tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217079012024-03-07T09:03:50.358+00:00Victim of the TimeDavehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.comBlogger254125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-91622432455435192582013-01-20T22:43:00.003+00:002013-01-20T22:43:53.946+00:00I've movedI have now decamped to Wordpress, which is prettier and more functional. And I'm now a PROPER .com. See you there.<br />
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<a href="http://victimofthetime.com/">http://victimofthetime.com/</a>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-36859779385795572252012-10-15T20:37:00.000+00:002012-10-15T20:37:52.936+00:00LFF: Antiviral<br />
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<b>Antiviral</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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Canada/USA</div>
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<br /></div>
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written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg; starring Caleb Landry Jones, Sarah Gadon, Joe Pingue, Douglas Smith, Malcom McDowell</div>
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<br /></div>
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<b>B-</b></div>
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<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwLSI8dtzRRhaUUc0LBjQfNVBPyKrnmGodYQeLLDKFiOwF82oEsXfu9hUV_3RVhpURlpH08zk0q6JiFWQBEZ_5le7Y_7BIwwc0zA4UhL-NXkLK4rivADFAQLqmhQWi7LplkPHk/s1600/antiviral.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwLSI8dtzRRhaUUc0LBjQfNVBPyKrnmGodYQeLLDKFiOwF82oEsXfu9hUV_3RVhpURlpH08zk0q6JiFWQBEZ_5le7Y_7BIwwc0zA4UhL-NXkLK4rivADFAQLqmhQWi7LplkPHk/s400/antiviral.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Syd (Caleb Landry Jones) and the allure of the viral</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Syd Marsh (Caleb Landry Jones) is bundled into an imposing
black car, and quickly joined in the backseat by one of the men who have just
escorted him from a diner. “Don’t look so worried. You’re a commodity,” the man
assures him, nonplussed as to the horror of that statement. In the world of <i>Antiviral</i>, though, being a commodity is
the highest honour. Celebrities – who, as far as we can tell, are all of the
variety whose career is exactly and only that celebrity – are so beloved by the
public that such places exist where people pay to be injected with infections
and diseases taken from celebrities’ bodies. Syd works for one of these, the
Lucas Clinic, selling the needles with an enrapturing, hollow rhetoric. He’s
not impervious to the lure of viral glamour and performs rushed operations on
himself.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Comparisons to the oeuvre of director Brandon Cronenberg’s
father are inevitable; certainly, the cool obsession with the corporeal is
reminiscent of almost David’s entire filmography, but <i>Antiviral </i> feels more
clinical, dominated by a conflict between the blinding brightness of this near
future and the blood that is vomited onto it. Brandon’s use of space is more
reminiscent of Julia Leigh’s recent <i>Sleeping
Beauty</i>, or Todd Haynes’ <i>Safe</i> –
the almost theatrical framing of spaces, trapping the protagonist within a
cold, disconnected milieu. With his endless spread of freckles, Jones is not
unlike <i>Safe</i>’s lead Julianne Moore,
and, as an infection grips him and he’s encased within a spacious white box of
a room, the visual parallels to Haynes’ masterpiece are surely not
unintentional.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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But Syd is not a passive patient fading away like <i>Safe</i>’s Carol White; not long into his
stay in that box of a room, he fights back in a particularly vicious way, of
the sort <i>Antiviral</i> is short but
punchy with. If there’s a problem here – beyond the essential vapidity of the
commentary on celebrity culture, ultimately a platform for demonstrating
Cronenberg’s visualisation of a particular world and his display of clinical
horrors – it’s that the film is overstretched and doesn’t fill that extended
reach with enough visceral action. I’m not asking for gratuity, but from an opening
stretch where the corporeal surface is captured with eerie brightness – Syd’s
eye opening, full screen, like a vast crevice – the film loses itself somewhat
in a quagmire of exposition. When it reignites towards the end, the internal
becomes external, as if it’s been percolating all that time inside Syd’s body.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Jones has shades of Michael Pitt about him – a thinner, more
angular face, but the same hushed, restrained tone of voice. Coming from Pitt,
it gave the impression he was scared of his own brain, but Syd is a more
dynamic, jaggedly imposing figure, and Jones uses his voice as an instrument to
hold Syd hidden on the sidelines. As the disease weighs him down, Jones deepens
the intense focus on the body by hunching so severely he comes to resemble Gollum.
Jones’ full-bodied commitment to the narrative is what really makes <i>Antiviral</i> click, surpassing the
unbelievable celebrity conceit to become an enactment of deteriorating horror,
with similar aplomb to Cronenberg Sr. and his contemporaries.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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---</div>
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<br /></div>
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I also had a <a href="http://thefilmexperience.net/blog/2012/10/14/lff-a-conversation-on-antiviral-and-cronenberg-jr.html" target="_blank">conversation</a> on <i>Antiviral</i> with <a href="http://darkeyesocket.blogspot.co.uk/" target="_blank">Craig Bloomfield</a> over at The Film Experience, which can be read <a href="http://thefilmexperience.net/blog/2012/10/14/lff-a-conversation-on-antiviral-and-cronenberg-jr.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</div>
Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-65109917926973854742012-10-11T10:54:00.001+00:002012-10-11T10:54:35.264+00:00LFF: Rust & Bone<span style="font-size: x-small;">I'm back at the <a href="http://www.bfi.org.uk/lff/" target="_blank">56th London Film Festival</a> for Nathaniel Rogers at <a href="http://thefilmexperience.net/" target="_blank">The Film Experience</a>; hopefully this is the first of many full reviews I'll be bringing you.</span><br />
<br />
<b>Rust & Bone / De rouille et d'os</b><br />
<br />
France/Belgium<br />
<br />
directed by Jacques Audiard; written by Audiard & Thomas Bidegain from a story by Craig Davidson; starring Matthias Schoenaerts and Marion Cotillard<br />
<br />
<b>B+</b><br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsUIYWNe_TFSTEzjYmxaj_m2BFfn_5VULu0AJ-S8ep5mnDis4x9P5X-Xs2cUZbrgp620yFDh-fQQPwLoGcm1Wm0tk48YD7cGjWOojTelCDfrfHrML57VnkQvjl373Aw5fSu4cI/s1600/rustbone.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="246" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsUIYWNe_TFSTEzjYmxaj_m2BFfn_5VULu0AJ-S8ep5mnDis4x9P5X-Xs2cUZbrgp620yFDh-fQQPwLoGcm1Wm0tk48YD7cGjWOojTelCDfrfHrML57VnkQvjl373Aw5fSu4cI/s400/rustbone.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rust (Matthias Schoenaerts) & Bone (Marion Cotillard)?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Rust & Bone</i>
is, as you might expect, a film of rough textures, though they proliferate more
through the emotional volatility in the central relationship than though any
visual particulars. Director Jacques Audiard is still in the business of
tempering abrasive, down-on-their-luck characters in the French <i>banlieues</i> with a style that smears the
poetic and the aggressive into one confrontational melting pot. As with
previous pictures <i>Read My Lips</i> and <i>The Beat That My Heart Skipped</i>, Audiard
embraces his characters as people dominated by darkness and a headstrong
physicality. The more positive moments of <i>Rust
& Bone</i> are still imagined in corporeal terms – the lusty meeting of
damaged bodies, or the rush of memory as Stephanie (Marion Cotillard) re-enacts
a routine to Kat Perry’s ‘Firework’ (if nothing else, Audiard has refreshed a
song I’d never wanted to hear again).<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As rust does, these sensations wear down, although it seems
to be part of Audiard’s intention to throw severe miserablism at his audience
just to see if they can survive. As the film reaches its second peak of
tragedy, the eerie suddenness of Stephanie’s early accident has been replaced
by a heavy, inevitable dread, with the crack of disaster impending in the
background of one lengthy take. Such momentous foreboding doesn’t lessen the
emotional pain, but it does make it feel ever so slightly gratuitous.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Still, such a vibrantly confrontational film with such a
charged sense of the physical is a rare thing, and Audiard works to balance the
lead performances by Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts between a dark
emotional percolation and a keen awareness of their physicality and the
relationship of their bodies. Typically, the male is the one with the more
willing engagement of the physical – Ali (Schoenaerts) proudly participates in
organised fights in a wasteland and engages in casual sex with nameless women –
making the camera’s sense of Stephanie’s less frequently engaged physicality
all the more heightened. Cotillard is expert at scorching her character’s lust
and enhanced sense of her own body onto the screen, and the building frisson
between Stephanie and Ali collects less through dialogue (the brisk, careless
attitude of Ali puts paid to that) and more through the relation of their
bodies and faces.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<i>Rust & Bone</i> is
a brutal but sensual portrait of two people learning to exist independently and
happily, and demonstrates the value of other damaged people in achieving that
goal. It may tilt wildly into grandiose dramatics or viracious sentimentality,
but while some of those notes may strike an off chord, they are all part of
Audiard’s passionate approach to his narrative, and reflect the beautiful,
distorted, uncomfortable mess of a world that these two people inhabit. The
rust rubs up against the bone and they spark, hurting but creating fire and
feeling.<o:p></o:p></div>
Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-36576759420228209432012-04-19T17:00:00.001+00:002012-05-02T05:57:55.919+00:00The LLGFF exploded my expectations, but also my fingersThe <b>26th London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival</b> ended a few weeks ago, and I was fortunate enough to have joined the writing team at <a href="http://sosogay.org/" target="_blank">So So Gay</a> just in time to be part of their team covering the event. Across the event I saw fifteen features, some accompanied by short films, and rounded it off with one programme of shorts. What's more pertinent here is that I <i>reviewed</i> all fifteen of those features and the shorts programme for the website, and that's what this post is about. Among these links might be the big gay hits of the future, or gems you might need to seek out, or sadly films that we won't hear from again. But they're all worth reading about.<br />
<br />
In rough order of my affection for them, then:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7eVaBsXyb9MK_SI87oI0VtsOdxS3nbOxnZ4Bj-Ptph_v94CkAvL8VbN21CkBTEBSjGJqlB5M6z0Ogvj8eO9Vw_gkxzDubJpb4OOV8HL6oNJcq5PWcJQ23zaun_tw13Y0TZBga/s1600/joebelle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7eVaBsXyb9MK_SI87oI0VtsOdxS3nbOxnZ4Bj-Ptph_v94CkAvL8VbN21CkBTEBSjGJqlB5M6z0Ogvj8eO9Vw_gkxzDubJpb4OOV8HL6oNJcq5PWcJQ23zaun_tw13Y0TZBga/s400/joebelle.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
<i><a href="http://sosogay.org/2012/bfi-london-lesbian-gay-film-festival-round-up-7/" target="_blank">Joe + Belle</a></i> (Veronica Kedar, 2011, Israel):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">Registering with an almost inexplicable amount of pleasure, </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Joe + Belle</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"> is an anarchic conflagration of rebellion, danger, romance and political implication. The first Israeli lesbian feature is spearheaded by Kedar, who, as writer, director and star, drives the film to unbounded success. Her energetic, tactile direction never allows the film to fly too far out of reach – delivering such a revolutionary piece with such carefree panache is a commendable achievement in itself.</span></blockquote><i><a href="http://sosogay.org/2012/bfi-london-lesbian-gay-film-festival-round-up-5/" target="_blank">365 Without 377</a></i> (Adele Tulli, 2011, Italy):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">Tulli’s close camera angles and sharp editing techniques create a film that really feels alive with the sights and smells of the city, bolstered by rich colour photography and a pointed sense of humour. As the film builds towards the triumphant anniversary celebrations, Tulli dynamically depicts a Mumbai that has bloomed into full colour under the progression of a fairer society.</span> </blockquote><i><a href="http://sosogay.org/2012/bfi-london-lesbian-gay-film-festival-round-up-6/" target="_blank">This Is What Love in Action Looks Like</a></i> (Morgan Jon Fox, 2011, USA):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><em style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">This Is What Love in Action Looks Like</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"> motors forward with a sense of purpose, and as part of the filmmaking process come the realities of progressive change – those involved were instrumental in the implosion of the Love in Action programme and the fairer, more open treatment of teenage homosexuals in the wider American culture.</span> </blockquote><i><a href="http://sosogay.org/2012/bfi-london-lesbian-gay-film-festival-round-up-4/" target="_blank">I Am</a></i> (Sonali Gulati, 2011, USA/India):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">Gulati realises a softly beautiful approach in her documentary. She contrasts the heteronormative society of India, reflected through a prevalence of advertising, with the Western world where the realisation of the new generation’s sexuality is often enacted. The interviews are frequently shifted to a voiceover of slowed, reflective imagery, moving them from the domestic space to the winding streets of India.</span> </blockquote><i><a href="http://sosogay.org/2012/bfi-london-lesbian-gay-film-festival-round-up-1/" target="_blank">Love Free or Die</a></i> (Macky Alston, 2011, USA):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">Graciously, Alston isn’t blind to the struggles within the shifting church. At least two minutes are devoted to a tearful bishop who brokenly announces that despite her love for the gay members of her church, she cannot reconcile her biblical comprehension with their lifestyle.</span> </blockquote><i><a href="http://sosogay.org/2012/bfi-london-lesbian-gay-film-festival-round-up-6/" target="_blank">Jobriath A.D.</a></i> (Kieran Turner, 2011, USA):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"><i>Jobriath A.D.</i> mourns the under-appreciation and the loss of a great artist – his music is the dominant soundtrack and feels vibrant with invention – while also celebrating the groundbreaking effect Jobriath had on music culture. For newcomers, this is an enthralling education; for those familiar, this is a paean to celebrate.</span> </blockquote><i><a href="http://sosogay.org/2012/bfi-lesbian-gay-film-festival-round-up-3/" target="_blank">Ballroom Rules</a></i> (Nickolas Bird & Eleanor Sharpe, 2012, Australia):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">What the overwhelmingly charming</span><em style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Ballroom Rules</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"> leaves you with is a sense of the bountiful possibilities that these dancers have revealed. Oh, and a huge grin and maybe something in your eye.</span></blockquote><i><a href="http://sosogay.org/2012/bfi-london-lesbian-gay-film-festival-round-up-8/" target="_blank">A Safe Place for the Wild</a></i> (Hanna Högstedt, 2011, Sweden):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">Hanna Hogstedt’s intimate depiction of an unconventional romantic utopia is delivered with a gentle humanity that connects the drama to the most familiar emotional concerns. Through the collaborative and symbolic effort of tearing down the wall, a raucous housewarming party, an intimate twilight tryst and an awkward morning after, the dynamics of the relationships shift in unpredictable ways.</span> </blockquote><i><a href="http://sosogay.org/2012/bfi-lesbian-gay-film-festival-round-up-2/" target="_blank">Waited For</a></i> (Nerina Penzhorn, 2011, South Africa):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">The women’s discussions of their experiences leads Penzhorn to focus her documentary more of the issues of race embedded deep within the country. Kelly in particular provides some incisive musings about how ‘profound the logics of apartheid were’.</span> </blockquote>Shorts programme: <a href="http://sosogay.org/2012/film-review-shorts-lifes-too-short-26th-london-lesbian-gay-film-festival/" target="_blank">"Life's Too Short"</a> - includes girl bunnies, lesbian clichés, and man-eating wedding dresses.<br />
