Beautiful people striving valiantly to save their marriages, their lives, their world, and their pets… That’s really all you need to know about Roland Emmerich’s latest disaster movie 2012. And that the star is my friend John Cusack (well – I was walking through Leicester Square two years ago and saw him stepping out of a car onto a red carpet at the London Film Festival).

There is one interesting moral dilemma, however, within all the syrup and special effects. [Warning: medium-sized plot spoiler follows.] An elite and self-chosen group have the chance to save themselves from the impending cataclysm, and to give hope that in them the human race might survive. But to do this with the greatest chance of success, they need to preserve their resources, and abandon another group of survivors that desperately needs their help. If they do help, they might jeopardise the possibility of anyone surviving. The answer seems obvious. With so much at stake, of course you would abandon the others and go it alone.

But then there is one of those Hollywood speeches, and it’s quite effective. It goes something like:

We may get through this. We may not. But if we do, will we want to look back at this decisive moment in our history and admit that it is a moment of betrayal? Will we want to live with the knowledge that our new civilisation is founded on an act of raw selfishness, of injustice, of cruelty? Perhaps it would be better to risk death together than to walk into a future without them?

I know, it’s a bit cheesy; and I might be hamming it up a little (and mixing metaphors). But it presents a tight non-utilitarian argument in the middle of a disaster movie – an argument that says the end does not necessarily justify the means, the moral cost is too high, the damage done to relationships and to the hearts of the people involved is worse than the loss of life that might follow. And it is more than just the old ‘too many people in a balloon or on a raft’ dilemma, because it brings in this extra element of historical consciousness, of looking back to the present as a time of unique significance. The implicit reference, I assume, is to the way the indigenous peoples of North America were treated in the founding moments of US history. It’s about how a nation’s continuing identity can be scarred by an original sin.

It got me thinking more widely. About how, in a certain sense, every moral dilemma we face becomes a foundation for the rest of our lives, a turning point to which we can look back with shame or gratitude. This doesn’t mean we should become obsessed about over-analysing all our choices; and it certainly doesn’t mean that all choices (moral or otherwise) are of equal weight. But it’s nevertheless true that every moral choice we face is significant, and pushes our life in a certain direction. We can’t pretend that any moral choice is just in the background or at the edge; in some way it will define us, and define our whole future. We are constantly living with the possibility of making our present actions moments of original sin, or of original blessing.

(UK) They say the best way to know a city’s nooks and krannies is through its locals, I couldn’t agree more, Dangerously Naive’s favorite Londoner graced us with his favorite visionaries last week (http://naiveboy.com/2009/11/21/ten-visionaries-of-jaiden-jeremy-james-by-navo/), and today he’s giving us an exclusive personal first class tour of his favorite spots to be seen or be incognito in London Town.

1. CLAIRE DE ROUEN’S BOOK STORE on charing x road for all the latest books and specialist magazines.

125 Charing Cross Road, WC2H 0EA London
+442072871813

Mon-Fri, 10:00–18:30; Sat, 10:00–18:00

www.clairederouenbooks.com

2. SOUTHBANK for my cultural fix it is definitely my favorite location in London with its mix of Bohemians for all kind of places from artists, to designers, to film makers. I love the BFI especially when it’s the London Film Festival and always check films out and the latest exhibitions they have, Tate Modern for my cultural fix of contemporary art. Haywood Gallery also puts on some amazing shows in recent months Warhol, Longo and Ruscha.

3. THE ROYAL COURT THEATRE, an amazing place for theatre the celebrates old talent whilst nurturing and embracing new. Each production is beautifully done and seems to question and challenge modern-day culture.

50-51 Sloane Square, London, SW1W 8AX, United Kingdom
+44 20 7565 5000

www.royalcourttheatre.com

4. PONYSTEP, a place where every and anything is welcome. Like boombox and those before it, Ponystep offers a unique clubbing experience.

www.ponystep.com/

5. JOINERS ARM’S, sleazy, cheap, testosterone overloaded and a place I would be lost without.

116-118 Hackney Rd, London E2 7QL, United Kingdom
020 7739 9397‎

6. FASHION RETAIL ACADEMY where I was trained by Philip Green the man behind TOPSHOP, I owe a lot to this them.

15 Gresse Street, London, Greater London W1T 1QL
020 7307 2345 /020 7307 2361

www.fashionretailacademy.ac.uk

7. SOMERSET HOUSE, I am at awe of its architectural beauty every time I see it, the new home of London Fashion Week and currently hosting the amazing Showstudio Exhibition.

Strand, London, WC2R 0RN, United Kingdom
+44 20 7845 4646
www.somersethouse.org.uk

8. INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, always plays the best new arts films and has great shows on as well as a cute little bookshop.

Nash House
12 Carlton House Ter, London, SW1Y 5AH, United Kingdom
+44 20 7930 3647

www.ica.org.uk

9. SHOREDITCH, truly amazing location, home to the coolest people, hot spots and companies from the likes of Gilbert & George to Tracy Emin, as well as the home of Fashion East, Dazed & Confused Magazine and I-D Magazine. Boombox, Ponystep, George & the Dragon, Joiners, the list goes on definitely a place to visit and an even cooler place to live.

10. MY HOUSE, home is where the heart is.

http://jaidenjames.blogspot.com/

Related Entry: http://naiveboy.com/2009/11/25/didios-brasil-by-navo/

I just saw over 38 films at the London Film Festival in October. Many were from non-European countries. It is amazing how little international content we have access to in the United States. And the major internet providers filter out a lot of that content. At the London Film Festival big Hollywood premieres like Men Who Stare at Goats play alongside films like No One Knows About Persian Cats. I also gained more confidence in the film projects I am currently working on for Harmony Image Productions. Globally people seem to be a bit more sophisticated about story structure, character development, and plotline. American filmmakers should take note of the various ways of telling stories and break out of the 3-act structure strait jacket.

Nadine Patterson at the Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival on Leicester Square.

Certificate – tbc; 99mins

Released – 16^th October 2009 [BFI London Film Festival]; 12^th February 2010 (UK)

Directed – Tom Ford

Written – Tom Ford (screenplay), Chistopher Isherwood (novel)

Starring – Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Nicholas Hoult, Matthew Goode

Awards – (Colin Firth) Outstanding Performance Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2010; (Colin Firth) Volpi Cup, (Tom Ford) Queer Lion, Venice Film Festival 2009

Vehemently steeped in the sixties – sublimely curated by the set design team of TV’s Mad Men – Tom Ford’s directorial debut is an adaptation of the Christopher Isherwood novel of the same name. A Single Man triumphantly portrays the isolation felt by George Falconer, (Firth) a middle-aged man living alone and ambling towards his silver years, in the aftermath of his partners’ tragic death.

Ford’s perfectly executed debut swathes with not only heart-warming and comic beat, but accomplishes Falconer’s brief moments of joy and attachment with people and his surroundings amongst the anomalous, almost ‘washed up’ perception he has of his life. This is managed simply through the parity of colour saturation throughout the film; for the large part, the colour appears dreary and insipid, yet when Falconer is drawn towards the youthful beauty of his late partner, Jim (Goode) in flashbacks, or of his student Kenneth Potter (Hoult) the colour literally imbues the screen.

The way in which Falconer visualises both Jim and Kenneth – which can in an almost roles-reversed effect, be mistaken as a Laura Mulvey-coined “male gaze” – is one that tries to establish Falconer as psychologically powerful over his young objects of desire, yet it simply unearths how ardently lucid and needy he is of their attention.

Firth’s performance is stellar and undoubtedly deserving of more than just Outstanding Performance and Volpi Cup at film festivals, whilst Hoult has hung up his drug-addled life of the disaffected youth in Skins and has held up a respectable enough grasp of the American accent. Moore’s limited though comic screentime is unfortunate, but is not discerning as it feels absolutely necessary to drive the film forward.

Ford’s efforts here do not go unnoticed. In fact, one could be forgiven for expecting A Single Man to have been his own personal story, when in fact it is one that evidently struck so close to Isherwood. Whilst, in 2009, we can watch, in awe and unflinching, the frank, sympathetic and moving portrayal of a gay protagonist, one wonders how controversial the novel would have been at its publication in 1964.

Inevitably, A Single Man in an unexpected precious and thoughtful delight from the man who led Gucci to a multi-billion dollar valuation. His eye for style and perfection has been duly noted and with a limited US release this December, he will perhaps be destined to raise an Oscar next year.

Mike Judge, creator of Beavis & Butthead, King of the Hill and cult white collar cubicle worker movie Office Space, is back at the London Film Festival with his new film, Extract for the first time since Idiocracy graced the festival.  Having seen what happened to Idiocracy which was left on the shelf by the studio to rot, I decided not to miss out a second time and took myself off to see Extract.

Jason Bateman plays Joel, the owner of an food extract factory who is suffering from sexual frustration, disillusionment with his business and the staff that work there and unloads most of this on his best mate, Dean, played in unlikely fashion by Ben Affleck, who is back on his Kevin Smith slacker friend form.  Of all his ennui is brushed aside when sexy temp worker, Cindy (played by Mila Kunis) is recruited to work at the extract plant and seems to take an interest.  Little does Joel know about Cindy’s past or her present for that matter.

What I liked about Extract is that Joel is a likeable lead with whom it is a pleasure to spend an hour and a half.  Equally impressive was the way in which Judge draws his supporting characters in terms which mean that get enjoyment from them no matter how little we see of them on screen and get a sense of what they are really like - from Clifton Collins Jr.’s unfortunate gopher Step to the two old biddies on the production line and J.K. Simmons’ co-owner.  My particular favourite, however, is male gigolo, Brad who makes an appearance when Joel makes an ill-judged decision, a man who is so stupid it is painful but he does provide a hell of a lot of laughs.

Where the film falls down a bit is that the comedy is occasionally too broad and not all of the characters work, in particular Joel’s wife is so pathetic and annoying that you wonder why Joel would ever have gone for her.  However, the film has sufficient goodwill to get over these.

8/10

Though I’ve lived in London for a decade, it was only this year that I finally joined the BFI and made an effort to attend the London Film Festival. Even when a colleague saw the original cut of Miike’s Ichii The Killer (which he maintains is far superior to the really quite tedious UK cut included on this DVD), I was not compelled to try. If the giddy joy I experienced this year is anything to go by, mark me down as a fool for not trying earlier. I’ve not been this excited about a cultural event since 2000, when Scott Walker’s Meltdown festival on London’s Southbank featured Smog, Jim O’Rourke, Elliott Smith, Jarvis Cocker, and the unforgettable Fuckhead, all in the same week.

