I Am Not Your Negro

I'm looking forward to seeing this. 

I saw James Baldwin speak at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 1985. It was riveting, unforgettable with an electric atmosphere in the big tent. I went along with Martin Currie. It was four months after I was discharged from my ten months in hospital following my accident. I was still getting used to life in a wheelchair. Still am. 

Preparing for a course on Spanish film

Un Chien Andalou by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali (1928)

The course outline for my second semester film studies course (Spanish language film) arrived in my university account inbox this morning. I've been waiting for it (not entirely patiently) so I can try to get ahead of the viewing schedule. I've seen only three of the thirteen movies on the screening list previously so that's good for me in that I'll be watching films I've not seen before. On the other hand I'll be viewing most of the works for the first time so I shall need to ensure I see each at least twice if I'm going to get into them adequately. There are, I accept, more onerous tasks in life.

I was not surprised that our screenings begin with Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou. That's one of my three. I watched it again this afternoon (It's under twenty minutes in running time). The opening scene with the eye remains as confronting now as it was when I first watched - I don't know how long ago. Once again, I closed my eyes because it's too difficult to look at. Modern day gore and guts and comic book violence have little effect on me. The willing suspense of disbelief seldom kicks in when shock-horror violence of absurd unreality and computer-generated fakery fills the screen. But I can't follow that open razor across the character's eye, even though I know the scene was filmed using the eye of a dead calf. I've no doubt the impulse to turn away, to not look is exactly what the film-makers were after. Nevertheless it's impressive that almost ninety years later, knowing what's coming, and knowing how the shot was constructed it still retains its power to shock; I still can't look.

The film is, of course, surrealist bonkers. One would expect nothing less of a project in which Salvador Dali participated. (I did not know he plays one of the priests being hauled across the bedroom floor. I think I did know, however, that it's Bunuel himself who wields the open razor). I laughed when I read that Dali thought the film had failed his co-author intentions at its first showing. No fight broke out among the audience, which reads like a who's who of the Parisian avant garde. Freud and psychoanalysis must have seemed so revolutionary in the mid-twenties. The film-makers must have felt they were pushing the boundaries of the still-new medium of film and the barely developed idea of spectatorship. Maybe they were.

I wonder what they would make of today's voyeuristic, reality-show culture? Dali might have loved its frivolous excess of attention-seeking performance (although he may also have despaired at the dearth of technical skill, irony and intellect to underpin it). Bunuel might have thought his worst nightmares were being realised. I shall see if the course sheds any light on those, not entirely idle speculations.

Batman v Superman

If ever a movie could be improved by losing the first hour of its preposterous, pompous three hours, it's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Man, oh man what a crushingly boring sixty minutes that first hour is. After that it's a passable visual effects piece - completely bonkers - but no more than passable. Shame really.

Captain America: Civil War

Popcorn movie blockbuster as they are meant to be. Fun but not stupid.

Transamerica

Source: Belladonna Productions

I watched the 2005 movie Transamerica which is the film we'll discuss in tomorrow's tutorial for my Film Studies course. Ho hum. I understand irony and the place of camp and parody and it is, of course, better to have you're heart in the right place than not. But it's not sufficient to have good intentions. So what can one say? Well ... it's not an awful film. It's heart is in the right place. And it's of its time and maybe, ten years ago, it was pushing against doors that remained firmly shut. But only maybe. I wish I could say more because I admire the people involved and respect their intentions.

Jane Eyre

The brilliant Mia Wasikowska as Jane Eyre

Watched a splendid adaptation of Jane Eyre, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. Anchored by a marvellous performance by Mia Wasikowska it also has excellent support from Michael Fassbinder, Judi Dench and Jamie Bell. Can a movie be better than the book it comes from? Probably not but this comes close. It's pared back, spare and manages the novel's implausible plot points well enough to keep intact your willing suspension of disbelief. Well worth watching.

Star Wars VII ... again

Rented the great adventure from iTunes. It really does stand up to watching a second time. It may even be better this time round (although that doesn't alter the fact it's essentially a re-make of the original with some clever mirror imaging between the two stories). I believe I'm now looking forward to Episode VIII more keenly than before.

Waltz With Bashir

My film course at the university is moving on to documentary-making this week. The text for the week is Ari Folman's animated film, Waltz With Bashir (2008). I missed it when the film was released so it's been good to catch up with it. Controversial at the time and retaining its capacity to unsettle viewers today (if my fellow students at ANU are anything to go by) I'm glad I've seen it now.  

Walter Benjamin in Paris in 1939
Pic: Gisela Freund

The reading around the film, especially an article by Ohad Landesman and Roy Bendor (conference presentation on the article can be seen here - beginning at 23:40) offered plenty of food for thought. The article makes a good case for reading the film in complex, interwoven ways - anti-war film, trauma narrative, recollection of lost memories, the flight of a generation of men from the realities of their own pasts, personal and national guilt, and more. 