<br />
<i><a href="http://sosogay.org/2012/bfi-london-lesbian-gay-film-festival-round-up-8/" target="_blank">The Skinny</a></i> (Patrik-Ian Polk, 2012, USA):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><em style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">The Skinny </em><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">never forces neat resolutions and easy forgiveness. A sequel beckons for these characters, and though the lessons they learn aren’t revolutionary, and they might have grown from</span><em style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"> Sex and the City</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">-esque character types (Magnus wants the 2.5 children; Kyle is Samantha), it’ll be hard to resist spending more time in their sexy, sparkling presence.</span> </blockquote><i><a href="http://sosogay.org/2012/bfi-london-lesbian-gay-film-festival-round-up-4/" target="_blank">The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye</a></i> (Marie Losier, 2011, USA):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">Although it seems petty to complain about sexism in a film concerned with the breakdown of gender roles, Lady Jaye’s scant presence – she often exists as a mere haunting giggle – is the film’s inherent weakness. Losier constantly delves back into aspects of Genesis’ past and arcs these entangled narratives towards the present, but only once does Lady Jaye’s life receive the same treatment, as narrated by Genesis.</span> </blockquote><i><a href="http://sosogay.org/2012/bfi-lesbian-gay-film-festival-round-up-2/" target="_blank">Difficult Love</a></i> (Zanele Muholi, 2011, South Africa):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"><i>Difficult Love</i> feels a little unevenly constructed, with an overarching eschewed narrative. However, as a portrait of the power of the creative, challenging patriarchy and homophobia without their violent tendencies, it isn’t difficult to admire.</span> </blockquote><a href="http://sosogay.org/2012/bfi-london-lesbian-gay-film-festival-round-up-5/" target="_blank"><i>Yes or No</i>?</a> (Saratsawadee Wongsomphet, 2010, Thailand):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">It’s hard to really dislike such a sweet, bubblegum romance between such a likeable pairing. But the film almost turns into a strange checklist of every romantic cliché in the rulebook. There’s a dramatic confrontation in torrential rain, one character eavesdropping on an emotional declaration, an obsessive rival threatening suicide, and so on.</span> </blockquote><i><a href="http://sosogay.org/2012/bfi-london-lesbian-gay-film-festival-round-up-7/" target="_blank">The Mountain</a></i> (Ole Giæver, 2011, Norway):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">Filmed in vast widescreen, you’re unlikely to happen upon a film as beautifully shot as </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">The Mountain</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"> very often. Cinematographer Oystein Mamen is attuned to every breath of wind on every blade of grass, working with the sound designers to make the mountain a third character in this sparse drama.</span> </blockquote><i><a href="http://sosogay.org/2012/bfi-london-lesbian-gay-film-festival-round-up-7/" target="_blank">Stud Life</a></i> (Campbell X, 2012, UK):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">Budget constraints obviously contribute heavily to the small, overexposed location shooting, but the close camera work feels like an imposition on the engaging performances of the actors. Worse, this style neutralises every space, so that the sense of danger inherent in the visibility of the alternative lifestyles with the London cityscape never connects, even when events take a darker turn.</span> </blockquote>Of course, you shouldn't forget to check out the rest of the reviews on the <a href="http://sosogay.org/" target="_blank">SoSoGay website</a> - the most comprehensive coverage of the festival you'll find anywhere, and all top class. I mean, it's unlikely that I bagged <i>all</i> of the great films.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Image from </i>Joe + Belle<i> courtesy of bfi.org.</i></span>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-82411738261760604962012-03-11T21:50:00.002+00:002012-03-11T21:59:17.665+00:00Queer Anglo Films, Take #3: Sebastiane<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKaJhXkrURQ_EdGSHAmJc21gEmW3_ZWt8BQakCJFwwt-xrv1cPFoyG9t9MwW6FmcvQ5lYUN58uI-Z-E-iQAFiIEm21OBSQ6YuCw951tVkT92QiRhjF4C0STNUWSN-3XyT0G5tD/s1600/qafheader.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKaJhXkrURQ_EdGSHAmJc21gEmW3_ZWt8BQakCJFwwt-xrv1cPFoyG9t9MwW6FmcvQ5lYUN58uI-Z-E-iQAFiIEm21OBSQ6YuCw951tVkT92QiRhjF4C0STNUWSN-3XyT0G5tD/s1600/qafheader.png" /></a></div><b><br />
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For our third discussion, <a href="http://rantsofadiva.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">James</a> and I move both forward and backwards in time. We're five years on from <a href="http://rantsofadiva.blogspot.com/2012/02/queer-anglo-films-take-2-sunday-bloody.html" target="_blank">last take</a>, <i>Sunday Bloody Sunday</i>, but Derek Jarman's feature debut is set thousands of years back in Ancient Rome. There's something interesting about <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075177/" target="_blank">Sebastiane</a></i>, and it's not just his penis...<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKUWcXU_tWjBrEavnPW9KK8_YnqGsTMFH2wcLtsVUSfYxxr4tJa2n0Q3zIJR-S_cDsoAXckZyHHbyJndNafnu0bhKCaU1vvI58i2FWo4Drc9dWOYGnclSgevCG5gl2sgvwvbZ8/s1600/sebastiane-poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKUWcXU_tWjBrEavnPW9KK8_YnqGsTMFH2wcLtsVUSfYxxr4tJa2n0Q3zIJR-S_cDsoAXckZyHHbyJndNafnu0bhKCaU1vvI58i2FWo4Drc9dWOYGnclSgevCG5gl2sgvwvbZ8/s320/sebastiane-poster.jpg" width="231" /></a></div><b>David: </b><i>Sebastiane</i> was the first film to be recorded entirely in accurately translated Latin. That's a hell of a way for Derek Jarman to introduce himself to cinema. (We should note that <i>Sebastiane</i> was co-directed by Paul Humfress, but since he's done no feature work since, we'll probably talk exclusively about Jarman.) Jarman's films are the type that lie everything controversial on the surface, so that you can't even look at them without confronting these issues and opinions and images, which is why I feel this discussion might be considerably more difficult that our previous two. Sebastiane intertwines religion and sexuality on the level of imagery and of text, and I'm finding the extrapolation of what these mean within the film hard to manage. It's also something we can't avoid, so brace yourself for some inappropriate comments and boneheaded observations.<br />
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I want to take this down to the most basic reading I made of the film at the end. If we read the entire film as queer, which seems necessary, then Sebastian, despite his refusal of Severus' advances, is gay too. Only what his rhapsodic words to Justin demonstrate is the purity of his gayness - the separation of love from lust. "You think your drunken lust compares to the love of God?" he asks Severus boldly, even in the face of potential rape. Severus' hazy slow motion views of Anthony and Adrian's wet make it clear that he seems the men around him purely in terms of the bodily, carnal involvement, but I think what the actors do, both in those scenes and later when Adrian is leaning against Anthony, is suggest the genuine affection and coupledom between the pair. Lust is<i> part</i> of love, but Severus' separation from the men around him causes him to objectify and see sex as the only possible connection to them. He's also, along with Max (who momentarily acts as our narrator), the old guard, the remnants of the brutal Roman society they've left behind. One of the most amusing moments is where the camera's so disinterested in Max's lament over how the glory of the past is receding that it lingers heavily over another man shaving his body.<br />
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It's easy to criticise the film for baring so much flesh and filming certain scenes in such an erotic way they're straight (no pun intended) out of porn films, but Jarman and Humfress don't use these techniques so basically. The constant appearance of dicks becomes normalised; even comedic when they all try to outdo each other's fake endowments. Especially late in the film, the degree of nudity for the various men seems to reflect social status. Note how emphasised Adrian is in the final scene and how he has to be forced to shoot Sebastian, because he is the submissive partner of Anthony, and has been teased earlier about being a virgin, the younger member of the group at the prey of his superiors. His posing in the final scene is erotic, but it's also so posed that it reflects the kind of emotionless decorative qualities of male flesh that we see in the ornate opening, with a motionless man painted gold and muted.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6258TNVWjl2TxqU2YPg-8Z4hnuvNg_zTSIEo4U5bzf5YTO5uxCaSMrHEy1i4e6OV5QZCoU8UO-sgFy7xVS4ymPQMhhM9J3Bvv2QphT4u3EdpBf_lTc7cqBrAmw0yYtLrPY-WD/s1600/sebastiane-golden.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="204" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6258TNVWjl2TxqU2YPg-8Z4hnuvNg_zTSIEo4U5bzf5YTO5uxCaSMrHEy1i4e6OV5QZCoU8UO-sgFy7xVS4ymPQMhhM9J3Bvv2QphT4u3EdpBf_lTc7cqBrAmw0yYtLrPY-WD/s320/sebastiane-golden.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />
The film's natural equivocation of sex and violence (swords = penises, you know the drill - and Sebastian doesn't want to have sex so he refuses to clean those swords!) create the natural solution to Severus' sexual frustration - if he can't sex Sebastian, he can reach satisfaction by piercing Sebastian with an arrow. In fact, the involvement of all of the men in this final act is a perverse reflection of the bukkake climax to the dancing scene that opens the film. And now, James, you have carte blanche, because I've just said bukkake. Twice.<br />
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<b>James:</b> Maybe we can start a drinking game. Every time we say "bukkake" in this post, the readers have to take a drink. It's really the inevitable continuation of the Bridesmaids girls' "SCORSESE!".<br />
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<i>Sebastiane</i> was my first Jarman film. All I really knew about him was that he made queer avant-garde films and that Tilda Swinton was his muse. So, I was actually surprised to discover that <i>Sebastiane</i> wasn't as "out there" as I had feared. Then again, what does it say about me that I did not find a film with a barebones plot and shot entirely in Latin "out there"? Perhaps it was the gratuitous amounts of male flesh on display, unashamed of just how gratuitous it was. Like you mentioned, many scenes were shot like they were straight out of a porno. Perhaps, though, Jarman and Humfress weren't "borrowing" so much as they were influencing that genre. I'm no expert in 70's porn, but a few of these scenes, particularly the one where the guys, nearly naked and wet, start throwing around a ball on the beach, felt completely modern to me: "Oh, look at these strapping young dudes, just tossing a ball around like the hot, macho jocks they are. Hot, macho jocks who are going to fuck each other, that is."<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjcqCbPIrudWwVOoTtxumrAFuyrU_B1qXYu5uEXtRzm7ZrWb9W2s9quVYgjcUwoXZAxi3ZJVZXFBXgJckWfqv02KukOhnFC6zMMgq9sTFr9AzrX9A7tRQoCn-tus7uUP656pAG/s1600/sebastiane-ball.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="198" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjcqCbPIrudWwVOoTtxumrAFuyrU_B1qXYu5uEXtRzm7ZrWb9W2s9quVYgjcUwoXZAxi3ZJVZXFBXgJckWfqv02KukOhnFC6zMMgq9sTFr9AzrX9A7tRQoCn-tus7uUP656pAG/s320/sebastiane-ball.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />
I like what you have to say about the film's "love vs. lust" angle, which I must admit completely escaped me when I was considering <i>Sebastiane</i>'s queerness. I was more focused on the relationship between Sebastian's homosexuality and his Christianity. There's no doubt that Sebastian was attracted to Severus--he openly admits it--yet I never quite saw it as something he was interested in experiencing or exploring. In fact, he seems oddly ashamed of it. Jarman and Humfress are not exactly subtle in making Sebastian a Christ-like figure. Over the course of the film, he is brutally beaten for refusing the follow Severus' orders, sexual and otherwise. Instead of getting the punishment over as soon as possible, however, Sebastian refuses to give in, accepting beatings far beyond what his body can handle. It's almost as if he feels he deserves these punishments for the sins he has committed, namely his homosexual desires (It's no coincidence that he mentions his desire for Severus during one of these cruel punishments). The purity of Sebastian's Christianity contrasts strongly with the hedonistic Romans who surround him. He won't allow himself to give into Severus' lust, but he also still has some feelings for him. Besides, as you said, the films shows that love and lust go hand in hand, but neither Sebastian or Severus can see this. In a way, the film's finale is the only way it can end: Sebastian must die for the sins of not only himself but of the soldiers around him.<br />