Perhaps I’m most excited as the movies I saw were, for the most part, extremely good, not to mention impossible to see in the UK any time soon. Enter The Void, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Les regrets, White Material, Extract, Metropia and Valhalla Rising don’t have release dates yet, and some of the others are coming out slowly. The Men Who Stare At Goats is out now, with The Informant!, Un prophète, We Live in Public, and Up In The Air rolling out over the next couple of months. Getting a jump on some of these was essential, as I plan to spend the rest of the year catching up with as many movies as possible before the traditional end of year Shades of Caruso Listmania! event happens. At the moment I think I have my top ten sorted, though there are still a couple of yet-to-be-released films that could crack the list. We shall see.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Jacques Audiard’s Un prophète is on my list. Newcomer Tahar Rahim — in one of the performances of the year — plays Malik El Djebena, an Arabic youth with a troubled past who is sent to prison for six years after assaulting a police officer. Though he is intent on keeping his head down, Malik’s stay is complicated by the arrival of an Arab prisoner (Reyeb – Hichem Yacoubi) who is to testify against Corsican gangster César Luciani (played like a kind of corpulent and manipulative spider/crook hybrid by the amazing Niels Arestrup). The Godfather-esque crime boss cannot approach Reyeb, who is surrounded by Arab prisoners, and so enlists Malik upon pain of death. The young boy has no choice but to kill Reyeb, leading to his estrangement from his brethren. Even worse, he is treated like a servant by the Corsican gang. Humiliated, powerless, and haunted by the murder he has committed, Malik begins to plan his revenge, but first he must better himself, consolidating allies and resources during his six year sentence.

After I stumbled from the screening, my jaw scraping along the floor like a broken fender, I found it impossible not to compare Un prophète to De Palma’s Scarface, but please don’t take that as a comment on the quality of Audiard’s film. Even as a fan of early career De Palma, the appeal of Scarface has baffled me for decades — it has struck me as one of his most misjudged films, half deathly serious cautionary tale, half gaudy semi-parodic nonsense. The one or two good setpieces are surrounded by kitsch, madness, and a horribly pitched central performance from some kind of demon who resembles mid-80s Al Pacino but can’t possibly be him because that kind of roaring caricature didn’t show up in his filmography until the 90s. If it was a demon taking Al Pacino’s place in Scarface, I reckon the name of the demon is Hooahhh, and is a distant relative of Pazuzu.

Nevertheless, the similarities are there. Tony Montana and Malik El Djebena are immigrants who fall foul of the law and find their calling while in “prison” (actual for Malik, symbolic for Montana, who is kept in a camp for Cuban immigrants with criminal backgrounds in Florida). They both kill to get out of their tough situation, and undergo baptisms of blood (Montana in the notorious chainsaw scene, Malik in the soon-to-be-notorious razorblade seduction scene). They start off as enforcers but climb their way to the top using ruthlessness, opportunism, and pluck. There is even a straight homage later in the film, as Malik and his colleague Ryad are given the job of eliminating an associate of Luciani, a job which begins to go wrong almost immediately and ends with Malik taking matters into his own hands. Compare this to a similar scene in Scarface as Montana resists killing a Bolivian anti-government activist with a bomb. Despite being shot in similar styles, there are deviations. Malik’s decisions don’t doom him the way they do Montana, and both films have very different endings: there is no “Say hello to my leetle fren!” craziness in Un prophète. The most dramatic and satisfying moment in the final act is played out silently, and manages to be even more emotionally resonant than Montana’s final stand.

Audiard’s style couldn’t be further from De Palma’s, yet he generates far more cumulative power and tension through careful use of pace and composition. His only concession to stylistic excess comes with Malik’s dreams/hallucinations, as he is visited and advised by the ghost of Reyeb, who gives him glimpses of the future that, at least once, save his life. The fantastical touches are scattered so lightly through the film that they barely register. Compare that to De Palma’s near-insane overkill, all long takes, flashy Hitchcock references, and crash-zooming. In many of his other movies that’s just fine, but Scarface always looked like a red-tinged mess, and now — when compared to the spartan aesthetic of Audiard’s instant classic — it looks even sillier.

Plus, while De Palma and writer Oliver Stone liked to play up Scarface’s depiction of the American Dream gone awry in an attempt to add inject profundity into what would be more acceptable as an out-and-out exploitation flick, Audiard and his co-screenwriters (Thomas Bidegain, Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit) touch on enough uncomfortable aspects of modern French life that — as Dafri explained prior to the screening — many politicians have used the movie to score points against their opponents. French prisons are notoriously overcrowded, and relations between French natives and Islamic immigrants are fractious, so a movie which deals so frankly with both issues is bound to be explosive. No matter how much Audiard protests that his movie has no message, the backdrop of his crime drama is portrayed vividly enough that it’s hard not to take the film as an indictment of the system as it stands. Scarface’s message about the corrupting effect of greed on the human soul was crushed under tons of tacky sludge, and amounts to little. Here, Audiard tells the story of one young man bettering himself (at the expense of others, sadly), and speaks volumes about contemporary racial and economic politics in Europe. Everyone who adores De Palma’s movie should do everything they can to check out Un prophète, because this is how it’s done.

Attending so many movies in such a short space of time left me greatly fatigued and mildly ill. Like some kind of Vitamin B injection, Audiard’s crime thriller gave me a burst of energy that lasted until I saw Cédric Kahn’s Les regrets. Kahn was responsible for L’ennui, one of my favourite films about sexual obsession. Adapted from a novel by Alberto Moravio, L’ennui depicts a philosophy teacher (Charles Berling) who falls for a young woman (Sophie Guillemin) to such an extent that his life falls apart as he pursues her, oblivious to her dark past. His efforts to stalk her and keep her interested in him become frantic, though as the object of his desire seems utterly unmoved by his devotion, there is a poignancy there too. It’s a memorable portrait of a man made into a fool by his desire.

Sadly, Les regrets feels like a retread of the same themes. Whereas the earlier film is an adaptation, here Kahn directs his own screenplay. Architect Mathieu (Yvan Attal) returns to his childhood home while visiting his dying mother, and accidentally encounters the former love of his life, Maya, played by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (who spookily resembles Virginia Madsen). Though married to another architect with whom he owns a small company, Mathieu is compelled to sleep with Maya in an attempt to make right what once went wrong. At first Mathieu seems to be fighting against his urges, but it’s not long before his desire for Maya takes control of him, and he jeopardises his marriage and his career. Maya is similarly afflicted, unable to resist her attraction to her former lover, until eventually she realises that Mathieu’s obsession will destroy both of their lives. Though she recovers a little, Mathieu is too far gone, and his actions doom him.

Les regrets is not without its pleasures. The three leads — Attal, Bruni Tedeschi, and Arly Jover as Mathieu’s neglected wife Lisa — are all wonderful, balancing on a line between absurdity and pathos with skill. Several scenes are simultaneously farcical and gutwrenching, with Mathieu and Maya racing around France to grab brief moments together, their desperate lovemaking becoming more passionate but less intimate. Late in the film Mathieu finally meets Maya’s daughter — a figure who has been mentioned but never seen — and yet this sobering collision does nothing to stop him, so determined is he to reclaim Maya’s love. Those regrets, those lost years, drive both characters to self-destructive lengths, and every so often Kahn captures a moment of panic or lust that perfectly reflects that experience and our own desire to turn back the clock and make things right with those we once loved, all while satirising the awful selfishness of these middle-class idiots who only occasionally give a damn about anyone else in their lives. The final ambiguous scene is especially damning.

Nevertheless, this feels more like a variation on a theme than a movie on its own, and as I’ve only seen once of Kahn’s movies it was especially disappointing. Perhaps if I had seen one of his thrillers (Roberto Succo or Feux rouges) this similarity would have seemed less bothersome, and certainly the stakes aren’t as high as in L’ennui, but the scenes of Attal and Bruni Tedeschi racing around to arrange one of their trysts were too familiar. Plus, I’m sure Kahn intended to make his protagonists so unlikeable, but for much of the movie the tone wavers between romantic tragedy and satire. Daisyhellcakes is convinced the movie is making fun of French erotic cinema, right down to the stolen moments of passion, the agonising and sub-poetic exhortations of love, and the overheated final act with characters passing out from stress and exploding with erotic rage. It certainly has its share of funny moments, but as a cultural visitor and heathen with only a passing knowledge of French cinema, I can’t help but feel that I was laughing at the tragedy and feeling empathy during the comedy.

These reservations are, of course, entirely subjective. Consider Les regrets recommended, especially if you’ve not yet seen L’ennui, though I’d say that’s still the superior movie. Of course, similarity to other films isn’t really a killing blow. There was one other film we saw that was heavily indebted to another, but this film was inspired enough to add iguanas, abuse of the elderly, and an uncanny — and entirely random —  impression of Ed Sullivan. More to follow…

It’s been eight days now. It’s still not clear. Harmony Korine’s new film ‘Trash Humpers’ hit the London Film Festival Screen last Monday and my head is still fuzzy. Seventy-Eight minutes of VCR of actors made to look old in footage made to look found. No plot, cackling melting-faced degenerates, with buttocks too lithe for their wizened masks, larking about the suburbs at night looking for kicks amidst trash and booze, whilst repetitively singing an eerie nursery rhyme. I like recalcitrance. It makes feel less stoopid, stupid. If there is nothing to get then I haven’t missed anything. Sure one could dig for social commentary…the decayed nature of the VCR editing evokes a feeling that we have wasted our freedom…the use of elderly miscreants suggests that the older, numerically abundant, generation’s quest to live free has screwed the planet. Sometimes it hurts to pigeon hole the ridiculous. Interpret it yourself. I tend to think that Korine could be a great film-maker if is work to date – Kids, Julien Donkey-Boy and Gummo – is anything to go by. Trash Humpers is a stage of evolution in his career. One of those random stages that isn’t caused by need but more of a freak mutation that doesn’t really affect much initially and becomes the norm. Genetic drift. That sounds rather condescending but Korine is playful, he is experimenting, perhaps kicking out at the overly-processed nature of film-making through this essay on the short, the nihilist and the random. For me Korine deals in the search for Herzog’s ‘ecstatic truth’ and I’ll watch him wade through trash trying to find it. Not every day mind you, we all need a little narrative now and again.

Speaking of Herzog and narrative, I caught the showing of Nosferatu at the Old Biscuit Factory in Bermondsey on Halloween. Nosferatu is a classic vampire horror, the classic vampire horror, originally made by the German expressionist director Friedrich Murnau in 1921. Herzog created his homage in 1979. It was this homage that was selected to be the final screening in the V22 Herzog season which has been showing the director’s work across London during September and October. It’d be great to tell you that I’d really enjoyed the film. I’m going to moan though. Not because of my precious Werner but due to one of the worst film audiences I’ve ever encountered. Oh Lord I know I sound pretentious but the constant talking, sniggering and laughing ruined my appreciation of a wonderful looking interpretation. Perhaps Halloween and the mythic Nosferatu image brought out the wrong crowd. Not that I should ordain how fellow viewers interpret and enjoy a film but once you have laughed at the sight of Nosferatu or the slight melodrama of the script once or twice is it still laugh-out-loud funny every other time? As Jeremy says to Mark in Peep Show after being kept awake by a new Aussie housemate, ‘I just want to know, what’s so funny?’ The situation wasn’t helped by the fact the organisers couldn’t work or position the projector or that glass bottles bought from the bar rattled on the concrete floor every few minutes, or that the space was cold – physically cold – and, worst of all, had terrible acoustics. All of this meant the atmosphere was poisonous for concentration; I had to near meditate to engage with the film. A good idea poorly executed, and absolutely nothing to do with the very little sleep I had the night before. Nothing.

So there was plenty of great looking films to choose from (I particularly wanted also to see Jacques Audiard’s  A Prophet as recommended to me by Julien Planté, Joon-Ho Bong’s Mother, Jacques Rivette’s Around A Small Mountain, Elia Suleiman’s The Time That Remains, Jarmusch’s The Limits Of Control and Mia Hansen-Løve’s Father of My Children amongst others, guess I will have to wait for the DVDs) and I eventually chose rather a mixed bag.