Among other ideas explored through the film and in the article I encountered the notion of the factical, a concept (from Martin Heidegger) I had never met before. Who knew memory could play such tricks on us? Maybe everyone but me. And Walter Benjamin's construct of the dialectal image. What a loss - one of the innumerable - that man's death was as a result of the Fascists of the 1940s.

London Has Fallen

Please. Just Say No!

Two hours of my life I shall never regain

Bonnie and Clyde - cinematography of America's lost innocence

Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker

I'm halfway through preparing my first class presentation for my university courses this semester. Specifically I'm laying out my power point slides for FILM1002 - Introduction to Film Studies. I'm asked to talk on cinematography with Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde as the reference movie.

So we dive straight in to the birth of the 'American New Wave' with the movie that got there a year before Bullitt, two years before Easy Rider or Midnight Cowboy, five years before Badlands. My line of argument will be that it's the first - at least one of the earliest - mainstream Hollywood films to tear down the icons of the 'golden era' of movie myth-making. It's an outlaw movie rather than a gangster film, owing much of its aesthetic interest to the classic Western tradition. Except this is a film premised on the death of the all-American Hero and the rejection of a national mythology of innocence. It is cynical - although perhaps I mean ironic - disrespectful of authority, comical, violent, deeply invested in the (hetero)sexual crisis of identity emerging in 1960's America and it cleverly exposes the hollowness of celebrity culture and the alienation of spectating or viewing.

Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow

All things considered it's a marvellous film. I hope my presentation does it justice.

First day back at school

Lectures began today with the first (of two this week) of my Film Studies course. Following the lecture we viewed two movies from 1919 / 1920 - Buster Keaton's The Scarecrow and Robert Weine's Das Cabinet des Dr. Cligari - German Expressionism at its most insistent. Both are excellent works in their different ways. The course certainly started well.

We viewed the restored version of Dr Caligari posted below. Clearly the soundtrack is a contemporary piece of music which, I guess, was commissioned especially for the restored film. It is, I think, perfectly matched; more an interpretation through music of the emotional core of the film than accompaniment. Together they work a treat.

When in Rome ..

The Eternal City

Not quite the eternal city but an approximation of what it might once have been. Spike and I visited the delightful, leafy campus of the Australian National University so I could buy the core text book for my film studies course: The Film Experience by Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White.  It's $79 by the way. Not cheap, I say, for a slim volume. I wonder how students with less disposable income than untypical yours truly find the cash for books like this and more. Maybe they don't.

On our way back to the car from the pleasant Co-op Bookshop we called into the Classics Museum of the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics to have a look at its small collection of glass artefacts, mostly from the first and second Centuries A.D. Adjacent to the cabinet of oil vials, bowls, dishes and a tumbler in glass there sits the large model of ancient Rome above.. Veni, vidi, vici ... after a fashion.

Buster Keaton - The Scarecrow (1920)

This the first screening on my film studies course at the ANU next week. Almost 100 years old and still it looks fresh. I think comedy may be the only genre that has travelled well over the intervening years. Modern Horror, the Western, Romantic Comedy retain many of the components, tropes and structural underpinnings of their predecessors but the original silent productions have dated - in technique, story-telling and dramatic effect - in ways that Comedy has not. Buster Keaton was a genius, of course. That much is obvious from the movie. But even allowing for his extraordinary talent it's interesting to watch the film simply to note how many of its elements remain with us today. It still makes me laugh and more than much of what passes for film and television comedy these days. But the early period of cinema looks so naive, so innocent reflected through the viewing prism of genres other than comedy, let's say, of The Exorcist, The Unforgiven or Trainwreck. 

A nice cup of tea

Spike's first pixilation - 10 minutes in the making for 17 seconds of taking tea the pixilated way. Ten years from now, when the Oscars are being handed out, remember you saw the beginning here first.

Sicario

Sicario directed by Dennis Villeneuve

A tense, violent and rather nihilistic film. Maybe not nihilistic but certainly bleak and despairing. 

Some of the sequences and opportunities that arose to move the story forward seemed a little implausible or clunky - for plot purposes rather than any real life situation - for example, the scene at the border with the convoy heading north back into the USA. Given the 'good guys' were so well-organised, hot-wired into the world's most sophisticated intelligence and spying network, why not simply arrange to drive over the virtually empty southern carriageway rather than head straight into the four-lane traffic jam containing two cars full of bad guys with bad teeth, ugly haircuts, repulsive tattoos and heavy-duty bad ass weaponry? For the purposes of dramatic tension and lethal action, that's why.  Never mind 'no horses were harmed...' 'No innocents were harmed in the portrayal of this precision-tooled execution scene brought to you by the CIA.'

But I may be nit-picking. The movie is well put together and the three, central performances by Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin and Bernico Del Torro are highly persuasive. Three and a bit out of five. 

They do not make them like this any more ...