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Let me pose a question that has been nagging at me since I watched this film: Why is it that the movies associate Ancient Rome with male homoeroticism and homosexuality? There are countless examples, no doubt, but perhaps the most glaring choice is Fellini's <i>Satyricon</i>, released just a few years before <i>Sebastiane</i>. That film was an epic about one young Roman's love/lust for an even younger male (a twink, to be more specific) and the journey he takes to be with him. It's a surprisingly brazen film, both for the time it was made and even among Fellini's filmography, but I think it got away with it precisely because of its historical context. Even with last year's <i>The Eagle</i>, many spectators were hoping Tatum and Bell got it on because that's what we expect from Ancient Roman epics. Why is it that Ancient Rome was, and, to an extent, still is a safe haven in films for homosexuality, or at the very least homoeroticism, to flourish? In other words, why is it we got to see bukkake in <i>Sebastiane</i> without UK censors burning every last print of this movie? Is it because of the well-recorded decadence of the empire, particularly during its final years? And why is Rome used more often than Ancient Greece, where homosexuality and pederasty was widely reported and approved?<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOa5S_iebBUVp2HIr9Pr5Wy1tDxtTD09z_7DBuCD0cyTptNm-puf3mQE_AT9AZxT-ECdXo6XINoyspxjG3fF9GIeGo8PwdVfkmhdBUKs_CbGUDMUX4L0a5JPjyqdvfDa-jFt7N/s1600/sebastiane-max.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="198" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOa5S_iebBUVp2HIr9Pr5Wy1tDxtTD09z_7DBuCD0cyTptNm-puf3mQE_AT9AZxT-ECdXo6XINoyspxjG3fF9GIeGo8PwdVfkmhdBUKs_CbGUDMUX4L0a5JPjyqdvfDa-jFt7N/s320/sebastiane-max.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Max (Neil Kennedy) momentarily acts as conduit</td></tr>
</tbody></table><b>David:</b> I think they key to your last question lies in your final word. It's quite clear that although homosexuality is a common occurrence among these Romans, it's not strictly approved. In <i>Sebastiane</i>, at least - I've not seen <i>The Eagle</i> nor <i>Satyricon</i>, and I'm no expert on Roman history, so I'm proceeding with caution on this subject. But Jarman and Humfress seem very careful to give a fair amount of time to Max, who, even though he admits having engaged in it himself, views homosexuality as inferior, wrong somehow. "They're okay for a quick one." I'd guess that we see much less of Ancient Greece within this topic precisely because it was too normalised. I think the Roman films we're talking about rely, to an extent, on a frisson of deviation from the normal. <i>Sebastiane</i> is a gay film from gay directors for gay audiences, but the central conflicts we've been discussed are powered by that sense of castigation and punishment of someone who is inherently <i>wrong</i>. As you suggested,<i> Sebastiane</i> equates Christianity with homosexuality - at its most essential, the film is an allegory for the homophobia and resulting violence that still occurs in modern society and certainly did in the 1970s, where homosexuality was more visible due to legalisation, but far from accepted. Jarman and Humfress twist these depictions to a brilliantly confrontational degree - the Jewish man crucified by Christians (Jesus) equates to a Christian crucified by Romans (Sebastian) to a gay man attacked by (possibly repressed) heterosexuals (the contemporary audience). The final point is an obvious, but essential one - discrimination is bad. Your excellent perceptions also pick up on the self-hatred that is often induced in gay people by the repressive society around them, becoming convinced that they deserve their punishment, when they are instead essentially suffering because of the self-hatred of people who can't accept homosexuality (their own, but also simply the concept).<br />
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I do remember as it began thinking, "this is the weirdest film I have ever seen" - and then ten minutes later, it felt almost ordinary. I think it takes a certain brazen attitude to pull that off, as you suggested - even though it does use the nudity for titillation, it contextualises that within an environment where the titillating elements are always on display, and thus, normalised. The exotic is sucked out of the nude bodies because we see them doing everything naked. And so those scenes you describe are not necessarily pornographic, simply the day-to-day life. You're right, though, since '70s porn (I am honestly not lying when I say I've been reading academic pieces on pornography just hours before I write this - it's part of my module on Exploitation Cinema) was driven by actual narratives, as opposed to the more direct clips we get today. And scenes like those ball games definitely reflect the infamous volleyball scenes in earlier films about nudist camps. How developed pornography was in terms of the slow-motion erotica Jarman and Humfress shot, I couldn't tell you, but I think it's worth noting that they aren't strictly sex scenes - what exuded powerfully from those scenes for me was the good humour of the two men. Porn generally reduces sex to a physical connection and those scenes felt more emotionally driven.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFhW9EzPbSx_ZUa0n_XwnY_ujtnUPlcSf8lu4VxMJVpyrEmJKhAF2SGs1LiJ4HUOvy2OsdTmlWBVEASjpCUV6IKBnQR_h2GNdX_da9Pqvte4CnvRI3iu8_wIEdylTcPURlRUyD/s1600/sebastiane-embrace.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="204" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFhW9EzPbSx_ZUa0n_XwnY_ujtnUPlcSf8lu4VxMJVpyrEmJKhAF2SGs1LiJ4HUOvy2OsdTmlWBVEASjpCUV6IKBnQR_h2GNdX_da9Pqvte4CnvRI3iu8_wIEdylTcPURlRUyD/s320/sebastiane-embrace.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Adrian (Ken Hicks) and Anthony (Janusz Romanov) embrace</td></tr>
</tbody></table>I'm most intrigued by the character of Justin. As his relationship with Sebastian seems to strengthen, it becomes clear that he's actually in love with him, to the point of sacrifice (where he's too made to ape the crucifixion, with a crown of thorns forced onto his head). The film doesn't depict any actual relationships that aren't founded on sex - it doesn't seem possible for these men to simply be friends. A society without females seems to suggest that the sexual drive is so strong that homosexual interaction is simply inevitable, which rather shatters the idea of sexual categorisation that our society is based on. It takes a story set in such an ancient time period as this to make these things apparent - which is why I found the character of Max so strange, because he's the only one so insistent on the deviant nature of homosexuality. He isn't strictly judgemental, but he doesn't understand the <i>preference</i> - whereas for the rest, even the idea of preference doesn't seem to exist.<br />
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<b>James:</b> Does the film position Justin as the idealized love counterpoint to Severus' lust? I never thought of it before, but now that you mention it, the idea makes sense to me. As you said, Justin is clearly in love with Sebastian. However, we never get the feeling that Justin is lusting after him. He's the pure love that Sebastian seeks, yet he's too racked with guilt over his "unnatural" feelings for Severus to even notice. To put it in terms more people will understand, Justin is the Ducky to Sebastian's Molly Ringwald: he'll always be there and may always have feelings for him, but Sebastian / Molly Ringwald is too caught up in their own little world to take him seriously as a romantic suitor.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbxLr7lYomEbzrnH8z3eJCpQgeYCyNijepAPKGyi9bc6Djh-LfFZMAq6TLbpwZutNw9luZKkdtahruzkO7tTfGH7lL9ecUXQXqlS8gRbgvfM2SVXprYlEitRbQ5jEc6WF_FIvj/s1600/sebastiane-reflection.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="196" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbxLr7lYomEbzrnH8z3eJCpQgeYCyNijepAPKGyi9bc6Djh-LfFZMAq6TLbpwZutNw9luZKkdtahruzkO7tTfGH7lL9ecUXQXqlS8gRbgvfM2SVXprYlEitRbQ5jEc6WF_FIvj/s320/sebastiane-reflection.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sebastian (Leonardo Treviglio) lost in his own little world</td></tr>
</tbody></table>And now that I've reduced this film to an 80's Brat Pack movie, let's talk about something else. We have talked a bit about how <i>Sebastiane</i> is set in an army post, secluded from the world and, consequently, other women. This seclusion from the outside world is a perfect place for homosexuality to occur, as they are away from societal mores that would normally prevent it (or, at the very least, look down upon it more, as Max does). What's interesting, however, is the fact that the homosexuality of the other films in this series has taken place in seclusion as well. All of the men in <i>Victim</i> hid in cars and kept it quiet in their apartments because they had to. Daniel and Bob were more openly affectionate with each other in <i>Sunday Bloody Sunday</i>, yet they too kept their love secluded in Daniel's apartment. We never really saw them go out in public together. At first, <i>Sebastiane</i> appears to follow the same pattern: the slow-motion lovemaking scene we have hinted at previously takes place in a small quiet beach away from the post. We think that they are secluded even further from the already secluded post. But then we see Severus looking down at them. And, before long, Sebastian stumbles upon it as well. The couple isn't as hidden as we thought, and when they are called out by Severus, we are surprised that they aren't punished or even looked down upon. In fact, it's quite the opposite really. The couple is openly affectionate with each other among the other men. Even Max, who mercilessly goes after Sebastian and his homosexuality, makes a silly one-liner about them and moves on. If we view this film as a metaphor for homosexuality in the 1970's, as you previously mentioned, then perhaps Humfress and Jarman are saying that in gay society, cut off from the heteronormative world, relationships can flourish. It's not perfect yet--we still have those who are self-loathing and those who don't understand--but there is hope, as evidenced by the open affection between these two men.<br />
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<b>David:</b> I don't know that it's that positive - after all, this is a society where refused advances lead to someone being crucified and pummelled with arrows. If the film shows a gay society flourishing, it also shows that these are still <i>men</i> - and men have the tendency to deal with their problems with violence. I think the film does still delineate between the butcher men and the more effeminate ones - Sebastian being feminised through the torture he undergoes. This is still a world governed by heteronormative, gendered systems, only mapped onto a society where everyone has a penis. You are right, though - the open affection does seem like a moment of simple, loving interaction between two equals. It's definitely the most content and positive depiction of homosexuality we've seen so far.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Next take:</b><i><b> </b>My Beautiful Laundrette</i></span>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-70146845421460922202012-02-24T16:15:00.001+00:002012-02-25T11:43:34.890+00:00Motifs in Cinema, '11: Is Old The New Young?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Once more into the breach...<b> <a href="http://encorentertainmnt.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Andrew Kendall</a></b> recently asked me to participate in his quasi-blog-a-thon, and I'm all about the community. So here's my piece on ageing in the cinema of 2011, preceded by Andrew's elegant introduction to the one-day series. Be sure to check out the other great pieces in the series from the <a href="http://encorentertainmnt.blogspot.com/2012/02/motifs-in-cinema-11-10-for-now-for-11.html" target="_blank">hub</a> at Andrew's blog.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>Perhaps because it’s one of the youngest artistic forms, cinema is often assessed in a much different manner than literature, or the visual arts. We discuss it in terms of genre, not in terms of thematic offerings. Comparing, for example, </i>Corpse Bride<i> and </i>Up<i> because they’re both animated leads to some dubious discussion, especially when – like any art form – thematic elements examined in cinema and the way different filmmakers address them make for some stimulating discussion. <b>Motifs in Cinema </b>is a discourse, across eleven film blogs, assessing the way in which various thematic elements have been used in the 2011 cinematic landscape. How does a common theme vary in use from a comedy to a drama? Are filmmakers working from a similar canvas when they assess the issue of the artist or the family dynamic? Like everything else, a film begins with an idea - <b>Motifs in Cinema</b> assesses how the use of a single idea changes when utilised by varying artists.</i></blockquote><br />
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When director John Wells insisted that Meryl Streep was "the only conceivable choice" for his upcoming adaptation of acclaimed play <i>August: Osage County</i>, he was rubbing at a scar that had only just stopped bleeding. Just a few years after her status as the only real female star of her generation was solidified by her scoring bona fide populist hits in <i>Mamma Mia!</i> and <i>It's Complicated</i>, Streep returned as a headlining star in 2011, albeit in a film destined to remain in Oscar circles for its US audience. But there's the not unfeasible idea that <b>The Iron Lady</b> exists thanks to Streep's mighty status rather than from any strong desire to tell Margaret Thatcher's story. And while it may tell the story of an elderly woman, she's a distinctly uncommon one, dementia deteriorating her within a lonely, restricted locale.<br />
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Still, you have to admire, even with all its faults, a script that devotes a huge chunk of its time to an elderly woman's struggles with the encroaching effects of ageing. The flawless work of the make-up team leaves Streep free to explore the fracturing mind of Thatcher, as seen from within. Abi Morgan's script imagines Thatcher accompanied by the ghost of her beloved husband Dennis (Jim Broadbent), carefully maintaining a spectatorial balance between sympathetic involvement and the resigned concern seen in her daughter Carol (Olivia Colman). Though Broadbent makes Dennis a genial, soft sort of ghost, his task is to be the little devil on Maggie's shoulders, pushing her to maintain the delusions and imaginings that become dementia's overpowering weapon.<br />
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Having to split its thematic concern between Thatcher's political life and her ageing, <i>The Iron Lady</i> finds little room for reflecting the positives of Thatcher's past that dementia returns her to. Instead, it takes a similar tack to Clint Eastwood's <b>J. Edgar</b> in its scattershot structure, spinning back into the past at the stroke of a bronzed statue. Dementia is reduced to a plot structuring device, and depth on the subject is as avoided as any definite political stance. Biopics like these seem to necessitate the use of old age as a duller counterpoint to an exciting youth. This tendency compounds the film industry's obsession with youth and beauty over the multitude of disparate experiences in the human world. Like Thatcher and Hoover, George Méliès and his wife Jeanne (Ben Kingsley and Helen McCrory) in <b>Hugo</b> have entered the dark despair of later life, and are led to look back on their former glories in order to find happiness.<br />