Jeunet's latest stars Dany Boon (centre) as Bazil, here with his adopted family of eccentrics.

The first film I saw was the Gala opening of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Micmacs (Micmacs À  Tire-Larigot) which I found to be not quite as good as Amelie of City Of Lost Children. Jean Pierre-Jeunet’s  last film A Very Long Engagement marked a departure to a more serious tone and epic scale and it’s been five years since then after an adaptation of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi  (tis a  shame I would’ve liked to have seen that) got too expensive, as Jeunet himself told us introducing the film. So there was a high expectation for this one.

The film follows the adventures of Bazil (Dany Boon) who nearly dies when a bullet accidently lodges into his brain. He sets out on a mission to find the arms dealers indirectly responsible for his near-death, and also for the death of his father in North Africa during his childhood.

He is aided by an adopted ‘family’ of eccentrics- including Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon as  Fracasse, a man determined to beat world records and Yolande Moreau as Tambouille, a sensitive contortionist- who live in fantastical underground caves under a refuge heap.

Jeunet has a lot of fun in vilifying the arms trade as represented by rivals Libraski (Jean-Pierre Becker) and Gerbaud (Patrick Paroux), showing Gerbaud viciously biting the heads off prawns and eulogising on the power of a land mine with power enough to take out an area the ’size of a football pitch’, (cue Bazil imagining a football match where footballers randomly get blown up). And Libraski proudly displaying his morbid collection of celebrities’ body-parts (Picasso’s finger is insultingly manipulated at one point in one of the best visual gags).

And the schemes that Bazil’s team concocts against them are elaborate and clever, while Boon displays a Chaplinesque gift for physical comedy. The problem is that things run so smoothly in Jeunet’s escapist-wish-fulfilment worlds that you find yourself wishing that Bazil and his team met with more obstacles, and that things weren’t so charming and embedded in a simplistic black and white morality (Jeunet is definately the more mainstream Spielbergian side of French cinema which typically favours amoral ambiguities in its characters and narratives). Saying that though he does still manage to make some salient points about how life is based on so many chances, with Bazil’s life literally decided on a toss of the coin in an operating theatre.

But even when you think that the ending is going into more amoral territory, Jeunet turns it into something merely amusing, meanwhile emphasising the rushed romance between Tambouille and Bazil. But that’s Jeunet for you, and you can’t fault his gift for old-fashioned entertainment.  And he certainly has visual flair to spare but I’m afraid I’m one of those who prefers my French films socio-realistic with more sophisticated characterisation than Jeunet’s play at heroes and villains (though maybe this is also greatly to do with the fact that it’ s largely a comedy). I laughed but was left feeling a little dissappointed like I had expected Jenuet to be well, less Jeunet.

The Portuguese Nun stars Leonor Baldaque as a strangely calm actress.

The second film I saw (on the recommendation of Kieron Corless in Sight & Sound) was Eugène Green’s The Portuguese Nun (A Religiosa Portuguesa) about an actress (Leonor Baldaque) who suffers from an instable love life. She visits Lisbon  to make a two-hander film about a nun and who makes some life-changing encounters along the way, meeting a real-life nun who inspires her to be a less selfish person and adopt a poor boy she meets. 

The film had some beautiful shots of Lisbon, it’s architecture, churches, city views and cobbled squares and alleys, the camera paying the city an adoring homage.  It also featured moving music of  fado  with singers Caminé and Aldina Duarte given wholes scenes to sing their songs, Green also concentrating on the emotional effects of the music on spectators.

There was also some funny moments such as when we see Green as the director in the film (so very meta) dancing like the old man he is in the disco and commenting on how it’s hard to be ‘hip’. But overall I think the film gets too bogged down in trying to be different. The camera persistently lingers on empty spaces or focuses for too long on anything from feet to door frames, refusing to follow the convention of following the main object of interest, i.e the lead actor.

This combined with the fact that the central actress keeps the same calm expression throughout the film, and all the actors speak in an unnatural mannered and slow tone meant that I continually felt disengaged from the film internally wishing Green would cut faster and stop being so pretentious. It also meant that it dragged, so it didn’t really work for me.

Ander is a moving little gem which stars Joxean Bengoetxa (left) as the titular character whose life is transformed when he meets Christian Esquivel's (right) Jose.

The next film I saw was Roberto Castón’s Ander which I loved, it got across profound things but in an entirely naturalistic and unpretentious way. Set in the Basque region it focuses on the life of the central character of the title, (played with great honesty by Joxean Bengoetxea) living in a secluded village on a farm with his mother (a comically grumpy and protective Pila Rodríguez) and sister (Leira Ucha) whose  limited existence is interrupted by the arrival of Peruvian Jose (ChristianEsquivel). A hired help who comes in when Ander has an accident and makes him acknowledge his true sexuality as a homosexual.

The rural area where they live is beautifully photographed, while also depicting the monotony and drudgery of Ander’s life as a farmer, as he gets up at 5.30 everyday to plough the land, feed the pigs and milk the cows with often only his radio for entertainment before Jose comes along.

He is surrounded by colourful and well-drawn characters in the community such as Panadero (a great and comically machismo performance from Jose Kruz Gurrutxaga) as Ander’s only friend, and a crude mismatched one at that who loves nothing better than shagging and drinking for whom the thought of homosexuality is something to be mocked and be disgusted by.

Ander also befriends Reme (another impressive performance from Maman Rivera)  a prostitute who is used by all in the village. She also takes her son around with her and we learn later that her husband has left her and she is desperately hoping for him to return. What’s great about her character is that we never judge her as she is so sensitively rendered. She is also the only one in the village that understands what is going on between Jose and Ander and encourages them, it is in fact her outsider’s position that allows her to be more open-minded than anyon-else.

The character of Iñaki (Eriz Alberdi) is also a delight and a moving character study of an elderly man who has been in love with Ander’s mother since the day he met her, but who is afraid to say anything because of Ander and his supposed loyalty to his father ( not realising that Ander was in fact tyrannised by him).(*SPOILER* in next sentance) So it is a very affecting when Ander’s mother eventually dies bringing forth all his previously restrained emotions.

Ander’s eventual realisation of his sexuality is realistically and touchingly realised as well, treating Jose with increasing warmth, and then contempt and indifference when he realises the effect he is having on him.  His realisation that he needs Jose comes then as he becomes more self-aware and sees that a life spent alone is no life at all.A beautiful film with sensitive performances from the leads, it had me thinking about it for days afterwards. I really hope this one gets a wide release despite it’s gay theme I think it’s meditation on loneliness  (as well as the  great shots of the Basque countryside) would connect with everyone.

The beautifully photographed Women Without Men features Shabnam Toloui (centre) as Munis a woman determined to take part in the political events shaping her country.

The last film I saw was Shirin Neshat’s Women Without Men  (Zanan-e Bedun-e Mardan) based on Shahrunsh Parsipar’s magic-realist novel, which won the Silver Lion for best direction at the Venice Film Festival and was 6 years in the making. It is set in 1953 in Iran, at a time when the British and American-lead coup against the then elected Prime Minister Mossadegh and installed a military dictatorship in its place leading to more oppression especially for women. Hence also making us aware of Western involvement in the current state of Iran and the hypocrisy of Western government’s criticisms of Iran.

The film tells the story of four women living in these tumultuous times, Zarim(Hungarian actress Orsi Tóth),  a prostitute with anorexia, Munis (Shabnam Toloui) a woman who joins the Communists and rebels against her brother Ali’s (Navíd Akhavan) wish that she be married. Faezah (Pegah Ferydoni) a women who longs to marry Ali but is frustrated when he marries someone-else, and Forakh Legh (Arita Shahrzad) a woman who longs for her more bohemian lifestyle and former lover Abbas (Bijan Daneshmand) before she married.

The film shows the frustration, humiliation and desperation of these women’s lives (only made worse by the regime change), as we see the sadness in which Zarim lives her life, despondent about her job serving men and ashamed by her own body (in one painful scene she tries to scrub the bruises off her shockingly emaciated body), she is also a mysterious character who never speaks, perhaps in protest at the world around her.

The other women are more vocal in their defiance, Munis openly refuses to be married off and her determination to live her own life as conveyed by Touloi is inspiring and courageous, reminding us of the other women still now fighting for freedom in Iran and other oppressed countries after all these years.

While Forakh renounces her previous marriage and goes to live outside the strictures of society in a house situated on a beautiful magical orchard which provides a haven for all the women (Even the military who eventually enter the house soon become just part of the party she is having, and become enraptured by the moving Iranian music playing there). She becomes a mother to the women but also misses out on the love of  Abbas who has moved on.

Faezah represents a more traditional woman in her desire to get married but even she comes to realise the limits of a life enslaved and beholden to a man like Ali, who would her take her on as a second wife and make his first her ’slave.’ Her rape also makes clear the privilege that men feel in Iran’s society to do whatever they like to women.

One of the most defining things about the film was the beautiful cinematography by Martin Gschlacht. The bleached out visuals like a faded photograph in the scenes in the city (shot in Casablanca in Morocco), contrasting with sumptuous colour of the flora in the magical orchard.  The camera inviting you in as respite from all the political turmoil in the city. The atmospheric  soundtrack by Ryûichi Sakamoto was also a great partner to the often poetic images, while the traditional Iranian music played in the film gave a sense of national culture and heritage as well as being very moving.

It’s just a shame about the ending which ended rather too abruptly for me after a climatic build-up. But otherwise it’s an enthralling and enlightening film that is definitely worth watching on the big screen if it manages to get on any cinemas here.

Till next time…

Review essay

It’s an annual bonanza of tasty cinematic goodness: the London Film Festival (LFF) is winding down. Since this is probably my last autumn in the Big Smoke/Londonium, I went all out and got tickets for everything that struck my fancy. It wasn’t until my  fourth film screening that I realized there was a theme: motherhood.

Disclaimer: I’m not a mother and don’t intend to be. I generally resent it when podcasts and blogs I like get all hipster-parent-ocentric. Hell, I was mad when Lisa Bonet got up the McDuff and quit A Different World.  But, clearly, I must’ve been subconsciously looking for something. No, not a soul. For a different portrayal of motherhood. Something beyond a traditional natalist script of the perfection of motherhood, i.e. Katie Roiphe’s Double X article about her baby being like gak.

What’s mama-ing looking like in the 21st century? I’ll start with the titles that were mostly good, in their own way, but limited in saying anything new about motherhood, pressures (real or imagined) placed on mothers, and their expectations of children.

Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)

I’m cheating a bit with this one. It wasn’t part of the LFF, but it should’ve been. Maybe it wasn’t because…drum roll…it won the Jury Prize at Cannes this year. And, yet, I suspect it won’t have a very wide release Stateside, so if Netflix has it, do it/queue it.

This quiet, tense film focuses on Mia, a 15-year-old living on an Essex council estate with her mum and sister. Grim. Read on. Mia dreams of becoming a street dancer and she practices her moves, gleaned from hip hop music videos, in an  abandoned and  trashed vacant flat. It’s just Mia, some wacked out speakers, a CD player, and a 40 of cider. Fame, it is not.  The film ostensibly hits its  core dilemma when Mia’s mum, with a pathological love of boob tubes, brings home a new, hot boyfriend, Connor. Is he making moves on Mia, as well, or is he being affectionate as a father would?