Introduced Spike to Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps

The Big Short

I watched the film The Big Short last week and had been meaning to post some thoughts about it here before now. That good intention slipped (as many do). I was brought back to the film by Peter Bradshaw's review today in The Guardian Online. Mr, Bradshaw, whose film criticism is always worth reading, was considerably less impressed by the film than I was. Here's just one part of his two-star review:

I came to The Big Short in a state of anticipation, only to be baffled at how smug, laborious and self-important it is, trying to combine Gordon Gekko sexiness with anti-banker correctness, like Oliver Stone’s Wall Street rewritten by Malcolm Gladwell and Justin Welby. It’s a film that doesn’t let you have your cake, or eat it. And how agonisingly it keeps stopping to explain technical stuff by bringing on celeb guest stars such as superchef Anthony Bourdain or singer Selena Gomez to recite the patronising and gimmicky mini-explanations written for them.

I was kinder.  I added my twopence-worth in the comments section below the article.  This is what I wrote.

It is quite a difficult film to rate. Parts of it worked well, I thought (breaking the 4th wall worked well for me and I thought the performances were very good). Parts of it not so well, although I did wonder if what seemed like a weak script at times (e.g. the Florida mortgage brokers' bragging) had more to do with the fact that the truth about those people at that time is more difficult to accept than fiction - as in, 'you couldn't make up this stuff'. 

I think as well it's interesting to contrast The Big Short with Spotlight: two drama-documentaries about small, tightly bound groups of (predominantly) men seeking to uncover hidden truths about corrupt social institutions - one group for personal gain, the second group for a higher moral purpose. I quite enjoyed both films but I couldn't stop thinking about how old-fashioned & trad Spotlight felt in its style, technique and structure. Maybe that was intentional (although I doubt it). For all its flaws (some of which I agree with PB about - a degree of smugness, the almost total absence of dramatic concern with the folk who were ripped off by those sharks) The Big Short does seem to be trying to tell its kind of story in a more contemporary manner. 

Two out of five is a bit harsh. It's a film worth watching even if it doesn't deliver all the time.

I guess that means I'd give it three, maybe three and a half.  Still worth the ticket price.

Guess where we'll be at Midnight?

May the force be with you ...

Avengers: Age of Ultron - summed up in a selfie

#SummedUpInASelfie. Pic by Spike

The excellent BBC Radio Five's film review programme with Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode invited followers of its Twitter feed @wittertainment to sum up Avengers: Age of Ultron in a selfie without words.  I asked Spike to take the photo here.  I know it's not a selfie and it may be a bit harsh but I was terrifically bored by episode two of the Avengers' tale.  And the selfie made me smile. Perhaps I am easily amused.

The Young Victoria

We watched a movie I've wanted to watch for a few years but missed until this evening: The Young Victoria, directed by Jean-Marc Vallee, starring Emily Blunt as the Queen and Rupert Friend as Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.  They were both excellent at the top of a pretty impressive cast all round (even allowing for the slightly paradoxical fact that the then 26 year Ms Blunt plays the 18 year old Princess Victoria of Kent who becomes Monarch alongside 36 year old Paul Bettany playing the 59 year old Lord Melbourne.  Go figure ... but I nitpick)

The impeccable Jim Broadbent

I'm no great fan of Royalty nor of chocolate box - not to say soap opera - reinventions of history ... and yet.  I quite enjoyed this superior farrago of an ahistorical fiction.  The palace gardens, interiors and facades looked sumptuous, elegant and imposing although not, I think, Buck House.  The frocks were lovely.  The gentlemen's suits looked appropriately rigid and the uniforms quite dashing.  And the acting was engaging which allowed the willing (and necessary) suspension of disbelief in a script that was entirely what you would expect from the man who has given us Gosford Park (which I liked very much despite its established-order predilections) as well as Downton Abbey (which I've never seen) and would go on to be 'elevated' (I believe they say) to the position of Baron Fellowes of West Stafford, a Tory Life Peer (quelle surprise).

One is required to take the ways the script is - at best - 'economical with the actualite' with a pinch or two of salt.  Did Victoria and Albert really discuss the game of thrones that was 19th Century Europe over a symbolically breathless game of chess (not unlike but more restrained than Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway in the original of The Thomas Crown Affair)?  And we know, do we not, that Prince Alfred never took a bullet for his Royal Mrs at any time (let alone in the manner of Kevin Costner protecting Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard - a connection neatly made in the Guardian's deconstruction of the Fellowes' screenplay here)?

But what can I say about this film, of which one should not expect too much given Sarah, Duchess of York is credited as a producer?  (On the other hand, so too is Martin Scorsese, who has no need to prove his cinema street-cred to anyone; least of all me).  The truth is, I think, it's a well-constructed fairy tale in the revisionist, centrist, patriarchal mainstream manner.  Not history but ideal telly for a wet bank holiday evening. Despite myself - despite my prejudices perhaps - I enjoyed it.