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Lee Chang-dong's elegiac South Korean drama <b>Poetry</b> seems to suggest the opposite, with its more classic view of the wiser, more fulfilled elderly generation. It even does this in the face of central character Yang Mija (a remarkable Yoon Jeong-hee) facing the onset of Alzheimer's Disease. Like <i>The Iron Lady</i>, <i>Poetry</i> contains a multitude of thematic threads refracted through an elderly female character, but Yang Mija does not lose herself inside her own head and memories of former glories. Instead, her efforts to focus her deteriorating mind by joining a poetry class open her up to revelations about the beauty in the world around her, even in the face of her grandson's horrific crime. Like <b>Potiche</b>, Francois Ozon's colourful French comedy, <i>Poetry</i> demonstrates a view of ageing as a positive progression. Yang Mija and Suzanne (Catherine Deneuve) are still allowed to discover new experiences and be active participants in their society.<br />
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Nanni Moretti's <b>We Have A Pope</b> portrays a man who longs for that same thing. Faced by the overwhelming responsibility of being appointed Pope, Cardinal Melville (Michel Piccoli) has somewhat of a mid-life crisis, a mixture of fatigue and youthful hope present in his escape into the anonymity of the city outside the Papal Palace. He slips away from the absurdist comedy that percolates inside the conclave and into his own tender, affecting plot of a man who simply desires to be true to himself. That's also the choice of the monk community in <b>Of Gods and Men</b>, whose religious dedication is, like Melville's, severely tested, but the truth of these men is instead to stay strong in their faith, even in the face of violence and possible death. Neither <i>We Have A Pope</i> or <i>Of Gods and Men</i>, though essentially presenting opposing views of religious life, judges their protagonists for their decisions one way or the other, warmly presenting their wizened men as capable, reasonable decision makers.<br />
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<b>Beginners</b>, 2011's most celebrated and evocative portrayal of old age seems, helpfully enough, to tie all these themes together. The revelation of his terminal cancer is what makes Hal (Christopher Plummer) feel liberated enough to reveal his homosexuality to his loved ones, finally realising the truth in his life because the release of death is assured. But disease doesn't turn Hal inwards to regret and self-reflection; rather, Hal uses his late-blooming freedom to love Andy (Goran Visnjic) and inspire son Oliver (Ewan McGregor) to find his own fresh beginnings with Anna (Melanie Laurent) once Hal has passed away. <i>Beginners</i> depicts the liberty of old age, once people are past the age of financial responsibility, equating in its title the freshness of Hal's and Oliver's romantic experiences as just as engaging and valuable as the other, wrapping sexuality and age together. <i>Beginners</i> stands tall as 2011's finest depiction of the elderly generation, and crucially, levels separate generations as equally worthy of exploration and fulfilment.Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-2423042598984418022012-02-19T17:29:00.000+00:002012-02-19T17:29:28.639+00:00Why Home Alone Disappoints: Scream, Kevin, Scream!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2Fvu6FPKfwVg5E40C9ymXS7kwYesgVoFfLiNywVK84PMSuPZ9OEs4YUa-8WvmeK1B6jEuIf_SY2CAxQzD1K32U-3bU5LuUq9OZmVQc1uIX42pCJ1l2-BgWMaVGSLutdeNMfoF/s1600/homealone01.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="217" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2Fvu6FPKfwVg5E40C9ymXS7kwYesgVoFfLiNywVK84PMSuPZ9OEs4YUa-8WvmeK1B6jEuIf_SY2CAxQzD1K32U-3bU5LuUq9OZmVQc1uIX42pCJ1l2-BgWMaVGSLutdeNMfoF/s400/homealone01.png" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div>No, I'd never seen <i>Home Alone</i>. (I didn't see <i>The Wizard of Oz</i> until I was sixteen either, so go yell at my parents.) As it started, and John Williams' familiarly magical score piped up, I immediately thought of <i>Harry Potter</i> - although dwelling on those two dodgy efforts with which Chris Columbus began the series is not something I'm really interested in. On the face of it, both <i>Harry Potter</i> and <i>Home Alone </i>are about orphaned boys. However, for a film that seems to be expressed in the pop culture space as the wild expression of a free child, <i>Home Alone</i> turns out to hew remarkably close to the whimsical holiday movie traditions of something like <i>Jingle All The Way</i>. What I wanted was the manic, unbridled release of free will; what I got was the affirmation of its suppression.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDPPMMoDrDG_xzHYqGE9z-U-pzZBzDU6d3FHyOx6TFPHV8Aa9XvH85n9Ki6Ci5RSw6uXCjAuZB-A2HSWdv3ZKT5DOGGBZCjHjpfSHQDnQEDJ6qBNjwfmaYJh5vN5xOtpIuvpJB/s1600/homealone04.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="173" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDPPMMoDrDG_xzHYqGE9z-U-pzZBzDU6d3FHyOx6TFPHV8Aa9XvH85n9Ki6Ci5RSw6uXCjAuZB-A2HSWdv3ZKT5DOGGBZCjHjpfSHQDnQEDJ6qBNjwfmaYJh5vN5xOtpIuvpJB/s320/homealone04.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kate (Catherine O'Hara) is too softly lit to be a bad mother</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Actually, <i>Home Alone</i> does give you both. Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) wishes for his family and their constraints and their bullying to disappear, and they do, with an astute mixture of plausibility and movie magic. Editor Raja Gosnell - who graduated to director by <i>Home Alone 3</i> - does particularly sharp work intercutting Kevin and his mother's (Catherine O'Hara) realisations that he's been left home alone. There's some similarly deft work from cinematographer Julio Macat - particularly the gliding zoom in on the parents, still blissfully unaware in their aeroplane seats, the realisation slowly but surely creeping towards them. When Kevin realises, everyone involved delivers a sledgehammer blow to the fourth wall - "I made my family disappear!" he exclaims into the camera. Frequent shots of him rushing to the top of stairs see him stop at the camera, stare, and then turn tail and run towards his room in the other direction. It's a technique that can be normalised, to an extent, through the idea of the id unleashed - Kevin is of the age where inhibitions aren't sealed, and having been cut free from his family allows him to do such unsocial things as talk to himself.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI99NEf1bgpO267TA6sxvSJu5MZ7LbV1EjWqaHngG59WsVqPMcfrapxZgMe9onsg9Hkax_vTwRQyJDaW31Bh0JNtL3WBpm4MNFHF94HHAp3HAF9E149i2Hyaj5aVhapZZCeZV-/s1600/homealone02.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI99NEf1bgpO267TA6sxvSJu5MZ7LbV1EjWqaHngG59WsVqPMcfrapxZgMe9onsg9Hkax_vTwRQyJDaW31Bh0JNtL3WBpm4MNFHF94HHAp3HAF9E149i2Hyaj5aVhapZZCeZV-/s400/homealone02.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kevin screams into the camera, which seems to block his way</td></tr>
</tbody></table><i>Home Alone</i> follows a narrative trajectory where Kevin's unleashed id is tamed, in the absence of a family to suppress it, by its having to fight against a darker expression of the id - the criminal. Or rather, criminals, in the mostly unthreatening form of Harry (Joe Pesci) and Marv (Daniel Stern), the former of whom is in the film almost as soon as Kevin, masquerading as a policeman standing untended in the foyer of the house. Harry and Marv, easily bested by Kevin, are repeatedly figured as childlike figures, particularly Marv, who's afraid of the dark ("Not not not!" he protests), and insists they be known as the "Wet Bandits" due to his "calling card" of leaving the robbed houses flooded. Harry is the gruffer and darker, the mastermind of the pair. As such, Kevin's victory over Harry - one which he ingeniously avoids taking credit for - is not so much Kevin ensuring his own safety, but the value and integrity of his family and their home. Notice how Kevin magically - with the final comic exception of Buzz's room - tidies the house up for the return of the family he didn't know were returning. And by not telling of his heroic exploits, Kevin reasserts the status quo, without gaining any superiority over his siblings and parents.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjocWBqVyXrgFDUmjVILAIrSEQygAy8G8UJV0bymDOugH1BHkBh0T8yqJY-rsvT9FciDmqnAOPUdtJlYTAFPhwL4VdP83YBVrTJXwgtTPksSm6aLs6br_P6EHADVvPB3-m34WsL/s1600/homealone05.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjocWBqVyXrgFDUmjVILAIrSEQygAy8G8UJV0bymDOugH1BHkBh0T8yqJY-rsvT9FciDmqnAOPUdtJlYTAFPhwL4VdP83YBVrTJXwgtTPksSm6aLs6br_P6EHADVvPB3-m34WsL/s320/homealone05.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Manchild Marv (Daniel Stern) and mastermind Harry (Joe Pesci)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Moreover, the film sees Kevin, in the absence of control, shifting from wild unleashed id to suppressed normality remarkably quickly - a few short scenes of exuberant physical madness and some eating unsuitable food combinations (what is that), and then he's done, doing shopping and laundry and protecting the home fortress. He finds safety and solace in the most communal of places - a church, where he also discovers that another 'Other', his frightening old neighbour Marley (Roberts Blossom), is in fact not a murderer but a melancholy grandfather. Marley - surely a nod to <i>A Christmas Carol</i> - inevitably becomes part of Kevin's victory over the robbers. But crucially, Marley is only a force for good once he's been normalised as part of a family unit which Kevin secures the reunion of. Kevin has passed through the final expression of the id and functions as a householder, working as part of a community (albeit a select one - but then it is Christmas and people are rather busy) to bring down an external threat.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh6tm4qPp_zKun-R_ZH6UauVbgSlXbHDB5TmcW8jOpWpAaK_FWl_eA9ioYW8fu2C7a-rBQcO02KoxSKrpS_NMyDTFPnNLP1_7bZ88I_ha_RrJfe8HKO_aBPilSZlJinkxELk7T/s1600/homealone03.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh6tm4qPp_zKun-R_ZH6UauVbgSlXbHDB5TmcW8jOpWpAaK_FWl_eA9ioYW8fu2C7a-rBQcO02KoxSKrpS_NMyDTFPnNLP1_7bZ88I_ha_RrJfe8HKO_aBPilSZlJinkxELk7T/s320/homealone03.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Obviously I'm not suggesting that <i>Home Alone</i> should have been about Kevin teaming up with the robbers to tear the house to the ground as a symbol of the destruction of domestic society and the true freedom of the id. This is a family comedy, a Christmas classic for many, and I did enjoy Macaulay Culkin's sprightly performance and the slapstick of his intricate booby traps. But I'd always imagined the film as featuring a kid really cutting loose, enjoying his freedom, being a proper kid without repression. <i>Home Alone</i> could be read in a more positive way along these lines - Kevin's concealment of his triumph keeps the power of the id hidden, so society and family life can continue as normal, but we have still witnessed the positive power of the freed kid. His victory over the criminals was greater than the mere arrest they'd have suffered under the influence of Kevin's parents - what Kevin did was humiliate them. But Kevin is always tied down - before he begins taking responsibility for the house, his freer expression is intercut with scenes of the family fretting on the other side of the ocean, so that you don't ever forget that he's still part of a functional family. O'Hara does an excellent job of making this worry very palatable, and I'm not against family or anything - but is it so much to ask for Kevin's brief freedom to be precisely that? Probably. No one likes to overthink this stuff, it's Christmas.Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-61793609988064693262012-02-13T15:38:00.000+00:002012-02-13T15:38:13.145+00:00Queer Anglo Films, Take #2: Sunday Bloody Sunday<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKaJhXkrURQ_EdGSHAmJc21gEmW3_ZWt8BQakCJFwwt-xrv1cPFoyG9t9MwW6FmcvQ5lYUN58uI-Z-E-iQAFiIEm21OBSQ6YuCw951tVkT92QiRhjF4C0STNUWSN-3XyT0G5tD/s1600/qafheader.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKaJhXkrURQ_EdGSHAmJc21gEmW3_ZWt8BQakCJFwwt-xrv1cPFoyG9t9MwW6FmcvQ5lYUN58uI-Z-E-iQAFiIEm21OBSQ6YuCw951tVkT92QiRhjF4C0STNUWSN-3XyT0G5tD/s1600/qafheader.png" /></a></div><br />
<b>Take #2</b> in the series sees me and <a href="http://rantsofadiva.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">James</a> take on John Schlesinger's <i>Sunday Bloody Sunday</i>, starring double Oscar-winner-cum-politician Glenda Jackson, the recently deceased Peter Finch and hot stuff-without-a-hot-name Murray Field. We're ten years after our last take, <i><a href="http://victimofthetime.blogspot.com/2012/01/queer-anglo-films-take-1-victim.html" target="_blank">Victim</a></i>, and homosexuality has been decriminalized. What overwhelms our discussion, though, is the film's highly debatable depiction of bisexuality. It's certainly an opinionated debate, so head over to <a href="http://rantsofadiva.blogspot.com/2012/02/queer-anglo-films-take-2-sunday-bloody.html" target="_blank">Rants of a Diva</a> and get yourselves engrossed.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Next take:</b> <i>Sebastiane</i></span>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-54560100766040613972012-02-11T14:10:00.000+00:002012-02-11T14:10:05.454+00:00Lang's Parting Shot: The Dark Prescience of While The City Sleeps<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_Fng6GCSpfp01PG5S-xxwetFpkJSCjbyHPN0s7S1F6JD3xgTPhWZdnmJVRcFakOT_5I3nvlEuz1bcTS1fbgo9wwE1w9q7pufWY9_vQ__Zf8e6PD_3Qzue9K2LU_v3mmoRz-6Z/s1600/fritzlang.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="307" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_Fng6GCSpfp01PG5S-xxwetFpkJSCjbyHPN0s7S1F6JD3xgTPhWZdnmJVRcFakOT_5I3nvlEuz1bcTS1fbgo9wwE1w9q7pufWY9_vQ__Zf8e6PD_3Qzue9K2LU_v3mmoRz-6Z/s400/fritzlang.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Fritz Lang was a perpetually political filmmaker. The darkness of his worldview was evident in his most famous masterpieces, <i>Metropolis,</i> a dystopic vision of a future now behind us, and <i>M</i>, where a paedophile is reviled by a court of criminals. His films are frequently alive with the eponymous emotion of one of his finest works, 1936's <i>Fury</i>, where Spencer Tracy's innocent seeks revenge on the townspeople who tried to burn him alive. The bold black-and-white of these films seems to shine more definitely than most, crisply capturing some of the most vibrant interactions and discussions ever filmed. As much as there's a distinctive Lang style, there's a distinctive Lang mood to match it.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSyUwHozUrWPGk-ZkjuX4zQQkqn_uOOvVY3r6BrVIafalfV8lHd6XS7dbirWQxHcyvocwe0lX2TL-y4gVO-vVysh7wpbYkLCkIe2wepuWKsLOCO2osi90gaFUdzNPnWQ8HLPyt/s1600/bard.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSyUwHozUrWPGk-ZkjuX4zQQkqn_uOOvVY3r6BrVIafalfV8lHd6XS7dbirWQxHcyvocwe0lX2TL-y4gVO-vVysh7wpbYkLCkIe2wepuWKsLOCO2osi90gaFUdzNPnWQ8HLPyt/s320/bard.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Fast-forward to 1956, though, and we find two Lang pictures that are less burning than smouldering. <i>Beyond a Reasonable Doubt</i> and <i>While the City Sleeps</i> - both headlined by <i>noir</i> favourite Dana Andrews - avoid the opinionated rage of Lang's earlier work for a more studied, intellectual disdain towards detailed political and social issues. <i>Beyond A Reasonable Doubt</i> very consciously lays itself out as an experimental game into the arena of social justice - Andrews' Tom Garrett schemes with his future father-in-law Austin Spencer (Sidney Blackmer) to prove the ineptitude of the district attorney and his reliance on circumstantial evidence. Carefully, they plant clues both physical and social - visiting the girls at the nightclub where a murdered dancer had been a performer - to lead to Tom's arrest. It entwines a highly schematic plot with Tom's romantic engagement with Susan (Joan Fontaine), and in doing so reveals itself to be founded on serious class issues.<br />