No spoilers here, but what I will note is that Mia’s mum, Joanne, is a two-dimensional portrait of Britain’s Young Mum Problem broadly drawn. She’s a vision in trampitude with very little inner-life. She’s mostly outer-life and a caricature of “the culture of poverty”: unemployed, hard drinking, braless, unconcerned with having sex with the bedroom door open, yells at her kids, is killing them with second-hand smoke and just a generally shite mum. We do see some vague notion of love for her kids at the end of the film, but it’s as if the filmmaker oh-so-reluctantly decided Joanne might be a teensy bit human.

While the reviews for this film were mostly concerned with the young girl/possibly paedophilic boyfriend plot, I was once again enthralled by British filmmakers’ fetishization of blackness. Or perhaps it’s British culture’s fetishization of African-American blackness. British filmmakers love to depict blackness without black people. Mia practices her dance gyrations to an Ashanti video (she is, indeed, on a boat!). When Connor catches Mia in the act he says, “You dance like a black.” Not a black person. Not with black style, but like something less than human. I don’t doubt the frequency of such grammatical construction but, while I’m not a linguist, I read it as an articulation of white superiority.

Similarly, Mia’s mum Joanne falls way outside the bounds of “decent” white British womanhood. Race comes crashing into class to equate poor British white women with the Reagan’s American vision of a black welfare queen or Ricki Lake’s hoochie. Notably, the music that Joanne and her friends dance to when the pile into her council flat is dancehall with accompanying windin’ da body. Black culture is clearly a proxy for degeneracy. An affinity for blackness will only keep Mia and her mother rooted in a culture of poverty, not a cycle with institutional roots—an assumption that certain people are born to be poor, are born to never achieve.

All that makes it sound like I didn’t like Fish Tank, but in fact, I thought it was captivating in the cinematography, the rich performances that Arnold elicited from her performers, a funny and poignant script, and some clever jibes at modern-day Britain’s tabloid-induced hysteria over paedophilia and missing children.

The Absence (Mama Keïta, 2009): I had a hard time with this one. Maybe I was supposed to. In Keïta’s film, Adama returns home to Senegal thinking that his grandmother is deathly ill. She, in fact, is not, but Adama’s sister, Aïcha, so desparately wanted her brother to come home from France that she faked the message. We’re also led to believe that it’s Adama’s fifteen year absence that has resulted in Aïcha turning to prostitution. Adama cannot, of course, understand this since he sends plenty of money back to Senegal for his female relatives’ survival.

Again, without spoiling the film, once he learns of Aïcha and her disrespect for his reputation, Adama whips himself into a veritable frenzy of battering Aïcha. He must, however, later try and save her when she turns her own anger on the wrong, vengeful john.

I left this film feeling ambivalent. Was it my Western black feminism that had me reading the film as short-sighted and misogynist in its manichean dealings with the women involved? The saintly but naive grandmother, the beautiful dead mother, and the dirty-whore sister? It seemed like an excuse to make a Tarantino-esque film in Senegal. While I commend the effort to depict the struggles that people face with emigration, the people they leave behind, and the people left behind, a more nuanced approach might have made Adama less of a douchebag and Aïcha able to articulate her needs (literally—in this film she’s both speech- and hearing-impaired) so that her family would listen. The people in the audience who liked the film were so glad to have a representation of Africa that wasn’t destitution or despots that it struck me as a bit of Stockholm syndrome: grateful for any new representation. I’d give it a close, but not-quite-made-it.

London River (Rachid Buchareb, 2009): I generally enjoy Brenda Blethyn’s performances. I think she’s a British national treasure right up there with Peggy Mitchell and the Queen Vic. Alas, when I mentioned Blethyn’s performance to a friend and that she was simply a miserable punching bag, he quipped, “She’s the nation’s punching bag. When is she not?” True dat.

In this London River, Blethyn plays, Elizabeth, the mother of a daughter who has gone missing during the aftermath of the 7 July 2005 bombings that killed 52 people plus the four suicide bombers—all of Muslims of British-descent. This is important because the film plays with assumptions about nation, race, religion, and appearance. Elizabeth is thrown into the chaos of relatives searching for missing persons as she travels from her home on the isle of Guernsey to London. There she must grapple with a multicultural city that won’t easily tell her what happened to her daughter or where she might be. Everyone she encounters in this modern-day London—an Islamic landlord, a French Muslim detective, a black female constable—is Other to her. In her provincial mind, the people she meets are all evidence of London “crawling with Muslims,” as she cries to her brother down the phone.

Blethyn really rocks this role because you can see her coming to pieces when she encounters the father of the young African man her daughter was apparently living with, in love with, and…wait for it…taking ARABIC classes with! With this evidence she fears her red-haired, pale-skinned girl-child has been radicalized, Elizabeth is rude, hostile, and insensitive to the one person she’s in contact with who would most intensely know her pain: Ousmane (Sotigui Kouyaté), the young man’s father. Also a devout Muslim and a forester, we’re encouraged to see this elderly, dreadlocked man as a natural innocent, despite not having seen his son since he was six years old (more at the end of this post about fathers in these films).

The film maintains suspense as we follow both parents’ attempts to find their children.  With archival news footage of 7/7, London River perhaps too realistically conjours the horror of the time and the agony of not knowing. And, yet, everytime Elizabeth exhibited her racism and privilege, when others in the audience laughed at her, I just wanted to strike her. Neither reaction’s acceptable, but those were the limited options. Empathizing with her plight as a mother was difficult because it was too familiar and expected. Of course a woman who spends her days gardening on Guernsey in Wellies and sitting peaceably on rocky cliffs and making tea is going to be scared witless at the prospect of her only child living amongst the people constructed as boogey men by the BNP.

Ultimately, I think the film did do a good job of contrasting her religious rituals (Sunday church) with Ousmane’s. While she tossed and turned and mumbled to herself about her failings as a parent, Ousmane both sought help at the mosque and quietly hoped for the best, trusting that Allah’s will would be done. Being a non-believer myself, I could still appreciate the juxtaposition. As Western as Elizabeth was she couldn’t very well navigate the Western world as it evolved. The film did, alas, strike a Driving Miss Daisy Around Londontown note at times: sage, African man inserted to assuage the pain of mostly undeserving, self-indulgent white person.

Precious Based on the Novel ‘Push’ By Sapphire (Lee Daniels, 2009)

I’d have to place Lee Daniels’ film on the border in terms of representations of motherhood, generally, and black motherhood, in particular. I’ve been holding my breath since it was announced that Daniels would dare approach Sapphire’s amazing book. Besides, I’m still mad about the Daniels-produced Monster’s Ball, so I wasn’t trying to like this film. Grudges aside, he had a dream, went after it, got it financed, and pulled some incredible performances from Lenny Kravitz, Mariah Carey, Mo’Nique, Paula Patton, and Gabby Sidibe. As an aside, Gabby needs publicity lessons. Walking on stage, saying, “Hi. Bye.” won’t cut it on Oscar night. There will be Oscar nominations, if not awards. Hollywood likes to give Oscars to our worst portrayals of black womanhood. Yea…Academy.

Mo’Nique pulled out all the stops as Precious’ delusional, force feeding, battering, sexually abusing mother, Mary. “Monster” is the word that’s emerging most frequently in the press on the film. And, indeed, her behavior and the rationales she give for allowing her man to abuse her baby are monstrous. But somewhere between Mary’s devestating insecurities that would make her want to keep her man—any man—at all costs and Mariah Carey’s turn as a social worker ultimately out of her depth, the film raises some compelling questions about motherhood. There’s a lot of handwringing over stereotypes, but as many media scholars have been saying for a while now, isn’t it time we push our critiques beyond good versus bad representations?

Hopefully, viewers will be encouraged to look a bit deeper into what society pushes women to think will happen if they become mothers. What is our investment in writing certain women (poor women, women of color, lesbian women) off as “bad mothers”? We seriously need to question the notion of a maternal instinct. Some socialist feminists have been trying to do this for years, if not decades. What are the perils that women and children face if they believe saintly notions of mother-on-pedestal and children at her feet? One of the best interrogations of motherly expectations is Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. Just because many women can biologically  have babies doesn’t mean that there’s anything natural about how we expect people to raise those babies.

The last two films I want to note blew the others right out of the got’damn water! Sky high. Totally rocked in their filmmaking and complexity in depicting mothers.

Applause (Martin Pieter Zandvliet, 2009): Paprika Steen. I’ll say it again: Paprika Steen. This is the moment I love: when I stumble upon an actor, a band, a TV show that’s been going for a while and I have a whole catalog to devour after falling completely in love with a performance. So, don’t stop by unless you’re up for The Paprika Steen Film Festival.

The film: Thea is a mother just out of rehab. She’s a recovering alcoholic, as well as an actress still at the top of her game. She struggles with her ex-husband Christian to see her two sons and make up for lost time. I know it sounds kinda True Movies/Lifetime, but the depth that Steen brings to Thea’s desperation is palpable. She’s blunt, self-depracating, but wholly believable when she expresses a need for her children. To be in their lives is clearly a selfish act. Her motivation isn’t wholly that she wants to prove herself to be a good mother, but to stay sober.

It’s a dynamic take on motherhood because it’s honest. Having children is, more often than not, framed as a selfless act, Never has so much self-lessness been trumpted and used to pull rank on the child-free: “When will you stop being so selfish and have kids?” This logic has always sounded ass-backwards to me. Just because  you can no longer go to the cinema when you want to or get shitfaced on a Saturday night doesn’t make you bloody Mother Teresa. It means you’ve made a choice about a lifestyle change. I can think of nothing more selfish than the need to have replicas of yourself watching Noddy or asking, “Can we go now?” Applause reveals a certain truth about motherhood: it’s entirely selfish and if one’s not honest about that need, who’s interests are really served? Thea’s final scenes with her children are revelatory to her and the audience as she twigs what she must do in order to fit comfortably in the role of mother.

Mother (Bong Joon-Ho, 2009)

Bong Joon-Ho reeled me in with his 2006 South Korean monster flick, The Host. He upended conventions by showing the monster very quickly and using that sighting to scare the beejesus outta me for the rest of the film. In this follow-up, Kim Hye-ja plays “Mother.” She appears to be much like Brenda Blethyn’s Elizabeth: an almost obsessive mother in her willingness to do anything for her child’s safety and happiness. In this case, Mother is determined to prove that her slow-witted son, Do-joon, isn’t responsible for the murder of a local girl. The frenzy with which Hye-ja plays the role always hints at something even more manic just beneath the surface.

I can’t say too much more about the film for fear of giving anything away, but the film made me think about the ways in which motherhood marginalizes women, particularly older women. The notion of an empty nest syndrome becomes even more terrifying if one is led to believe that one’s value only rests in being a mother and wife, perhaps a grandmother. What’s a mother to do when her raison d’etre is threatened? If you like mystery-thrillers with a societal statement to boot, see this. One Korean film site likened Joon-Ho’s work to Almodovar and I’d say that description’s not far off. As we’d say on Yelp: I’m a fan.