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Austin and Tom's game is of the superior snob proving his superiority over the working class police force, although my initial criticism that their fun little plot might be a little distracting for the genuine investigation comes a bit - alright, a <i>lot</i> unstuck with the film's sensationalist twist. The film is too keen on showing off its own brains - the dialogue is predominantly expositional, pre-empting questions that no one was asking yet. Joan Fontaine, awkwardly crunching her shoulders in flowery dresses, seems thrown in to guarantee our continued investment in Tom and his dangerous game. But her lingering presence also suggests the greater dramatic reverberations, which culminate in an inevitably fiery twist of fate from which the film abandons cool social criticism and heads down the path of consternated drama. The final twist not only gives Dana Andrews the cherished chance to gurn like a maniac, but it finalises a regretful negation of the intriguing social commentary which ran for the first half.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiWoBNvuo1yONRks6p9ZL8syYgXTiNwRq3d4IlR5MwV_Gd4tr0MthSgkDmSOvm68FNUrIN_yu0MwsxQD1J8VFRBDdBKy96Nfve2GCJx2etYJNVwLffxHUy_8SQh8KgSyMxz6Ey/s1600/wtcs-poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiWoBNvuo1yONRks6p9ZL8syYgXTiNwRq3d4IlR5MwV_Gd4tr0MthSgkDmSOvm68FNUrIN_yu0MwsxQD1J8VFRBDdBKy96Nfve2GCJx2etYJNVwLffxHUy_8SQh8KgSyMxz6Ey/s320/wtcs-poster.jpg" width="208" /></a></div><i>While the City Sleeps</i>, the longer and more detailed of this 1956 pair, uses its patchwork of characters to create a more scholarly version of a Robert Altman film. Both films eschew any character identification by invading any space they damn well please, and <i>While the City Sleeps</i> even flaunts this omniscience with its dramatic opening sequence. The camera flirts with the killer's (John Drew Barrymore) point-of-view, and openly reveals his identity from his first knock on a doomed lady's door. (Intriguingly, after the influence of <i>Psycho</i>'s bathroom murder I've been seeing lately in the openings of <i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUD20qTIxmE" target="_blank">The Beast of Yucca Flats</a></i> (warning: ludicrously wonderful) and <i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWEUU7lNCsk" target="_blank">Blood Feast</a> </i>(warning: gruesomely terrible effects), this opening sequence could almost be a precursor - a bathroom framed with a narrow doorway, and the scrawled message of 'Ask Mother' left behind!) Though the film's poster sells it as another sensationalist killer thriller, the film creates a deliberately placid narrative where the murderous exploits of the 'Lipstick Killer' are of as much interest as the machinations of a media corporation's internal competition for the post of executive director. Lang maximises the possibilities for deep compositions within the budget constraints and square 2:1 ratio, crafting a more fully realised set of complex spaces than the boxed studio feel of <i>Beyond A Reasonable Doubt</i>.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu5WRqlmJHeG-tljvVwvmZNwndXPoSqA_GxfsdxYd6cps_FG_uEL76V1akUlP3Snf2kw-w-GNfUmHJE-xxzzuengsUZRMo8eHnVMpP3HHhbe8fd20op9CJfbkcO3X5CYI7iwjY/s1600/wtcs-deep.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu5WRqlmJHeG-tljvVwvmZNwndXPoSqA_GxfsdxYd6cps_FG_uEL76V1akUlP3Snf2kw-w-GNfUmHJE-xxzzuengsUZRMo8eHnVMpP3HHhbe8fd20op9CJfbkcO3X5CYI7iwjY/s400/wtcs-deep.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Deep space as Edward Mobley (Dana Andrews) appears at the rear</td></tr>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXvwntW1R7B86cf55siiQ8KVqU1dppv0sUBhUWibh9AV7pl70vYGmtmwHW62einDlraln2piSuOvjIuSV6714outkpneJ10w6dZtxzdRXHlATbEE0XmZrELTJPoJFFj1ol5H8d/s1600/wtcs-face.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="149" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXvwntW1R7B86cf55siiQ8KVqU1dppv0sUBhUWibh9AV7pl70vYGmtmwHW62einDlraln2piSuOvjIuSV6714outkpneJ10w6dZtxzdRXHlATbEE0XmZrELTJPoJFFj1ol5H8d/s200/wtcs-face.png" width="200" /></a></div>Although their contest revolves around scoring a revelatory exclusive on the killer, Lang carefully entwines the escalating delirium of the killer with the sociosexual conflicts between the three competitors and their colleagues. The pointed comparisons between the working class killer and the middle-class media executives are obvious, matching their mistreatment and fetishisation of women through key image matching like the button locks on apartment doors (<i>below</i>). Lang even shows a crude blank face in one of the newspapers issued by the corporation (<i>right</i>), inviting the city readership to draw the face of the killer - the implication being that any of the characters on display could fill the spot given the wrong circumstances. Barrymore (Drew's father, whose career never took off) is less the hardened or creeping murderer type than a troubled teenager resembling Marlon Brando's Wild One.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigjiNG1ddvNpqixiQVs6IoevEunZhTgdINP5mpoUM5Az7gVKR7bYMWRF_-VX0FTjuUlpw4mvv3ldU-plSFgR_es6Zla4XSNHqkjTqVEYsCow1lySNMGtR-ILrPnL304roSDZM4/s1600/wtcs-door.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigjiNG1ddvNpqixiQVs6IoevEunZhTgdINP5mpoUM5Az7gVKR7bYMWRF_-VX0FTjuUlpw4mvv3ldU-plSFgR_es6Zla4XSNHqkjTqVEYsCow1lySNMGtR-ILrPnL304roSDZM4/s400/wtcs-door.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Killer ≠ seducer</td></tr>
</tbody></table>So there are class issues here too, all mixed up with gender politics. The actresses craft sparky, crafty female characters (one even rather excessively compared to Lady Macbeth), who quickly abandon their anxiety over being offered up as bait for a killer, and are as susceptible to drunken lust in the back of a taxi as their male companions. Invading the psychopathy of a killer five years pre-<i>Psycho</i>, a central scene where Barrymore rails at his adoptive mother for treating him as much like a girl as a boy strikes as remarkably prescient - though it never really expands on it, the script touches on the basics of confused sexual identity and the murderous compensation in a distorted family environment.<br />
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None of its threads are ever fully realised, but <i>While the City Sleeps</i> plays with other ideas that didn't come into vogue until the following decade - the ruthless instincts newly manifest in females, the destructive relationship between media and the law. Though as a sealed off product <i>While the City Sleeps</i> looks minute and basic, it proves itself a key film in the Lang canon, a devastatingly pessimistic critique of American values. As a two-fer, Lang's final Hollywood films act a summary of his experiences in the country, a place he seemed to view as more intrinsically rotten than the homeland he fled during the rise of Nazis.Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-26826726490088340382012-02-10T17:43:00.000+00:002012-02-10T17:43:17.624+00:00The Silent Crime: How The Artist Might Reopen Lost Modes of Cinematic Experience<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8BsfCGOt2Qxdpona3Zv83asXT3RePXwRDFrIeohdJ64nZbrB8TsPYwY3E_IgXGyDouk0UAQE4B5_dXN2hyphenhyphenS8CuqvhrjfHh1YTf1ZfxIyHJnFBfPoEFbJ8DaQZbyr2Ndi1ml0e/s1600/olitwist01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8BsfCGOt2Qxdpona3Zv83asXT3RePXwRDFrIeohdJ64nZbrB8TsPYwY3E_IgXGyDouk0UAQE4B5_dXN2hyphenhyphenS8CuqvhrjfHh1YTf1ZfxIyHJnFBfPoEFbJ8DaQZbyr2Ndi1ml0e/s400/olitwist01.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
It seems strange to recall that once upon a time, it was normal cinema-going practice to not hear any speech or sound effects from the images unfolding before your eyes, but to instead have the experience soundtracked by a pianist sitting somewhere not out of sight. It was certainly strange for me, on my shamefully delayed virgin experience of live silent cinema, as I took my seat at the BFI Southbank for a showing of the 1922 version of <i><a href="http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0013450/" target="_blank">Oliver Twist</a></i>. The piano was already set up, its blackness not distinguishing it from the necessarily muted décor, and the pianist - the famous Neil Brand - was already seated before it, ready to do the job he's done countless times before. It had never struck me before that the pianists in this situation would have to play without music sheets, because they're basically playing in the dark. It wasn't the most inspired score, but then it wasn't the most inspired adaptation - this particular version of <i>Oliver Twist</i> was conceived as a vehicle for the cherubic star Jackie Coogan, and it betrays the most blinkered tendencies of the money-hungry studios and managers, because Oliver is all wrong for Coogan, who is irresistibly adorable, but his scenes with the rich folks smack all over of goody-two-shoes. There are some interesting shot choices, and Gladys Brockwell shines as Nancy, but it gives itself over to the angelic innocence of Coogan, shaving all the character from the central character.<br />
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Brand's compositions were clean and classic, exactly the kind of shifts between chirpy high pitches and menacing low ones you'd imagine soundtracked the film on its release. Every so often, I looked over to Brand, professionally immersed in the job, but it never really drew me out of the film. The human mind is surprisingly adaptable. Once I'd become used to the irregular novelty of a film without audible speech, the strangeness of a man sitting feet away playing the soundtrack fell away with it. You imagine that when the film was released, the audience experience would be starkly different - when, exactly, did Western experience of cinema shift into one where complete silence before the screen was the expected behaviour? Audiences in India still treat the experience as a fluid, communal one, although of course, their cinema is one of the few national cinemas to have retained a distinct style, and perhaps suggests itself, in the repetitions and cliches and sheer length, as a product that doesn't have to be experienced as a uniform whole. The Western world, though, seemed to change with the advent of sound; as Robert Sklar put it, "talking audiences for silent pictures became a silent audience for talking pictures"<span style="background-color: #ffffcc;">¹</span>. What my night at the silent movies was missing was a chat with the person next to me.<br />
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I get a lot from the movies. If I didn't, I wouldn't intermittently maintain this blog, and I wouldn't have been studying film for the past seven years. But sometimes, I do reflect on the loneliness that cinephilia can bring on you. Even if you go to the movies with other people, it's an odd choice of social activity, because you're paying to go and sit with friends or family or a date and <i>not</i> interact with them for two hours. And if you do interact with them, chances are someone - probably me - will hiss at you to shut the hell up or get out of the theatre. It's about a divergence between cinema as art and cinema as entertainment. My definitive choice would be art, and so I do like my silence at the movies, the immersive matching of image and surround sound. But the silent film's momentary comeback with <i>The Artist</i> might point us back to a different, more acceptable mode of cinematic community.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_WmJx9cjKwrZNwgLhRO5Jaxg0ed-Iulvn1B7V2pPKMZaLIdY1Jf70YW8JofgLrJATNC2vI3rBQw8FLnTT05zTM5sev53OBV-RdBWKgRGc6RBg8hVL86ziLEQ6vQLmmlIkrfTA/s1600/artist-bejo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_WmJx9cjKwrZNwgLhRO5Jaxg0ed-Iulvn1B7V2pPKMZaLIdY1Jf70YW8JofgLrJATNC2vI3rBQw8FLnTT05zTM5sev53OBV-RdBWKgRGc6RBg8hVL86ziLEQ6vQLmmlIkrfTA/s400/artist-bejo.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
Revisit your own experience of watching <i>The Artist</i>. No one said a word, did they? Or if they did, they were shushed in the regular manner of normal cinema-going practice. It is, to an extent, symptomatic of the breakdown of social communities and human communication evolving into technology that cinematic experience in Western culture has developed in such a narrow form. The mooted idea of allowing mobile phones to be used in cinemas is going in completely the wrong direction - that's merely replacing one screen with another, one type of alternate reality beginning to swallow another. If you're looking at your phone, you're not experiencing the movie. But if you were talking about the movie while it played - could that not be a valuable extension of cinematic experience? Cinema's future seems to lie inside our own homes, and the criticism that opponents of that evolution repeat is its lack of the collective experience. Ultimately, though codes of audience silence are ingrained in us, impulses remain of wanting to be a community. I know that one of the most enjoyable experiences I've ever had in a cinema was a packed house for <i>Drag Me To Hell</i>, where a hefty percentage of the pleasure was the laughter, jittery nervousness and loudly whispered fears of the people around me. With the right kind of people, the experience of a film can be significantly enhanced.<br />
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There is no right answer. I'm equally enraptured by that screening of <i>Drag Me To Hell</i> as I am with <i>The Purple Rose of Cairo</i>'s depiction of Cecelia being able to enter the fantasy world in front of her. Sometimes, we need escapism. And I'm not even suggesting that in the silent era, cinema was the precise flipside of what it is now - Rick Altman's <i>Silent Film Sound</i> details the diverse ways in which different expressions of sound were explored before pre-recorded synchronisation². But it feels as though cinema, long before anyone reading this was even born, has closed off so many different avenues of enriching experience. The domination of the idea of escapism betrays the darkened world of pessimism we seem to live in, one where all cinema is expected to offer is a distraction from our woes. Ironically, silence is the mode of audience's expression that has become ingrained ever since cinema itself broke its muteness. If <i>The Artist</i>'s success has given us anything, it is perhaps the possibility to dust off these other roads and see if they're worth treading.<br />
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<span style="background-color: #ffffcc;">¹ Sklar, Robert. <i>Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies</i>. Vintage, 1994, p. 117</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #ffffcc;">² Altman, Rick. <i>Silent Film Sound</i>. Columbia University Press, 2004.</span>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-76642065048659306132012-01-27T14:20:00.001+00:002012-01-28T10:00:05.015+00:00The Lady's Snake<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/x15rv0" width="480"></iframe></div><a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x15rv0_the-lady-eve-opening-credits_fun" target="_blank">The Lady Eve Opening Credits</a> <i>by <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/pezhammer" target="_blank">pezhammer</a></i><br />