Word to your papa…

Fathers didn’t generally fare well, but given that so many of the mothers depicted were flawed what makes you think they’d make good partner choices? There was the absent father (Fish Tank, London River), the dead father (London River, Precious, The Absence, Mother), and the abusive father (Precious). Of these men, it wasn’t a far leap to think that the underlying message was that if the men were around these women wouldn’t be inclined to drink, be sexually promiscuous, have Islamophobic panic attacks, or become abusive themselves. Of all the films, Applause has a present father who is central to the mother’s relationship with her children. As a testament to the strength of the script and the fine acting, we didn’t get a cardboard cutout of a bad man wanting to keep a mother from her kids. Nor was he a good man dealing with an utter wackjob. Of all the dad’s, present or unaccounted for, he made the most sense and made me want to see more of fatherhood depicted as more than an after-thought.

* I play on the “MILF” concept reservedly. It’s rather creepy that patriarchy finds ways to sexualize women at any age and in any station of life: “milfs,” “cougars.” Not that women of all ages don’t want to be wanted, but isn’t it telling that as soon as women reclaim their sexuality (e.g. women in the 40s, 50s, and 60s), some jackanape comes along and undermines it with a new “demographic” term?

From Netribution

The London Film Festival will close tonight with the world premiere of the feature debut from artist Sam Taylor-Wood, Nowhere Boy. It takes a look at the early years of John Lennon, when he was being brought up by his Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas in a fantastic performance), getting into music, and taking guitar lessons from a young squirt called Paul McCartney. Suchandrika Chakrabarti reviews.

As we’re used to with films from artists-turned-directors (see also: Hunger by Steve McQueen; The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Julian Schnabel; Control by Anton Corbijn), the film looks absolutely beautiful – as the cinematographer, Seamus McGarvey, puts it: “One thing we didn’t want to do was make a kitchen sink drama, just because we were depicting post-war Liverpool during the depression of the 50s.” The smallness of Lennon’s suburban surroundings is enlivened by bold colour, and the exuberance of his mother (Anne-Marie Duff, another great performance) is contrasted with Aunt Mimi’s conventionality by dressing the former in various shades of red and a select few other bright shades, and the latter in buttoned-up earth tones. The lure of Julia Lennon’s life to her son John is easy to see, but the reds also signal danger – she has disappointed him before, and she will again. This is what Mimi fears for the boy she and her husband George have brought up since he was just 5, in the absence of any children of her own.

Lennon’s story before he became an icon is fascinating, and it is told movingly in Nowhere Boy. His mother was married to his father, Alf Lennon, but his extended absence, due to working at sea, led her to an affair, an illegitimate child called Victoria (given up for adoption and later renamed Ingrid) and co-habiting with a new boyfriend, Bobby Dykins (David Morrissey), with whom she had Lennon’s half-sisters, Jacqui and Julia – all of which made her an outcast in 50s/60s Liverpool. Today, her crimes don’t seem quite so bad. Yet, Julia is emotionally fragile, and weak when it comes to providing security for Lennon – and this affected him all of his life. Aunt Mimi is sterner, but provides a safe framework within which the teenage Lennon can grow, make mistakes and learn.

The film is based upon the memoirs of Lennon’s half-sister Julia Baird, depicted as a child in the movie. As always with a deceased star of this magnitude, there are discrepancies between the story told here and told elsewhere; for instance, the film’s emotional core begins at Lennon discovering that his mother lives round the corner from his home at Mimi’s, meaning that she hasn’t bothered coming to see him in 10 years, since he was 5. However, other sources say that Julia was a regular chez Mimi and George, and had a warm relationship with her son, while never permanently sharing a home with him. Although the film isn’t explicitly from Julia Baird’s point of view, the source of the material shouldn’t be forgotten.

After John rediscovers his mother in the film, he flounders in attempting to place Julia in his life. She ’s his mother, but Mimi is more of a real mother. Julia’s younger and more fun – and oddly flirtatious. She whisks him off to Blackpool for a day trip – leaving her daughters in the care of John’s young cousin – and she treats him like a new boyfriend who’s a little less knowledgable her, constantly kissing him, then whispering that rock’n'roll is all about sex, then dancing in the middle of a quiet beachfront cafe, in front of variously shocked and intrigued punters. Poor Lennon doesn’t know what’s hit him.

The film really belongs to his two mothers, Julia and Mimi. At a late point in the film, Lennon begs Mimi to remember that they are sisters, and never are the divisions so plain as in the (slightly earlier) climactic scene on his birthday, when Mimi forces Julia to finally lay bare exactly what circumstances led to Lennon being raised by his aunt, rather than his mother who lives just over the field. After this dramatic, painful and completely believable scene, the reconciliation between the sisters seems a little too easy – Mimi in particular was a famously spiky lady and it’s the only element of the film that doesn’t ring true, the two sisters sitting happily sitting side-by-side in deckchairs in the Mendips garden on a warm afternoon (see picture above). Really? Can 10 years of estrangement – as the film has it – be mended so easily? Perhaps the thawing of sisterly relations was dramatised so because of the nearness of Julia’s death, run down by an off-duty policeman in 1958 at the mere age of 44? The narrative compression is forgivable in these terms because it is an attempt at showing us the calm – the happiness, even – before the storm that irrevocably changed John Lennon, Mimi and the rest of the family.

The film is full of wonderful performances, with Kristin Scott Thomas and Anne-Marie Duff stealing the show as the two main women in John Lennon’s early life. When onscreen, they are never less than mesmerising, and you do keep hoping that they will be brought together to solve all the mysteries of Lennon’s existence; in time, that scene does arrive, and it does not disappoint.

Relative newcomer, 19-year-old Aaron Johnson is sometimes overshadowed in the central role of Lennon, undoubtedly mirroring the real Lennon’s early experiences. The Liverpool accent of the Buckinghamshire native sometimes wanders, but he does a good job of conveying Lennon’s fascination with his newly-found mother, his alternate affection for and frustration with Aunt Mimi, and his alpha-male ways when it comes to forming a band – look no farther than his amusingly quick dismissal of a young Paul McCartney’s skills, who, in the next scene, is teaching Lennon how to move from banjo chords (“easy”) to guitar ones. There are, in facy, very few Beatles tracks played in the film (at one point, McCartney plays ‘Love Me Do’ for Julia Lennon; she correctly surmises that it’s about his dead mother); instead, we are placed firmly within a 50s context, wherein Elvis really is the king, and Julia Lennon’s screams for him (well, she is not alone) provoke Lennon into fashioning his own mop into a quiff. For a star so asscoiated with the 60s, it’s a surprising thing to see.

For me, born three years after his death, and only really aware of Lennon in his beardy Bed-In phase (and of course, according to my mum, McCartney has always been the only one worth caring about), this portrayal of Lennon’s making is gripping, and the three main characters are easy to empathise with, despite their conflicting wishes and actions. Some have criticised the lack of foreshadowing, of hints towards future Beatles moments, but, for me, that’s the beauty of it. If John Lennon interests you, don’t you want to know how he was made? And all of this happened years before anyone could ever have dreamt of his success. Taylor-Wood’s film conveys the poignant, complex and innately suburban story beautifully, without resorting to cheap biopic clichés.

Researching is the result of a well crafted article, one that speaks coherently and factually about a topic any Journalist wishes to discuss be it financial, cultural or agricultural – the facts need to carry some weight.

As an MA student the sheer importance of researching a topic and its prevalence was something instilled into us from day one. Such its importance, prior to my acceptance at The University of Westminster it also crept up in the process of my telephone interview. So it’s pretty important right? And I guess it goes without saying any Journalist piecing a scoop together would have done the research, checked the facts and then ran the story?

Not so, according to a recent online article in www.guardian.co.uk a tabloid stunt entitled starsuckers has left numerous members of the tabloid press red-faced and looking a little gullible to say the least. Starsuckers which debuts at London Film Festival (lff) today lifts the lid on Journalist’s that fail to research their stories. It also portrays the idea that  Celebrity culture really is somewhat of a bubonic plague within the media industry, seeping its way into every possible outlet . To further this point all stories put to the press were celebrity  based yarns, upon listening to them even I found them hard to believe.

However over a two-week period some of the Country’s top newsrooms fell victim to the hoax. Atkins received no money for the stories, was said to be surprised at the sheer speed at which the fabricated stories spread around the internet like “wildfire.“

The promotional video available online starsuckers-tabloids-hoax-celebrities features Journalist’s  practically salivating  at the opportunity of a fabricated story. Director  Chris Atkins states: “ I deliberately chose outlandish stories – for example one printed in The Sun suggest that the director Guy Ritchie received a black eye while juggling cutlery.

The documentary team  “used false names and telephone numbers, did not give the tabloid reporters evidence to corroborate their stories, which typically appeared in the following day’s edition.”

Ethics eh?  It seems to me that the land of Celebrity culture, Celebrity Journalism has completely overtaken the moral code conducted by young Journalists, this failure to provide adequate research may come at a price. Knowing the law goes hand in hand with the everyday practices of a young Journalist, it is this law that some of these ‘scoop hungry’ hacks may have already broken.

The PCC’S code of conduct makes for some interesting reading in accordance to some of  the Journalism practices depicted in StarSuckers.

Take point one for example.

“Newspapers and periodicals should take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading, or distorted material.”

The Sun, Daily Mirror, Daily Star and Daily Express – FAIL

And two:

“Whenever it is recognised that a significant inaccuracy, misleading statement or distorted report published, it should be corrected promptly and with due prominence”

The Sun, Daily Mirror, Daily Star and Daily Express – FAIL

So the question remains, are guy Ritchie’s juggling skills or any other exaggerated fictional celeb story really worth the lost credibility?

Allegedly so.

The Coens are getting positively prolific these days, treating their hardcore fans like yours truly with a movie a year and with their latest release A Serious Man they have taken the comedic strand of their work into unchartered waters. For this potential highlight of the Film Festival I thought I’d conduct an experiment, film fanatic that I am I visit a few news and rumour sites on an almost daily basis and eagerly get my hands on any trailer of potentially interesting projects as soon as they become available. Rather more warily, depending on the film I will read non-spoiler reviews and listen to podcasts discussing the relative merits of certain movies, it all depends on the podcast pedigree and potential quality of the film, who’s in it and made it, what’s their pedigree, all sorts of factors. This approach of course is fraught with peril, I’ve stumbled across submerged spoilers in the past and had films almost ruined so with A Serious Man I embarked on a total media boycott, I didn’t read a single word intentionally about the film, I didn’t watch the trailer, I didn’t visit the IMDB page, I stuck my fingers in my ears, closed my eyes and started yelling to drown out the ambient media, even then I still managed to ascertain that the film centred on the life of Jewish intellectual, was set in the 1950’s or 1960’s and was supposedly the Coens exploring their Jewish identity for the first time on screen. It was still a real joy to walk into a movie knowing relatively nothing about the plot, its setting or indeed who was in it (interestingly no-one particularly famous as it happens, a few recognisable faces from US TV and certainly none of their usual acting roster – Buscemi, Goodman, Clooney, Hunter, McDormand etc.), a joy compounded by the appearance of the brothers themselves to give a characteristically succinct introduction before the applause faded, the lights dimmed and we were sucked once again into the Coenverse.