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The delightful things about <i>The Lady Eve</i> are too numerous to count - it is one of cinema's most perfect films - and one of them comes at you straight away. Even in the days where credits came at the beginning of the film - yet were still only a couple of minutes long - it was still rare for filmmakers and studios to do much beyond an ornate border. <i>The Lady Eve</i>, though, employed Leon Schlesinger's studio, the masterminds behind the <i>Looney Tunes</i> cartoon, to craft this genius credit sequence starring the cheeriest snake you'll ever meet. Hell, the expressions on his face during this one and half minute bit make him a fully rounded character in himself - look at his pure joy in shaking that maraca, and his venomous indignity when he's hit on the head.<br />
It's a superb example of the effort that makes the whole of <i>The Lady Eve</i> so magical - using even its credit sequence to play with the themes of duplicity and slippery feeling that play out across the film. And it sticks the grin on your face that will remain there for the whole hour and a half. Positively the same dame!Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-65495010190869393542012-01-26T23:38:00.000+00:002012-01-26T23:38:28.655+00:00Queer Anglo Films, Take #1: VictimWelcome, readers, to a new ten-part blog series! I've never undertaken anything like this before, but collaborations are always an exciting way to expand and challenge your own views on something. With that in mind, when my good friend <b>James</b> at <a href="http://rantsofadiva.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Rants of a Diva</a> suggested we try out a series, I jumped at the chance. What we've come up with is a ten-part series focusing on fifty years of films that focus on queer experience within Britain. For me, that's a dive into my own country's past, my adolescence, and current existence; for James, it's a look at what might be different, and what might be similar, on the other side of the Atlantic.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKaJhXkrURQ_EdGSHAmJc21gEmW3_ZWt8BQakCJFwwt-xrv1cPFoyG9t9MwW6FmcvQ5lYUN58uI-Z-E-iQAFiIEm21OBSQ6YuCw951tVkT92QiRhjF4C0STNUWSN-3XyT0G5tD/s1600/qafheader.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKaJhXkrURQ_EdGSHAmJc21gEmW3_ZWt8BQakCJFwwt-xrv1cPFoyG9t9MwW6FmcvQ5lYUN58uI-Z-E-iQAFiIEm21OBSQ6YuCw951tVkT92QiRhjF4C0STNUWSN-3XyT0G5tD/s1600/qafheader.png" /></a></div><br />
Our final destination is last year's lauded <i>Weekend</i>; our starting line, though, comes exactly fifty years before. It's 1961, and Dirk Bogarde, matinee idol, took a risk and starred as Melville Farr, a barrister with a secret life that blackmailers are keen to expose. The time was dark, and the film was <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055597/" target="_blank">Victim</a></i>...<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhyphenhyphenzZ7LLlZ6ydNwr0Ro3aRhCV3VoTASjUXvGztHwet6sCJh-GHUVEBfeU1WJpUXazZ81c4aJH2_xZ98m3f48FzoXFqjXnj5Y3AZDo8mt2zOSNaZrOOvfD-i8bxQpVlTVqha7RE/s1600/victim-poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhyphenhyphenzZ7LLlZ6ydNwr0Ro3aRhCV3VoTASjUXvGztHwet6sCJh-GHUVEBfeU1WJpUXazZ81c4aJH2_xZ98m3f48FzoXFqjXnj5Y3AZDo8mt2zOSNaZrOOvfD-i8bxQpVlTVqha7RE/s320/victim-poster.jpg" width="247" /></a></div><b>David: </b>I think audiences need to watch <i>Victim</i> today with at least a sliver of context, because otherwise it is a bit of a fusty old drama, although I still reckon there's some value in it as a cinematic product in its own right. But first of all, anyway, some factual stuff. In 1961, homosexuality was illegal - straight up, a crime, go to jail, do not pass the local pub, do not collect your belongings. Victim might have been a mainstream kick up the arse of the law, but it was still six years before the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 decriminalised homosexuality for consenting males over the age of 21. (It wasn't lowered to 18 until 1994, and equivalency with heterosexuality - age 16 - didn't come until 2000. That's, like, yesterday.) Critical literature seems to agree that <i>Victim</i> was the first mainstream British film focusing on a contemporary homosexual character - <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053269/" target="_blank">Serious Charge</a></i>, a couple of years prior, dealt with accusations of pederasty by a vicar, but it was, unlike <i>Victim</i>, a fraudulent blackmail, and was also released under an X certificate. (And also shows its lack of historical importance by now being famous for Cliff Richard's first screen outing. Intentional pun.)<br />
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<b>James: </b>Context is crucial to understanding and evaluating <i>Victim</i>'s impact on not only the representation of gays in cinema but also the gay rights movement in general. It's certainly tamer in comparison to modern gay films like <i>Brokeback...</i>, <i>Milk</i> or even crap like <i>Eating Out</i>, but people must understand that without <i>Victim</i>, many films, even ones we are discussing later on in this series, wouldn't have been possible. <i>Victim</i>, as best as it could in 1961, brought homosexuality out into the open and tackled it head on. <br />
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<b>D:</b> So then, being born out of this background, <i>Victim</i> is a landmark, a revolutionary statement, than merely a film. It had to make a point, and it had to be very careful about <i>how</i> it made it. So I think, with that it mind, that it's very hard to criticise the film, but at the same time, very hard to really appreciate it. It's so decidedly a product of its time that I can't really stick it with the kind of formal criticism I usually apply to films. Of course it can't really show us any sexual or romantic interactions between these characters; of course they all have to go around making their jittering their defining feature. Of course it has to - twice! - put heavy emphasis on heterosexual smooches, although I did read that more as an implicit criticism of being able to show that to such passionate extremes while the men can barely touch each other. (But then the ending comes and I have to wonder if I'm being too kind.)<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"He hasn't got what you and I've got, Sylvie"</td></tr>
</tbody></table><b>J:</b> Actually, I was surprised looking at it again at just how open <i>Victim</i> is with the characters' homosexuality. Sure, modern audiences will notice how the film shies away in the beginning from referring to any of the characters as gay, merely hinting at how they are different from the others. But I saw this as a necessary function to the mystery that lies at the center of the film. <i>Victim</i>'s hesitation about its homosexuality has more to do with setting up and discovering why Barrett is running from the cops and why Farr refuses to be in contact with him than because the film is nervous about labeling anyone as gay. While it's no "we're here, we're queer, get used to it," the rest of the film is almost shockingly (for its time, I must emphasise) transparent. The characters may be hiding from the law, but they are not hiding within the film. There are no shadows, no <i>chiaroscuro</i>, no film noir lighting and no blending in the mise-en-scene. I am especially intrigued by the way <i>Victim</i> shows how homosexuals are in every stratum of society. They are everywhere, rich and poor, high and low class. Your barber, your local shopkeeper, even your lawyer could be one.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Laura (Sylvia Syms) can't handle Farr's admissions</td></tr>
</tbody></table><b>D: </b>I did love the whip-crack of the line, "You know of course that he was a homosexual," spoken by the most senior policeman (John Barrie) - as you suggested, the film is surprisingly transparent, and this sudden exposure of the unspoken is very effective as an emotional rush. And Bogarde's admission of his sexual desire for Barrett (Peter McEnery) seems like an extreme the film didn't even need to go to, although of course I'm very glad it did. <i>Victim</i> doesn't suggest that homosexuality should be legalised and accepted by casting its gay characters as angelic, chaste people in love, but as humans who lust and desire just like heteros. Of course, it then turns around and places the sexless, platonic love between Bogarde and Sylvia Syms on a higher plane, but I really do sense the ending was a necessary evil, a measure that meant they could get away with actually speaking about actual homosex.<br />
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You say "no shadows, no chiaroscuro, no film noir lighting", but I think <i>Victim</i> definitely plays with these things, and it does so particularly strongly with Bogarde's character. He even seems to give himself dramatic <i>chiaroscuro</i> lighting in the climactic scene with Sylvia Syms, stepping nearer to the low lamps to cast shadows across his face, and as his temper builds, sweat combines with the lighting to bring out the stubble and dark recesses of his face. This plays out within the context of one particularly piqued scene, so it doesn't really apply to the grander depiction of repression across the whole film. But I would note a parallel visual play throughout - characters often seem to be framed as if they're trapped, caught, and this of course feeds back into the title. Whether within doorways, beneath ceilings or just closed onto by the frame of the camera itself - Bogarde is often captured in frozen, emotionally drawn close-ups - the gay characters aren't hiding because they keep getting found.<br />
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But we should definitely go into more detail with regards to Bogarde - I'd wager that his performance is the most successful aspect of the whole enterprise. Knowing how much of a fan you are, though, I'll let you take the floor...<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bogarde contorts his image</td></tr>
</tbody></table><b>J: </b>Not only its most successful, the most revolutionary aspect is the casting of Dirk Bogarde as the married barrister who risks his career and comfortable life by coming out of the closet and hunting down the blackmailers who drove his would-be lover to suicide. Although he would go on to become one of the most prominent English actors of the 60's, at that point in his career Dirk was merely a matinee idol known primarily for light comedies. Casting him as an admitted homosexual should have killed his career. Against all odds, however, it didn't and only adds to <i>Victim</i>'s impact. Before this film, gay characters were always the limp-wristed fairies who bounced in and out of scenes with a thin moustache and a bitchy one-liner. But, in <i>Victim</i>, here comes this strong, attractive, heterosexual (or so we thought at the time) leading man playing a homosexual, shattering every stereotype and preconceived notion about gay men the movies had ever shown us. It was a bold move for both the film and Bogarde, and it pays off in aces for both. I make no mystery of my fondness for Mr. Bogarde, or Dirky as I affectionately refer to him, so it shouldn't be a surprise that I find him to be marvellous in <i>Victim</i>. It's not the bemused, smarmy Dirk we're used to in many of his best performances (<i>The Servant</i>, <i>Darling</i>, <i>Our Mother's House</i>). Instead, this is Dirk in full-on repression mode, scrambling to hide and push down every unwanted feeling and emotion that comes barrelling out of him. His voice and manner remain relatively steady throughout the film, but there are times when his face struggles to keep composure. I love the moments when you see the facade about to crack and his face twists and contorts itself to suppress any and every emotion spilling uncontrollably from him. It's like watching a sick person suppress the urge to vomit, or, even more uncomfortably, a drug addict resisting their drug of choice. Everything about this performance hints at what a great actor Dirky actually was, despite what his filmography to that point had suggested, and just how great he would become in the next couple decades.<br />
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There are two further points I am interested in discussing with you. First of all, what do you make of the title and its connotation with gay imagery in cinema up until that point (i.e. the gays as victims, whether of their own circumstance or as pariahs of society, and how, especially in American films, the gays must pay for their sins by dying)? Secondly, and you hinted at this before, what do you make of that final shot? It's an interesting way to end the film, particularly after Farr has supposedly "won" over the bad guys.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The final shot: memories of Barrett go up in flames</td></tr>
</tbody></table><b>D: </b>I think the title <i>Victim</i> is almost an early type of the linguistic reclamation that oppressed groups of society have undertaken in the years since. Obviously being a victim of any sort isn't a positive thing, but, with an immediate suggestion - even from the marquee outside the cinema - of gays as "victims", it can then set out a narrative for Bogarde's character that progresses from victim of blackmail and his private shame to a brazen declaration of his homosexual lust. The word "victim" doesn't only refer to their receipt of blackmail, or of the long arm of the law, but of their own shame as well - in Melville Farr, you have perhaps the first homosexual character in cinema who dared to risk everything and declare his sexuality. Obviously cases like Barrett's are tragic, but ultimately, what it took for homosexuality to be legalised was the courage of people like Farr to reject their inscribed status as victim.<br />
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It's interesting that you point out the tendency for gay characters to die "for their sins", because I wouldn't say <i>Victim</i> ever stoops to being that moralising - Barratt dies because he's terrified, but its at his own hands. The hairdresser's death isn't a tragic inevitability but a horrific abuse by a character who is villainized throughout. <i>Victim</i> actually seems to paint a society in which attitudes have already begun to change - the exchange between the police may be very blunt, but it also demonstrates a tolerance from within the legal system, years before the law itself followed suit. Perhaps that was a fantasy at the time, but I think the film could easily have been made with an unsympathetic policing force. Instead, <i>Victim</i> shows the way towards a better society from every side of the tracks.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Farr stands anxious, trapped, but strong</td></tr>
</tbody></table><b>J: </b>I absolutely agree with everything you said regarding the connotation of <i>Victim</i>'s title. In a way, by portraying Farr as a strong individual risking everything to, as Oprah would put it, stand in his truth, the film takes back any negative association between being gay and their subsequent victimization. The title is almost ironic because by the time the blackmailers are captured, Farr, having given up everything for this moment, refuses to be a victim anymore.<br />
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But then the ending comes along and suggests that although he's perhaps not victimized by his homosexuality, Farr isn't ready to completely start his life over. He needs something, anything familiar as he faces a bleak and unpredictable future. And this is why he turns to his wife: she turned a blind eye to his homosexuality once and he assumes that she will do it again. I agree that this ending is probably a "necessary evil" for the time and place it was made, but I don't believe it's as cut and dry as many would interpret it. The dialogue suggests otherwise, but notice how neither of them look or sound particularly enthused about getting back together; it's as if they believe that that's what is expected of them. "I need you," Farr tells her. "Need is different from love," his wife responds. Even though the final image is of Farr burning the picture of him and Barrett, effectively destroying any remaining memory of that relationship, she realizes that they cannot go back as they once were. There will be another Barrett, as much as she and Farr will both try to deny it. As you mentioned, attitudes were changing and eventually there will be no reason to go on with the charade. Quite a sad realization for what is normally taken as an inevitable ending.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sylvia Syms is not ready for her close-up</td></tr>
</tbody></table><b>D:</b> I suppose Sylvia Syms is featured so prominently as a palliative measure, to strengthen the audience interest, but as you intimate, that does come from a genuinely sociological place; she might be misguided in thinking she can change him, but society forced gays into those kind of relationships and the feelings of the women who are left behind and unhappy both because of the neglect during the marriage and the abandonment that will come as a result of legal changes are no less valid or tragic just because she's a heterosexual. And as you say, the ending speaks of a lingering sadness - <i>Victim</i> is trying to provoke changes, and the ending is one last motivation to get the audience mobilised in that direction.<br />
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If we haven't gone on long enough already, I'm intrigued to know your thoughts on the interactions and community of the various gay characters, including how Bogarde's character is forced to engage with it.<br />
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<b>J:</b> I was surprised by how abrupt and almost condescending Farr was towards the other homosexuals in the film. When he meets the barber, he gets straight to the point, acting like a macho hetero who only needs this puny little gay to get a lead on the case. And, later on, when he realizes that the three homosexual men live together, he gives his trademarked bemused grin and a sarcastic, "I see." He's not particularly harsh towards them, but he doesn't exactly act like they are on his level. In a way, he's a bit like Hugh Grant's character in <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093512/" target="_blank">Maurice</a></i>. The idea of homosexuality makes perfect sense to him. But applying it to real life and living with one like man and wife is completely out of the question. It's beneath him, something only a boy with no class, like Rupert Graves' character, would consider. Farr thinks of himself as above these "common" homosexuals because he can control his impulses. It's an interesting choice for a character who is supposed to be the hero of the story, but it's easy to see why it was made in 1961. <i>Victim</i> was already revolutionary enough; there was no reason to push it beyond the point (straight) audiences would stop listening.<br />
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<b>D:</b> Your comparisons to <i>Maurice</i> are very apt, and perhaps a good way to end this entry - it may be set much earlier than <i>Victim</i>, but <i>Maurice</i>, made in 1987, chooses to focus away from this kind of tortured existence and instead creates a idyll where homosexuality can function. I'm sure it'll come up again during this series!<br />
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<b>Speak up, readers; don't be a victim! What do you make of <i>Victim</i>'s revolutionary attitudes?</b><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Next take:</b> <i>Sunday Bloody Sunday</i></span>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-14202575501358401732012-01-26T17:43:00.000+00:002012-01-26T17:43:15.162+00:00Oscar Season: Playing the Genuine Nostalgia<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm_05kWPhxu7aqTU_W6HhmPvPc8jPmusyDfdKKi80_LHg_aqA5D4StjWHBFneK4wmsNOykt2Jh9i8nwL59r0zpMslHYS2uHBkUwLSN5y02wXKpU0NZe91xOK9tjW5qtRI-Tdaq/s1600/shore-studio.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm_05kWPhxu7aqTU_W6HhmPvPc8jPmusyDfdKKi80_LHg_aqA5D4StjWHBFneK4wmsNOykt2Jh9i8nwL59r0zpMslHYS2uHBkUwLSN5y02wXKpU0NZe91xOK9tjW5qtRI-Tdaq/s1600/shore-studio.jpg" /></a></div><br />
Yesterday the background to my unimportant daily activities was a full listen to each of the newly Oscar-nominated scores. It was not as vast a journey as I expected. It's been said, many times, both by better and by worse men than I, that this year's nominations are dominated by nostalgia. So it shouldn't really be a surprise, then, that all of the nominees here come from films set in the past - the most recent being the 1970s gloom of <i>Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy</i>, while the remaining four, at best, cover a mere thirty year period from 1910 to 1939. (<i>Tintin</i>'s setting is debatable, but would certainly seem to exist pre-WWII because of the clothing and technology on display.) Not only that, the settings of the films restricts the geographical trip to the most Western corner of Western Europe - the dank Britishness of <i>Tinker, Tailor</i>, leaping the channel within <i>War Horse</i>, stuck inside a Parisian train station for <i>Hugo</i>, and scurrying around with a Belgian in <i>The Adventures of Tintin</i>. Even <i>The Artist</i> takes as many cues from its native France as from the classic compositions of Hollywood's Golden Age.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilJe76K-hlndfTOxc_C-nkaEZwRhP2YMviNom9bP3R1m-U09zdwauPu1eyk0ruolZNYxnUpQVwbloiyxEJBUl7vYxJip8KtBAzHkLynVyUi3Us4FH49ijUyblwKwpESmw-Yv84/s1600/valentin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilJe76K-hlndfTOxc_C-nkaEZwRhP2YMviNom9bP3R1m-U09zdwauPu1eyk0ruolZNYxnUpQVwbloiyxEJBUl7vYxJip8KtBAzHkLynVyUi3Us4FH49ijUyblwKwpESmw-Yv84/s320/valentin.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>The limited scope of these nominees - leaving aside questions of their quality for the moment - makes a far more critical suggestion of the Academy's blinkered taste than their selection of the films in the Best Picture category would seem to. Across the whole of a film, say <i>The Artist</i>, both nostalgia and prescience can be encompassed, with the finale allowing George Valentin a passage into a future as joyful as his past. But when we take these scores on their own - not necessarily the right approach towards lauding them, but stick with me - they seem to work solely as nostalgia pieces. There isn't a lack of joy in that - try listening to a piece like 'George Valentin' from Ludovico Bource's score to <i>The Artist</i> and not grin at the images of Dujardin and Uggie's slapstick routine that pop into your head - but, as an overview of a category, these accomplishments demonstrate exactly what the Academy has feared becoming: irrelevant.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="25" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/amYMGrsT7cM" width="560"></iframe><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>You're Here - </i>Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross, <i>The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</i></span><br />
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Perhaps awarding Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross the prize for their pulsating electronic work on <i>The Social Network</i> sated their contemporary needs for a couple of years. (You certainly imagine the three hour work the same pair did for <i>The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</i> may have been just too long for even the most open-minded of voters, even if it is among the best of the year.) The problem is, Iglesias' insidious, evocative work aside, these scores are some of the most uninventive scores of the year, their supposed 'originality' tempered by the overwhelming number of cultural and historical reference points they embody, and, as such, they seem to reflect the laziest choices this branch could have made - and next to the widely criticised Original Song category (which this year offered up a paltry two nominees), the music branch isn't looking in the best of shapes. It seems to speak of an outdated conception of what film scores should 'be' - vast orchestral compositions with smooth traditional melodies. 2011 was a strong year for music at the movies, but, though these scores are not without their strengths, the Academy's selection seems to counter Wesley Britton's <a href="http://blogcritics.org/music/article/music-review-alberto-iglesias-tinker-tailor1/" target="_blank">assertion</a> that "original orchestral scores are no longer the norm".<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>The Chase</i> - Howard Shore, <i>Hugo</i></span><br />
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Howard Shore's work on <i>Hugo</i> lazily matches the film's contorted nostalgic impulses, shoving accordion and trumpet into many of the melodies without the winsome invention of Yann Tiersen's memorable score for <i>Amelie</i>. As it progresses, the mischievous, winsome string flurries become tiresomely repetitive. John Williams' <i>The Adventures of Tintin</i> isn't dissimilar, though its use of brass, harpsichord and looping woodwind provides a much wider palette of melodies, and Williams, ever the class act, has great fun weaving these into an appropriately lively and flourishing accompaniment to the film's mix of mystery and slapstick action. It certainly mines the jazzy milieu of its unspecified Belgian setting as much as Shore lazes in 1920s Paris, but Williams' music is lithe enough to have darted out of your critical grasp before you can moan.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>The Adventures of Tintin</i> - John Williams, <i>The Adventures of Tintin</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>George Valentin</i> - Ludovic Bource, <i>The Artist</i></span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7EMyy2Dt4enQgHrQXH1pWBAMz3MHn_LCn9b4486APr6OGc_qNZJJOQrMF46XSyYNV3P29eVWuRL-9Hx3TFrRl752yy58yj1pCVyKrVmlw33Wb1gEWuUfy0cNUI4MbLmWaaSoa/s1600/artist.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7EMyy2Dt4enQgHrQXH1pWBAMz3MHn_LCn9b4486APr6OGc_qNZJJOQrMF46XSyYNV3P29eVWuRL-9Hx3TFrRl752yy58yj1pCVyKrVmlw33Wb1gEWuUfy0cNUI4MbLmWaaSoa/s320/artist.png" width="320" /></a></div><i>The Artist</i>'s score, by Ludovic Bource, is undoubtedly the most integral to its film's success - quickstepping its way in to compensate for the unfamiliar lack of diegetic sound - and its engaging, sprightly warmth is indeed so wrapped up with the images that a listen apart from the film is enormously evocative of the pleasure of my two viewings. Bource <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203518404577093490109485590.html" target="_blank">has said</a> he took his inspiration from music across cinematic history - music that "everyone has inscribed in their memory". Kim Novak's accusations aside, there is enough wit, piquancy and love in Bource's original compositions that <i>The Artist</i>'s nomination in this category seemed essential.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Bringing Joey Home, and Bonding</i> - John Williams, <i>War Horse</i></span><br />
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<i>War Horse</i> strikes me as the laziest of the nominations here, though its blooming, passionate twinning of the string section and light woodwind works in the same sort of fashion as the production design I discussed last week - it's so overwhelming and blatant in its emotionality that it hits its cues even as you realise you're being so baldly manipulated. But in that way, it feels as informed by classic Hollywood scores as <i>The Artist</i> does, and there's less wit and more seriousness in this one. Finally, while Alberto Iglesias' nomination for <i>Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy</i> feels like the most unlikely nomination, its moody, insidious use of low brass and inconsistent piano melodies also betrays a nostalgia for the gloomy thrillers of the 1970s. Still, it strikes a dissonant note in this roster - one for the pessimists, if you will.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Guillam</i> - Alberto Iglesias, <i>Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy</i></span><br />
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Nostalgia doesn't explain everything. Both Cliff Martinez's <i>Drive</i> and Hans Zimmer's <i>Rango</i> mine similar wells, the former with a menacing morbidity similar to <i>Tinker, Tailor</i>, while the latter matches the joyful invention of <i>Tintin</i> in its playful spin on Ennio Morricone's famous Western refrains. Dario Marianelli's lush, intricate score for <i>Jane Eyre</i> is whole other centuries ago, possibly an even finer distillation of 'classic film score' than the nominees, yet even it couldn't muscle into their narrow window.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Underground</i> - Hans Zimmer, <i>Rango</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Waiting for Mr. Rochester</i> - Dario Marianelli, <i>Jane Eyre</i></span><br />
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And I've not even mentioned the more bracing modern scores like The Chemical Brothers' eerie accompaniment to <i>Hanna</i>, Nico Muhly's arresting strings for <i>Margaret</i>, or Basement Jaxx's punchy score for <i>Attack the Block</i>. Those seem a step too far, but the fact that their omission (not to mention that only <i>Drive</i> errs onto the idea of an "Adapted Song Score" that Joe Reid <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2012/01/26/145896672/best-not-original-song-how-the-academy-lost-touch-with-movie-music" target="_blank">preached</a> only today) isn't the complaint here demonstrates the alarmingly tight insularity of this year's choices. To quote someone the Academy did once nominate: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsqCl2vO9xA" target="_blank">wise up</a>.Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-16887955230834240422012-01-23T21:17:00.003+00:002012-01-23T21:20:06.973+00:00Go on then...My first, and last, crack of the Oscar prognostication whip this season - the nominee announcement is always my favourite part of this whole process, while most of the winners already seem like a foregone conclusion. (I've noted my predictions for that with some stars. How glitz!) Where I am this season: most of the films in contention are okay, but just that. But I'm firmly behind the frontrunner, so now begins the worry that something is on its way to derail the train. Unless it's Anna Paquin looking for a cowboy hat, that will <i>not</i> be okay.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_NchjgXsPH3HrUumducJh166bOAMrBs_mghJeIn8rl72FsBaxu0-_naBDZz1wsBwhM4vmC2kfxe6QxuQOGuy7JeLUxNW_au5WuwYm8ieF8UEf2zupdBMExwwHEbVapNHXgfEQ/s1600/artist.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_NchjgXsPH3HrUumducJh166bOAMrBs_mghJeIn8rl72FsBaxu0-_naBDZz1wsBwhM4vmC2kfxe6QxuQOGuy7JeLUxNW_au5WuwYm8ieF8UEf2zupdBMExwwHEbVapNHXgfEQ/s1600/artist.png" /></a></div><b><span style="font-size: large;">BEST PICTURE</span></b><br />