Minnesota, the late 1960’s. Jewish professor – and I only stress the Jewish status as it is instrumental to the films chutzpah – Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is not having a good month. After taking tests for a mystery medical ailment Gopnik is accosted by a disgruntled South Korean student who subsequently attempts to discredit his reputation with anonymous letters to the tenure committee after Gopnik failed him in a critical test. His bickering children ignore him, his red-neck neighbour is encroaching on his property with his home expansion designs, his medically afflicted brother is staying with him to the exasperation of his distant wife who most distressingly reveals early in the film that she is going to leave him for the affections of scene stealing widower Sy Albeman (Fred Melamed). Seeking the wisdom of his community leaders, a trio of Rabbi’s unconsciously echoing the early middle and late stages of life, Gopnik embarks on mid-life odyssey to remain a virtuous man, a serious man, as events conspire to wreck his intrinsically good if somewhat ineffectual nature.

As skilful as ever the Coens incrementally pile on the frustrations of Gopnik’s disintegrating life whilst drawing forth laughter at his hapless situation, a spoonful of sugar to swallow the bitter pill,  this is certainly their most idiosyncratically funny work since Lebowski. But there are darker forces at work here buried beneath the suburban angst – this is no mere Sam Mendes film – underneath the carapace of the film there is a notion that life is suffering, that destiny is an indifferent, unassailable force, for Gopnik even a mind expanding and potentially physical sojourn with a sexy neighbour is interrupted by the intrusion of the foibles and weaknesses of our fellow players in the charade of life. As with the ominous coin tosses of No Country For Old Men and the phlegmatic consequences of fate the film delves into the parameters of cause and effect, the bell curve chart of fortune and adversity that populate both films. At first glance A Serious Man could be the Coens most systemically structured film, Schrödinger’s cat allusions nestling next to a fascinating delineation of the Jewish experience, the film is littered with the religious trappings and cultural mores of the Hebrew faith, most memorably with Gopnik’s sons Bar Mitzvah and his allegorical discussions with the second Rabbi serving as the films two most hilarious sequences.

Regular cinematographer Roger Deakins provides the unobtrusive visuals, this is a movie with the details stitched into the plot and dialogue rather than any visual symphony, stalwart Coen composer Carter Burwell also providing another of his habitually lyrical scores. If it’s possible to chart two alternate strand to the Coens career, the crime films moving from the lo-fi noir of Blood Simple to the homage of Millers Crossing, the bleakly humanist Fargo to masterpiece No Country For Old Men and the comedies from broad Raising Arizona to cultic Lebowski, from curio The Hudsucker Proxy to reverential O Brother, Where Art Thou then both strands have bivouacked at the same nucleus, perhaps an absurdity of life, with the final scene of A Serious Man mirroring the seemingly abrupt finale that graced <SPOILERS> No Country For Old Men. I mentioned in my twitter feed that the film was pretty good but after a night of reflection and thought this could be one of their very best, up there for me with Lebowski, Millers Crossing, No Country and The Man Who Wasn’t There in the brothers career and certainly a film that merits future viewings and contemplation. Oh, its also got one of the greatest dream feints of recent cinema, an observation which leads me nicely to this years planned Halloween movie and its terrifying, pig masked hooligans – a new glorious digital print of An American Werewolf In London.

Controversial Filipino film Kinatay continues its international success with sold out screenings at the London Film Festival. Written and directed by award-winning filmmaker Brillante Mendoza, it follows the uncomfortable true story of a young man’s journey into corruption, crime, and violence.

The ‘gruesome’ film was exhibited at selected art-house venues in the National Film Theatre and the Institute of Contemporary Arts as part of the festival’s World Cinema programme.

Kinatay, which means ‘butchered’ in Tagalog, depicts a pivotal evening in the life of a policeman (Coco Martin) as he unwittingly becomes involved in the brutal murder of a prostitute (Maria Isabel Lopez) in the hands of a local gang. It presents a decidedly realistic portrayal of a classic moral dilemma, which has sparked strong opinions from viewers and critics alike.

Earlier this year, the film was included in the official selection of the Cannes Film Festival in France, and the Sitges Film Festival in Spain. Mendoza was awarded ‘Best Director’ at both events.

Despite its success, Kinatay often causes a powerful struggle of opinions between – and within – critics. While people may agree that the film is “well-made”, many of them may also find it unnecessarily “extreme”.

A writer from The Telegraph branded the film as “tedious, harrowing or vile, and possibly all three”, but he also thought that it was “unforgettable” and “intriguing”. Another critic from The Guardian said that it may have “interesting points”, though he found watching it to be “sickeningly horrible”.

Time Out, on the other hand, found parts of the movie to be “vibrant and engaging”, but it also protested against the graphic detail of the “brutal” and “horrific” murder scene.

A review from Screen Daily could potentially summarize most people’s reaction to the film: “Kinatay is a nerve-shredding exploration of crime which is both repellent and grimly compelling. Offering audiences no relief or redemption, it is perhaps most notable for its daring attempt to capture the moment a young man crosses the line into irrevocable evil.”

Mendoza often demands patience, concentration and understanding from his film audience. Favoring slow pace with sobering realism, his movies deal with difficult subject matters that can lead to an unsettling cinematic experience.

With critically acclaimed films like Serbis, Tirador and Foster Child under his belt, the 49-year old director has now become a fixture in the festival circuit, with work previously selected for prestigious events in Berlin, Singapore, Bangkok, Brisbane and Manila. His latest project, Lola, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September.

Mendoza currently has the backing of production companies in France and The Philippines, which helps in the funding and promotion of his projects.

The London Film Festival features British filmmakers alongside creative talents from all over the world. Organised annually by the British Film Institute, it exhibits a critical selection of films in various cinemas across the city for two weeks in October. The festival attracts thousands of movie-goers each year, and is supported by The Times and the UK Film Council.

Written for ABS-CBN News
by Patrick Camara Ropeta
October 2009

イーダは、第一次世界大戦勃発前、「ドゥーチェ（Duce,、統帥）」の呼び名で知られるムッソリーニが、イタリア北部国境沿いの街・トレントでイタリア社会党の日刊紙『アヴァンティ!』（前進）の編集長をしていた頃に知り合い、結婚。経営していた美容院を含む全財産を売り払って、ムッソリーニが設立した日刊紙「ポポロ＝ディタリア（Il Popolo d’Italia／イタリアの人民）」に出資する等、献身的に彼を支えた。しかし、ムッソリーニの子を妊娠していることが分かったある日、1915年にムッソリーニと結婚したラケーレ・グイディ（Rachele Guidi）とその娘が彼に会いに来たのを目撃。その後ムッソリーニのイーダへの愛は冷めるが、イーダは彼をストーカーまがいに追い続け、疎ましがられた末にトレントの妹の家に強制的に追いやられ、地元警察の厳しい監視下に置かれた。それでも執拗に諦めないイーダは、とうとう精神病院に強制収容され、1937年に57歳で亡くなるまで病院生活を余儀なくされた。彼女の息子も、伯父・叔母の家から連れ去られ、ファシスト党員の養子になり、寄宿舎で教育を受けた後に海軍入隊、常にファシスト政府の監視下に置かれていた。彼も、最後までムッソリーニが父親だと公言していたため、精神病院に入れられ、27歳の若さで死んだ。

他人を信用せず友人もいなかったが、かなりの女たらしだったムッソリーニに捨てられたにも関わらず、いつまでも彼が自分の元に帰ってくると信じ、息子にも会えず精神病院で人生を終えるイーダの姿が余りにも悲しい。ファシズムと深い関わりがあった未来派のスタイルを彷彿させる、当時の白黒の映像を要所要所に交えた映像は、幻想的でドラマチックに仕上がっている。なかなか良い映画だったが、問題があるとすれば、若かりし頃のムッソリーニ役のフィリッポ・ティーミが男前過ぎて、アーカイブの映像にある現実のムッソリーニと結びつかないこと。そして128分と言う上映時間が不必要に長かったことかな（特に二人のセックスシーンが長かった！）。

This is another movie we saw at London Film Festival, an Italian–French movie “Vincere (Win).” Vincere, the only Italian movie shown at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is about the tragic life of Ida Dalser, the “first wife” of Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, based on a book “la moglie di Mussolini (wife of Mussolini, 2005)” by an Italian journalist Marco Zeni. The story of Mussolini’s first marriage was suppressed during fascist rule, and remained generally unknown for years afterwards. Vincere stars Giovanna Mezzogiorno as Ida, Ida Dalser and Filippo Timi as young Mussolini and Ida’s son Benito Albino Mussolini.

Ida met “Duce” (nickname for Mussolini) in the northern border city Trento, when he was working as an editor of the Socialist Party newspaper Avanti! before World War I. Ida financed him to set up his own newspaper “Il Popolo d’Italia (people of Italy)” by selling everything she had including her beauty salon, and later they married.  One day she came to tell Mussolini that she was pregnant, but soon she was kicked out from his office when another woman with her daughter showed up – Rachele Guidi whom Mussolini married on 1915. Mussolini’s love for Ida soon disappeared but Ida didn’t give up – she was chasing him all over the place, and she and her son were ordered to move in with her sister and her every move had been watched by the local police. Ida still tried to win back her love to the point of extreme, and was forcefully hospitalized in a mental institution. She had never allowed to leave the  hospital until when she died at the age of 57. Her son, Benito Albino was abducted from his uncle’s house by government agents, and was adopted as an orphan by the fascist ex-police chief. He was educated at a boarding school and later enrolled in the navy, and always remained under close surveillance by the fascist government. He also insisted that Mussolini was his father, and was eventually forcibly interned in an asylum, where he died in 1942, aged 27.

Ida was dumped by Mussolini, who had no friend but tons of women, but had never given up her hope that Mussolini would come back to her one day, but finished her life at mental hospital, even  separated from her beloved son – such a heartbreaking story. The cinematography mixed with archival black & white footage and edited in Futurist style, which had strong tie with Italian fascism, is dramatic and atmospheric. I enjoyed the movie, but if I have to find a problem, it would be (1) Filippo Timi is too good-looking and I couldn’t connect him with real Mussolini in the archive films, and (2) 128 min screening time is unnecessarily too long (especially the sex scenes of Ida and Mussolini goes on and on!)  .

For the first time in a couple of years, it seems we’ve taken a break from music gaming. With much of our spare time used up on TV shows that are failing to live up to their potential, attending the London Film Festival and having to brave the mosh-pit-simulator that is Leicester Square, or tweeting until 2 in the morning, we’ve not spent much time on Rock Band. Even The Beatles: Rock Band — a game I’ve been going on about for a while — only got a few hours of play, partially because we’ve not had a chance to use the extra mics we bought, and partially because while it’s been fun learning more about the band, it’s been less fun playing Paul’s songs.

He seems to be a kickass bass player, but his songs are the worst kind of mawkish tripe. I mean, Hello Goodbye has nineteen actual words in it (not counting the three nonsense words at the end), repeated over and over again in combinations of varying meaning but persistent insignificance. This Spitting Image sketch once struck me as cruel, but no longer:

Luckily, with other songs, The Beatles: Rock Band has done exactly what I had hoped: given me a better understanding of the appeal of the Fab Four. The unbearable repetition of their songs on the radio during my childhood was enough to create a mental block between me and the band, but that Rock Band magic has worked again, with the interaction between the player and the song breaking down that mental barrier so that I can finally get “into” the songs to experience their beautiful structure. McCartney’s bass lines are surprisingly complex, Ringo’s drumming occasionally much stronger than myth would have have it, and the songs by Lennon and Harrison are all inspiring and complex. Simultaneously playing guitar and singing on Here Comes the Sun is guaranteed to cheer me up.

And yet we’ve let it gather dust for now, and even Rock Band itself has been played infrequently. This, despite the recent DLC addition of ten Queen songs, including Under Pressure and Somebody To Love (my two favourite Queen tracks), a Raconteurs track-pack, and The Metal by Tenacious D (previously on Guitar Hero 3 but now given full Rock Band attention). This busy-ness — plus lack of funds — means I’ve paid little attention to the forthcoming release of Activision’s DJ Hero, which is expensive, potentially time-consuming, and based on dance music. As I have little interest in dance music or culture, this indifference was inevitable, but the real killing blow was the baffling gameplay videos (here’s one)…

…and the perplexing turntable peripheral. The actual experience of using the peripheral and seeing your actions keep the song going are not adequately conveyed by the information given out thus far. The Rock Band and Guitar Hero controllers are pretty self-explanatory. Strum, hit and bellow, and the lights on the screen do the happy thing yay. In contrast, how does that turntable controller enable you to do the things on the screen? It made no sense to me. Until today.

An impulsive trip to my local branch of Game paid off nicely this morning. The turntable controller had been set-up with a demo of DJ Hero, and no one else in the shop seemed even slightly interested. Maybe it was that alienating peripheral, with its peculiar buttons and knobs. Whereas my first try at Guitar Hero 2 had been intuitive, here I had to go through a series of tutorials hosted by Grandmaster Flash which quickly explained the basics of the game with enormous enthusiasm. Following that were three easy game tracks: Marvin Gaye – “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” vs. Gorillaz – “Feel Good Inc.”, Gwen Stefani – “Hollaback Girl” vs. Rick James – “Give It To Me”, and Black Eyed Peas – “Boom Boom Pow” vs. Benny Benassi – “Satisfaction”. Either the songs got easier as I went along, or the learning curve has been worked out well, as I went from three stars on track one to four on track two and five on the last one. In Easy mode there is no cross-fading or complicated scratching. You just push the buttons when necessary and half-ass the scratching. Simple.

Well, simple-ish. The scratching is not as easy as I’d hoped. For a start you’re supposed to let go of the button as soon as the scratching symbols have passed through the active area on screen, but if you’re holding the button and using that for leverage you can’t let go without the turntable getting away from you: disastrous if another scratch symbol is coming up. The other problem is caused by physics. Scratching while holding down the green button is easy enough as it is at the edge of the circular turntable, but the blue button is nearer the center, so it’s harder to push and pull the circle around, thanks to Pi or some other geometry thing. My struggles with Blue Scratching rocked the display around enough to attract the unhappy-seeming attentions of the shop owner. This was not good: he is so grizzled and rugged that I suspect he is actually the Authentic Battle Damage version of some other guy.

Even more annoying, the cross-fader switch has three positions, but the default position in the middle is very tough to hit. There is a slight click when you get it into position, but when swiping back and forth quickly, it’s easy to go too far without feeling that tactile reminder. I suspect this is something that will become second nature in time, but on advanced levels, with rapid cross-fader spikes zipping around, there will be many points lost, and much frustration added. A stronger bit of feedback from the controller would have really helped. I would also have liked to know what the purpose of the middle “effects” button is. As far as I could tell it was there to send out the odd “ZORB!” sound when pushed. The effects dial allows you to change the effect, so for a while there I was sending out a series of ear-scritching “PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW” sounds that made the entire shop’s energy turn against me. It was much more fun during the third song, where pressing the middle button makes an androidal lady intone “Sat-is. Fack. Shun” over and over again. No one seemed to mind that as much.

Other than choosing lasers over booms, the basic tutorial didn’t give a hint as to what the effects dial does, but apparently you use this in the same way you use the Whammy Bar on a Rock Band/Guitar Hero controller, to “customise” the sound on screen. As with Rock Band and Guitar Hero, all this pointless distortion does is ruin the song, and from what I can tell from other tutorials posted on YouTube, it doesn’t even serve a purpose with charging up the “Euphoria” bar. Maybe it does and we’re not privvy to that info just yet, but the Whammy Bar at least allows you to gain more Star Power / Overdrive points if you rattle it around as hard as you can, further ruining the song you’re playing.

As for Euphoria, it doubles multipliers just like with the rock games, but it doesn’t generate the sense of satisfaction you get in the rock games. Star Power or Overdrive are triggered by the Guitar Neck Tilt Move, the Drum Fill Move, or the Eccentric Microphone Scat Singing Move, which effectively — and entertainingly — mimic the show-off actions of a typical rock douche. Triggering this score multiplying mode by just pushing a button lacks that translation of action and effect that makes Rock Band and Guitar Hero feel even more like a replication of the live music experience. That said, how could DJ Hero trigger Euphoria otherwise? Have you wave a Wii-mote style Glowstick peripheral over your head? Require you to chew on an E peripheral? There’s no easy way around it, I guess.

Though the display had a guitar controller hooked up to it for the DJ Hero/Guitar Hero mash-up game mode, there was no one around to play it with. The shop owner was too busy giving me stinkeye, and the four kids who congregated behind me to watch as I demolished Benny Benassi’s infectious monstrosity looked too scared of the flashing lights and raving avatars to join in. (It was definitely the game that scared them. Not me. Honest.) I guess that co-op mode would be a lot of fun, and would probably be the thing that tips me over into buying the game, but I note that the only other party gameplay modes are just using multiple turntables to battle against each other. That made sense back in the days when the only peripherals around were guitars, so you could have boring face-offs in Guitar Hero 3 (no amount of complicated Snapped String weaponry could make that mode any less of a failure), but here it shows up the biggest problem with DJ Hero: it might be a great solo player game, and it might be an even more entertaining turntable/guitar co-op game, but it will never be able to replicate that amazing four-player co-op that makes Rock Band the best party game in the world.

It has been proven again and again that if you get a large enough group of people into a room and start playing Rock Band at midday, you will still be going at midnight with only the occasional break to eat Pringles. DJ Hero isn’t going to have that, and it isn’t going to have that instant click of cognitive understanding that Guitar Hero and Rock Band has. Once you get going on DJ Hero, it’s enormous fun. The demo I played was way way way too short, and I’m sure I would’ve stayed there all day if I’d had the chance. It even made me tap my foot, which is a big deal for someone as dance-averse as me, no counting that Megadog/Eat Static gig I went to that very very nearly converted me to rave culture because it was so fucking out-of-the-body AWESOME to the extent that even to this day I’m convinced someone slipped me a mickey early in the night and had a right old laugh watching me stomp around the dance-floor like a malfunctioning Cyberman. However, I’m not sure that’s enough. When I win the lottery, I’ll get it. Until then, maybe I should go and practice Fat Bottomed Girls, now that I’ve paid for it an’ all.

From Netribution

Starsuckers is the second feature-length documentary from writer/director Chris Atkins, who made the BAFTA-nominated Taking Liberties in 2007. The film takes an in-depth look into celebrity culture – and sleb journalism – and the results are both laugh-out-loud funny and worrying.

The issue of made-up stories making their way into showbiz gossip columns was discussed by George Clooney and Kevin Spacey at the press conference for Men Who Stare At Goats last week (after the London Film Festival press screening).

Of course, there was nothing new about the debate, but it was intriguing, hearing two celebrities, who have been hounded by the media, describing how it feels, right in front of us. In fact, we got to watch it happen – in each of the two press conferences I saw Clooney in (Goats and Fantastic Mr Fox), he was besieged by a number of questions about his private life, namely when the hell he was going to get married and have kids. Some of the non-tabloid journalists later complained about this hijacking of precious press conference time. Who really cares? Well, as Starsuckers shows, we’re all meant to, because caring about slebs makes us buy stuff…

Narrated by a jovial-sounding voice that uses “we” and is supposedly the representation of the media, Starsuckers takes us through the ways in which celeb culture takes hold of the public, including hooking children on it, and creating fake news. An interesting choice for a Friday morning press screening. As Atkins put it on his Twitter, “have been advised against going to the Starsuckers Press screening friday to avoid actual bodily harm,” but judging from the atmosphere in the room afterwards, he may well have found some sympathisers. It’s not hard to see why, judging by the quality of the film.

While Starsuckers explores how celeb culture exploits both the participants and the public, the thread holding the film together is that of six-year-old Ryan, whose cash-strapped (and rather sweet) parents want him to become a star. Heartbreakingly, even though the little guy can “barely read” at the age of 5, he knows the word “résumé,” and he is somwehat aware of his parents’ financial situation, and promises to buy his mother “a big house to live in” with his pay. This story provides the thing closest to an emotional heart to the film, as the narrator takes us through the scary links between celebrity, commerce, politics and power.

There are some Chris Morris-alike touches, such as Atkins and team setting up a stall in a shopping mall calling for child actors, named “x.ploit tv.” Parents willingly file in, ignoring the name, and the fact that their children are being asked to dress up as though they work in a slaughterhouse, or else pretend to be drunk for a show called “Baby Boozers.” In fact, the parents encourage their children to do well, envisioning a better life for the kids thanks ton TV money and fame. They’ve obviously never heard of Child Star Syndrome.

The most reported-on aspect of the film actually takes up very little time, but illiuminates the worrying state of journalism. The crew called up the media tip-off lines and span ridiculous tales of celebrity doings, such as Sarah Harding of Girls Aloud having loads of books on quantum physics and Amy Winehouse accidentally setting her own hair on fire. This episode illustrates the point that fact-checking is alien to celebrity gossip desks – they’ll take their material from anyone.

So far, so what, who cares what people write about slebs? This is where the film goes a bit visual-version-of-Flat Earth News, an investigation into the state of journalism today, and, indeed, the book’s author, journalist Nick Davies, gets a significant amount of screen time in the film. Flat Earth News coined the term “churnalism,” which signposts the tendency for journalists – under great time pressure, and possibly covering the jobs of laid-off colleagues – to use un-checked press releases and wire stories to fill space. This is why you often see very similar stories across a wide range of media – they may well have originated from the same email attachment. Sleb journalism is ideal for this, as everyone knows who they’re talking about, the subject will attract interest, and if they deny it, well, everyone’s lost interest by then.

Scarily, Atkins gets a lot of interest from reporters when attempting to sell medical records, which is illegal. Posing as the friend of a medical secretary who works in Harley Street, Atkins offers the information (celebrity-related, of course) to tabloid journalists. Those from the Sunday Mirror, the News of the World and the People bit, but the Sunday Express guy was the only one to point out that this was illegal and flouted the Press Complaints Commission Code. The illegality is more of a concern than the PCC, which is run by a group of editors, and is famously seen as a “toothless watchdog” within the industry – as admitted by one giggling journalist secretly filmed by Atkins’ crew during a medical records meeting.

Most unnerving of all is the celebrity power / political power axis. Of course, we’re not surprised that Americans are susceptible to star power – look at ex-matinee idol Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency in 1981, and of course, the Governator of Florida. In Lithuania, they’ve gone several steps further: the second biggest party in their government is the National Revival or National Resurrection party, and is composed entirely of celebrities. Their introductions to camera become entertainingly, and then eerily, monotonous: “I was a TV presenter/actor/singer… and now? I’m a Member of Parliament.” Even the head of the nuclear committee has a starry past. Eek. It’s like putting Rik Waller in charge of defence. Or, alternatively, a London mayoral candidate into the jungle. Oh, wait.

It’s not as though it hasn’t happened here – how about Glenda Jackson? It seems as though people like voting for a familiar face; as one of the Lithuanian sleb MPs put it, politics has a theatricality to it, it’s all about performance. And yet, the candidates’ claims to fame and political expertise are getting ever shakier. Atkins speaks to John Smeaton, the baggage handler at Glasgow International Airport, who shot to fame as the man who stood up to terrorists back in 2007. He will be standing as an Independent candidate in the Glasgow North East by-election on 12th November 2009. He is currently the head of security at a private car park near Glasgow airport, having moved jobs since the incident. In his conversation with Atkins, he did not come across as highly articulate. What would be his plans for political office, were he to gain it? Here’s an idea:

Smeaton, who became famous after kicking and hitting one of the attempted airport bombers in July 2007 and was awarded the Queen’s gallantry medal, said Labour had failed to increase jobs and investment in a constituency known for its deprivation.

“Well I can,” he said. “And, if I’m elected, you’d better believe it – I will. I’ll bring a storm down on Westminster, knock down doors and badger them until they listen. No messing.

“We must have someone in parliament who knows how the public feels. I know I can do that.”

…

Smeaton said he knew the Glasgow North East constituency because his mother worked in a local pharmacy some years ago.

He explained that he had decided to stand because he was “angry and fed up by the way politicians have been behaving”.

“Like everybody I was shocked by the fiddling by the MPs … it really made my blood boil,” he said.

However, Smeaton appeared to be completely stumped when, at a press conference, he was asked about Jury Team policies on linking MPs’ pay to civil service pay grades and the holding of referendums on key policies.

Asked about the public electing Commons select committees, he said: “It’s something I will look into and get back to you on that.”

(The Guardian)

Right. Into the vacuum left by an MP shamed for expenses swindling (ex-Speaker Michael Martin), a pseudo-celeb must go. On the flipside, the bigger a celebrity for EU council president, the better.

Starsuckers ties together strands that look disparate from the outset, but increasingly look connected: lazy journalism, celebrity obsession, photogenic politicians, high-profile charity work such as Live Aid/8. Little Ryan’s story weaves through them all, and surely continues out in the real world. We see him becoming more spoilt and obsessed with being the centre of attention. The ending of the film isn’t comforting; it forces us to look more closely at what is really happening behind the overheated headlines, advertising to tweens and cease-and-desist letters.

Vi i Film&TV klassen bestemte oss for å bruke hele linjebudskjettet vårt på en “stor” tur i stedet for mange små, så vi reiste like godt til London for å gå på London Film Festival. Den 53. festivalen til nå. Dette er ikke siste gangen jeg reiser til London, for å si det sånn!!! Hadde en knallbra tur, og følte at klassen ble veldig sammensveisa også!! Vi er en hærlig gjeng!! <3

Siden vi var på en filmfestival, skulle vi se en del filmer. Den første filmen vi skulle se, var  en fiasko uten like!! Den dårligste filmen jeg har sett i hele mitt liv, og jeg kødder ikke når jeg sier at det var nok ikke ett eneste hode i den kinosalen som skjønnte hva filmen gikk ut på! For den handlet nemlig ikke om noen ting!! Du kan få se traileren her, men for all del: IKKE FINN PÅ Å SE HELE FILMEN!!  Det har ingen godt av!

Den neste filmen vi så, var derimot en av de aller beste jeg har sett, med tittelen “The Boys are Back”! Sykt bra og rørende film! Deretter fulgte mer eller minde meningsfulle(løse) filmer, som jeg ikke hadde noe nytte av, men de var liksom aldri så ille som den første! Her kan du se traileren til den: (anbefales)

Som sagt, dette er ikke første gang jeg reiser til London, så hvem vil være med neste gang??

Halfway through the festival and I’m pleased to report that after a couple of mediocre experiences this weekend’s activities have swung the pendulum back into the world of fun. On Friday night I attended the best BFI screen talk of recent memory with the prodigiously talented Julianne Moore, one of the top half dozen actresses working today and a personnel favourite of mine for her remarkable performances in those early Todd Haynes and Paul Thomas Anderson movies, there was a real sense of anticipation in the NFT1 and the crowd went rock-star wild as she took to the stage. But we’ll come back to that, lets deal with the latest Stephen Soderbergh movie first, the corporate comedy The Informant! which screened on a wet and windy Saturday afternoon in Leicester Square.

You can’t keep a good executive down. After ENRON, after Lehman Brothers and the continuing fury at executive bonuses  it was quite a change to see the corporate executive class as brimming with ineffective buffoons rather than coldly calculated capitalist psychopaths, in The Informant! Matt Damon stars as the amiable Mark Whitacre, an up and coming  heavyweight at global food derivative company ADM in the early nineties. In a stream of consciousness voiceover which is probably the films finest stroke (unlike The Road where this potentially fatal technique can ostracize the viewer) Mark takes us through his corporate experience, as the film opens advising superiors that he’s in touch with a Japanese whistle-blower who can expose an industrial saboteur in their midst and fix a production issue that’s costing them $7 million a month. Much to Mark’s consternation the company brings in the FBI to investigate the sabotage, Whitacre distracting them with the revelation of a massive conspiracy to price-fix goods in the global marketplace. Two earnest FBI agents (Scott Bakula and Joel McHale) enrol Whitacre into service as a double-agent, an informer in a comedic bumbling and disorganized fashion, leaving his exasperated handlers uncertain whether he’s cooperating or not. Mark’s web of deceit begins to disentangle as the film progresses, his numerous subterfuges slowly unraveling as the scale of the real corruption is incrementally revealed.

Soderbergh is one of the masters of the new digital cameras and under his usual pseudonym Peter George he shoots all his current projects with the industry leading Red Camera. I don’t know how he does it but this film doesn’t look digital unlike say the recent work of Michael Mann, the surface sheen and glows from his subdued and effective lighting schemes looks to me like they are printed on the most expensive, luscious film stock on the market.  The Informant! has a very jovial, frothy atmosphere which is reinforced with a slightly intrusive score of Marvin Hamlisch that brings to mind the caper movies of the 1960’s, it’s a far more breezy affair than Soderbergh’s impenetrable existential corporate yarn Schizopolis.   Damon convinces as the amiable Whitacre, even generating a certain level of sympathy toward the finale despite the depths of his corporate malfeasance, one serious scene toward the end revealing a psychological spike to the characters congenial veneer. The film almost metaphorically seems to grab the audience in a headlock, ruffle their hair and convince them that they’re having a good time, it’s an amiable romp that will evaporate from the memory a couple of hours after the credits dim.

So now to Julianne Moore who was in town to promote her new films Chloe which has been directed by Canadian art house favourite Atom Egoyan and A Single Man by US newcomer Tom Ford. She came across as very down to earth, pretty funny and very, very smart. No Q&A from the audience unfortunately but questioner Briony Hanson handled proceedings with a solid dexterity, covering all the essential bases of Moore’s career including her variation of the big budget projects with the independent arena and her frequent support of first time, seemingly inexperienced directors being a testament to her generosity and desire to take risks. The script is always the only consideration she weighs in deciding to commit to a project, the directors oeuvre or lack thereof not being a contributory factor. Moore expressed a real disappointment that Blindness got such a raw deal from the press and despairing that so many critics overlooked some of the subtle touches in its visual and sound design to replicate the tone and strengths of the source novel.

She explained how it was fun to gravitate between the small independent projects and the big league likes of Hannibal and The Lost World as ‘it’s like only eating tomatoes for the rest of your life. Sometimes you want to try something else’. Most illuminatingly she explained how she didn’t subscribe to the notion that a director sculpts a performance, the actor brings the role to the table, that is their job and with the director they photograph the performance, together. Some of the production tales from Boogie Nights, Magnolia, The Hours and Far From Heaven were all explored, overall a very entertaining evening with a great talent. Next up, the Film Festival Super Secret Special free members screening which unfortunately isn’t Where The Wild Things Are but another recent US premiere for Europe, stay tuned….

Niclas Winding Refn is clearly a favourite of the film selectors at the London Film Festival.  Entries into his Pusher trilogy of films made their debut in London as did his last film, the controversial Bronson which featured a bravura performance from British actor Tom Hardy and possibly my favourite scene of the whole year so far where asylum inmates dance to It’s A Sin by the Pet Shop Boys.  Now, he is back with an all together different beast and “beast” is certainly the right word as Valhalla Rising sees Refn reteam with fellow Dane, Mads Mikkelsen who will be most familar to the majority of readers as Le Chiffre in Casino Royale.

Valhalla Rising is a stark brutal film which opens with Mikkelsen sat atoop a windswept craggy hill in a wooden cage with little protection from the elements.  We don’t know how he came to be there nor the identity of his captors.  All we know is he is there and we quickly learn that he can fight as he is made do for the amusement and sometime financial gain of his masters.  Tended to by a young boy, he appears to have little ahead of him except hunger, exposure and more fighting.  However, upon being traded to another tribe, he makes his escape.  What follows is part-supernatural, part-spiritual, part-fight movie as Mikkelsen’s One Eye stumbles upon Christian Viking missionaries who see his value whilst seeking to convert him at the same time.

This is an interesting film full of ideas about the nature of belief and about the supernatural.  During his Q&A session, Refn said that all he wanted to do was to avoid the banana skin of the Viking film which has killed many a career.  Well, he has managed that, mainly by not producing a Viking film at all.  Rather this film has shades of Herzog’s Aguirre: Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo in its flawed dangerous mission films whilst seeking to channel the director’s latent sci-fi leanings.  It is difficult to judge Mikkelsen’s performance as he is completely mute as is much of the first 20 minutes.  Having said that, I felt the silence worked as it allowed the audience to take in the impressive visuals.

Clearly, this is not a film for everyone.  Its stark sensabilities such as very little music, a mute protagonist and occasional sci-fi and horror cinematic language means that it will alienate most mainstream cinema audiences.  If Bronson was a violent crowd pleaser, anyone expecting Bronson 2 is likely to disappointed.  Not all of the film’s messages come across and overall, I would say this film ranks higher on the interesting scale than the enjoyable scale.

6/10

Just a quick post about how amazing last night’s screening of A Prophet was. I don’t think there is another prison drama out there more gripping and visceral. The unknown actor and star of the film Tahar Rahim is an extraodinary cinematic animal. Totally convincing through his journey from brutalised servant to master of his universe. Fantastic characters and ambition, amazing script, wonderful music and some of the most spot-on screen interpretations of dreams I’ve ever seen.

Just finding this trailer to add, I found a comment from a French Corsican (let’s just say Corsicans “run things” inside the prison). Chilling in every way as it reinforces the truth of the film, even though director Jacques Audiard last night kept insisting on its role as a piece of fiction:

Je suis Corse, ancien des baumettes (braquage réalisé dans les années 90), et je peux te dire une chose eylliae : les Corses dirigent les prisons francaises tout comme dans le film. J’ai bénéficié du même type de protection (sans avoir à perpetrer un quelconque crime toutefois) et il est vrai que nous, Corses, sommes souvent très durs. J’ai retrouvé dans ce film l’univers carcéral que j’avais connu (même s’il y manque un problème très important : celui de la promiscuité). – ursulala

Watching A Prophet reminded me intensely of the time I visited a Victorian Category B prison in Liverpool to interview the chaplain about his life and work… But that is a post for another time.