<i>The Artist</i>*, <i>The Descendants</i>, <i>The Help</i>, <i>Hugo</i>, <i>Midnight in Paris</i>, <i>The Tree of Life</i>, <i>War Horse</i><br />
Alphabetically arranged, but the first five are nevertheless the films that'd be your five if the rules hadn't changed, twice, since 2008. So go ahead and try to do the maths to work out how many more we'll get - I'm counting on the overwhelming sentimentality of <i>War Horse</i> and a passionate fanbase behind <i>The Tree of Life</i>. <i>Moneyball</i>, as good as it is, doesn't seem like a #1 choice for many, and that's what these movies need to be.<br />
<b>In my dreams:</b> <i>Margaret</i> argues her way into the headlines.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6tuErB_rLvNLHHztxMsDjkncMayF2mGOYP6YlL3X-GoErOowgJhSNIrku2TDBtmjzAzGvwEMXxHdiVi43TQ_TrFpqab3V_FwgEM_y1LqfM-lqQLGl4yWt5dBo6a0WXh2VKock/s1600/refn.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6tuErB_rLvNLHHztxMsDjkncMayF2mGOYP6YlL3X-GoErOowgJhSNIrku2TDBtmjzAzGvwEMXxHdiVi43TQ_TrFpqab3V_FwgEM_y1LqfM-lqQLGl4yWt5dBo6a0WXh2VKock/s1600/refn.png" /></a></div><b><span style="font-size: large;">BEST DIRECTOR</span></b><br />
Woody Allen (<i>Midnight in Paris</i>), Michael Hazanavicius (<i>The Artist</i>)*, Terrence Malick (<i>The Tree of Life</i>), Nicolas Winding Refn (<i>Drive</i>), Martin Scorsese (<i>Hugo</i>)<br />
Almost certainly idiotic, but wouldn't the Directors branch, being made up of, well, directors, be more likely to acknowledge such vivid stylistic grasps as Refn's and Malick's were this year? Perhaps because to the overwhelming dislike for <i>The Descendants</i> among the blogging community, I'm risking a hunch that the film won't score as well as expected, and this is the most obvious nomination that'd be yanked in that case.<br />
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Plus, that line-up just looks <i>better</i>, doesn't it? <br />
<b>In my dreams:</b> I just put two of them up there, didn't I? If I get another: Lars von Trier.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjycMhbCxmaNTXyCg9Vela7Taw_KjQLqcomZ185qZGcdiECWykRTb98jD0GeUk613KtOZDbJmWsStAnFNsDPGRIkS_LAQxrthPvA05i1fNo33nb-ryAFMjRNdE3AQipL94KsFnV/s1600/oldman.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjycMhbCxmaNTXyCg9Vela7Taw_KjQLqcomZ185qZGcdiECWykRTb98jD0GeUk613KtOZDbJmWsStAnFNsDPGRIkS_LAQxrthPvA05i1fNo33nb-ryAFMjRNdE3AQipL94KsFnV/s1600/oldman.png" /></a></div><b><span style="font-size: large;">BEST ACTOR</span></b><br />
George Clooney (<i>The Descendents</i>), Jean Dujardin (<i>The Artist</i>)*, Gary Oldman (<i>Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy</i>), Brad Pitt (<i>Moneyball</i>), Michael Shannon (<i>Take Shelter</i>)<br />
Taking yet more risks on quality over tradition. But those two spots (beyond Clooney, Dujardin and Pitt) are up for grabs, and they <i>like</i> Shannon. As for Oldman - Dujardin aside, those other performances seem so tailored to a US audience that there's surely a push for the British bloc to be making here.<br />
<b>In my dreams:</b> <i>A Separation</i>'s sublime anchor Peyman Mooadi makes the papers.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioHD8fiGQ67wTrwYz6_TvtiIkD19YLW4-Y9JouhyomEa5Tt-o2Jhjn-ourdnRA88iEv0W8AGZc5DjVVN-XNbH2k519nY-N4yBhvYlT8StCiZwlIGvJHuEpIegUAQ-DOIqGA56l/s1600/davis.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioHD8fiGQ67wTrwYz6_TvtiIkD19YLW4-Y9JouhyomEa5Tt-o2Jhjn-ourdnRA88iEv0W8AGZc5DjVVN-XNbH2k519nY-N4yBhvYlT8StCiZwlIGvJHuEpIegUAQ-DOIqGA56l/s1600/davis.png" /></a></div><b><span style="font-size: large;">BEST ACTRESS</span></b><br />
Glenn Close (<i>Albert Nobbs</i>), Viola Davis (<i>The Help</i>)*, Meryl Streep (<i>The Iron Lady</i>), Tilda Swinton (<i>We Need To Talk About Kevin</i>), Michelle Williams (<i>My Week With Marilyn</i>)<br />
The accepted line-up here. I just can't see this branch really pushing for any of the other contenders - Dunst is in too divisive a film, Theron's playing a bitch (no Thatcher jokes please), and Mara has hardly set the awards circuit alight. Saying that, she's the most likely to swoop if <i>Albert Nobbs</i> is just too rubbish to reward.<br />
<b>In my dreams:</b> <a href="http://victimmovies.blogspot.com/p/best-actress.html" target="_blank">best of 2011</a> <i>and</i> 2005 Anna Paquin marches stridently into the fold.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlAo9TWjm7XqwdjDwDxJevk2HqolF_xUJgwT5X8Qf_9-zoXzbZvAFfV3GmGiaqJUkBdmG-ELdWASPVqK1-0MtMZuWgS_XTq_2M0Mdv6vjJO3bMJJ599W906pbzXFHxoKSpU1nE/s1600/kingsley.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlAo9TWjm7XqwdjDwDxJevk2HqolF_xUJgwT5X8Qf_9-zoXzbZvAFfV3GmGiaqJUkBdmG-ELdWASPVqK1-0MtMZuWgS_XTq_2M0Mdv6vjJO3bMJJ599W906pbzXFHxoKSpU1nE/s1600/kingsley.png" /></a></div><b><span style="font-size: large;">BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR</span></b><br />
Albert Brooks (<i>Drive</i>), Kenneth Branagh (<i>My Week With Marilyn</i>), Ben Kingsley (<i>Hugo</i>), Brad Pitt (<i>The Tree of Life</i>), Christopher Plummer (<i>Beginners</i>)*<br />
Yet another acting category ripe for surprises beyond an agreed three. If they like <i>Hugo</i> - and even if they didn't - Kingsley seems like such an obvious nominee as soon as you see the film, and I was surprised he hasn't had more attention. And Pitt's another one for my surprising, probably misguided faith in the Academy's outre taste. (Hey, they <i>are</i> inviting more young faces into the fold.)<br />
<b>In my dreams:</b> Tom Hardy's dark reveries from <i>Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy</i> make an impact.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEtFNopX7NwjCQswRhqfrV0pUDJuln_PKn0VW4ACdby4w_qSU_NvboorFFiBCrDpwzwJzjJB4Xl_zaAdtcB1ZQ5l-q3zv-cuX3Sz8y6SZow5VSqxzwKT3BXqV8Usb5fBG-OlBu/s1600/mccarthy.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEtFNopX7NwjCQswRhqfrV0pUDJuln_PKn0VW4ACdby4w_qSU_NvboorFFiBCrDpwzwJzjJB4Xl_zaAdtcB1ZQ5l-q3zv-cuX3Sz8y6SZow5VSqxzwKT3BXqV8Usb5fBG-OlBu/s1600/mccarthy.png" /></a></div><b><span style="font-size: large;">BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS</span></b><br />
Bérénice Bejo (<i>The Artist</i>), Jessica Chastain (<i>The Help</i>), Melissa McCarthy (<i>Bridesmaids</i>), Janet McTeer (<i>Albert Nobbs</i>), Octavia Spencer (<i>The Help</i>)*<br />
From what I hear, if you're going to nominate Close, you'll be jotting down McTeer's name at the same time. Woodley's the other woman in this race (barring a miracle for Carey Mulligan or Vanessa Redgrave), but I've already mentioned my hunch against <i>The Descendants</i>, although I imagine that'll be less virulent amongst the Actors. Still, she's on the edge. If Chastain somehow splits her vote and falls out, my wrath will be like nothing ever seen.<br />
<b>In my dreams:</b> the haunting, scarred sister in <i>Shame</i>, Carey Mulligan, gets another moment in the spotlight.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcfGsCMsH9YqeOG81ZwWYeqN0Ux3OCQSfAlKXBfM_brMLxtU0aqxptWrFl9PVXpM8xxawrPD81BbjBT_ImLVtCZww9P8E0a91bbri7laGf9HfBCrEg0sbsMQEgvgZZge4itYw3/s1600/moneyball.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcfGsCMsH9YqeOG81ZwWYeqN0Ux3OCQSfAlKXBfM_brMLxtU0aqxptWrFl9PVXpM8xxawrPD81BbjBT_ImLVtCZww9P8E0a91bbri7laGf9HfBCrEg0sbsMQEgvgZZge4itYw3/s1600/moneyball.png" /></a></div><b><span style="font-size: large;">BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY</span></b><br />
<i>The Descendants</i> (Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon & Jim Rash)*, <i>The Help</i> (Tate Taylor), <i>The Ides of March</i> (George Clooney & Grant Heslov), <i>Moneyball</i> (Aaron Sorkin & Steven Zaillian), <i>Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy</i> (Bridget O'Connor & Peter Strong)<br />
<i>Hugo</i> just doesn't seem like a writers' film - the enterprise is too juvenile and the MacGuffin is so poorly constructed. So I've put the denser political "thriller" <i>The Ides of March</i> in its place. <i>The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo</i> seems informed as much by its cinematic predecessor as the source text, while <i>War Horse</i> might find an odd strength from being so episodic, but I imagine it's a film for the technicals. Those are your potential spoilers, though.<br />
<b>In my dreams:</b> Hossein Amini gets his five minutes for shaping <i>Drive</i> into such a menacing thriller.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZaefb_Nkgq4XSN3XeG3LkIqOussKAtUmJSiQ1uEoJLBK-9Ibss5gs1lBoVdcgCwjuawCLFVGMFKILBwDUht57BpRcghCMTvu1Z66S8qQv7gtryn0bsCQD1hJNx0lrFN-XNJCG/s1600/youngadult.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZaefb_Nkgq4XSN3XeG3LkIqOussKAtUmJSiQ1uEoJLBK-9Ibss5gs1lBoVdcgCwjuawCLFVGMFKILBwDUht57BpRcghCMTvu1Z66S8qQv7gtryn0bsCQD1hJNx0lrFN-XNJCG/s1600/youngadult.png" /></a></div><b><span style="font-size: large;">BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY</span></b><br />
<i>The Artist</i> (Michael Hazanavicius), <i>Bridesmaids</i> (Annie Mumulo & Kristin Wiig), <i>Midnight in Paris</i> (Woody Allen)*, <i>A Separation</i> (Asghar Farhadi), <i>Young Adult</i> (Diablo Cody)<br />
A tough call, this category - a bunch of strong, distinctive contenders which are fighting out behind weaker but somehow locked-in leaders (<i>Midnight in Paris</i>, and, though I love it, <i>The Artist</i>). So, once again, I'm predicting a nice outcome - <i>A Separation</i> is masterfully constructed without ever subordinating character, while this is the most likely place for comedy to actually show up.<br />
<b>In my dreams:</b> Andrew Haigh's political but intimate and witty script for <i>Weekend</i> puts its feet up as a nominee.Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-42634429878119548412012-01-23T18:26:00.001+00:002012-01-23T18:29:05.805+00:00Action genre codes go Haywire<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbCehT0hhgpeZmrALbJ15NOKp4bmXGNq4SsQl2KCEOKCPuX0vhb7_yajhDbGXfqZbX8lCbQCOe5_LZQVHEaraLo2j6GMyRE1tBjpPOxcxcO7x1qrSwL3ENR0sYvQd4uHTmRC0n/s1600/haywire03.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbCehT0hhgpeZmrALbJ15NOKp4bmXGNq4SsQl2KCEOKCPuX0vhb7_yajhDbGXfqZbX8lCbQCOe5_LZQVHEaraLo2j6GMyRE1tBjpPOxcxcO7x1qrSwL3ENR0sYvQd4uHTmRC0n/s400/haywire03.jpg" width="266" /></a></div><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Vague spoilers may follow.</i></span><br />
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<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1506999/" target="_blank">Haywire</a></i> is not the first film to present us with a female action heroine. You know that. Where it is different from the likes of <i>Tomb Raider</i> and <i>Kill Bill</i> is in the fact that it does not centre around an established female film star. Gina Carano may have a different glow of fame about her to a certain subset of the audience, but cinematically, she is unknown. She's given a character name - Mallory - but what Carano essentially represents is her own persona, the reality of Gina Carano, mixed martial arts and kickboxing champion.<br />
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What <i>Haywire</i> presents to Carano, and to us, is the thrill of a woman kicking the hell out of some of Hollywood's most masculine bodies. Channing Tatum's star persona is one of the robust, perhaps slightly dim, but idealised hunk, one whose experiences as a soldier (<i>G.I. Joe</i>, <i>Dear John</i>, <i>Stop-Loss</i>) and brawler (<i>Fighting</i>) feed easily into his role as Carano's colleague here. <i>Shame</i>'s narrative may work to undermine the posturing masculinity of Michael Fassbender, but in a pop culture sense, it's the film where he shows off his penis, and that frivolous discussion - the most dominant kind these days - has focused mostly on its size seems to giving Fassbender a shine of intimidating maleness. Even if <i>Shame</i> shows the darker side of masculinity, it still constructs Fassbender as a very male figure - the blackest level of his humiliation being a same-sex encounter - and this cinematic persona is bolstered by his brooding role in <i>Jane Eyre</i> and the turn to villainy in <i>X-Men: First Class</i>. Ewan McGregor, though reedier in stature, has a similarly naked history, uncomfortably coupled with his most famous Hollywood exposure as a Jedi knight in the <i>Star Wars</i> prequels. Ultimately, what these men (Carano does not engage in combat with Michael Douglas or Antonio Banderas, though arguments for them would not be too dissimilar) share is a confrontational level of masculinity, whether they've achieved this through action roles or corporeal exposure.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLrpime6VW0kP6yb0zgjyDiNiu-XAI1fO8W4p5NJDTnODpAELaJfIAjiGdQyTYmSV-YO69MRA4mqS1tP9eySfTbR42YpBfwpdFhUpszJfz-A4_qEYHcUVk691ZjyxE13Tbei2r/s1600/haywire02.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLrpime6VW0kP6yb0zgjyDiNiu-XAI1fO8W4p5NJDTnODpAELaJfIAjiGdQyTYmSV-YO69MRA4mqS1tP9eySfTbR42YpBfwpdFhUpszJfz-A4_qEYHcUVk691ZjyxE13Tbei2r/s400/haywire02.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
So to sit down in front of <i>Haywire</i> and see these men get badly beaten up (to say the least) might seem to subvert that image. It doesn't, because what <i>Haywire</i> doesn't do is emasculate its characters, even when there's a woman smashing their face in. That's to the film's credit - it equalises gender during its showcases of physical combat, even if the basic pitch of the film highlights Carano's status as female. What it does point towards, however, is a critical conceptual failure of the film. What might be its greatest strength is also what undoes it.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0q5KuLwLWCe8MaVL-fEN25GIF_E7rckGJaWNHxNOBb9eHWzPuoGwf7MeZk9poj9d1PovaXYb8U_g-q_n1fpF0-00wEW2KE0Fe2PC_OwXEEBr0V6p_rvMm2WfcC6Uk3uG5zAjm/s1600/haywire01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0q5KuLwLWCe8MaVL-fEN25GIF_E7rckGJaWNHxNOBb9eHWzPuoGwf7MeZk9poj9d1PovaXYb8U_g-q_n1fpF0-00wEW2KE0Fe2PC_OwXEEBr0V6p_rvMm2WfcC6Uk3uG5zAjm/s320/haywire01.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><i>Haywire</i>'s action scenes - which comprise the majority of the film - are filmed with a bare level of realism that's even more immediate than the celebrated intimacy of the <i>Bourne</i> series. The kicks, punches, throws, slams and twists aren't accompanied by any sort of music, nor the sort of frenzied editing that's become <i>de rigueur</i> for action films. Director Steven Soderbergh presents these scenes with a docile camera, remaining mostly in long shots in order to capture the entire physical spectacle. What makes the scenes tense are the continual physical impacts on each character, both seen and crisply heard. When the film opts for a chase scene instead, Carano doesn't have the seamless luck of Jason Bourne racing across Moroccan rooftops - she's no less clear-headed as she navigates the Dublin skyline, but we witness her decisions and mistakes as she eludes the swat team. What <i>Haywire</i> has in its favour is this very tangible sense of physicality.<br />
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Yet this is also what ultimately works against it. As hinted, the reason behind this is the casting. I don't mean Carano's limitations as an actress (not particularly natural when she's speaking, but also not without a quiet charisma), but the extra-filmic baggage the rest of the cast brings with them. As I said earlier, what <i>Haywire</i> essentially offers is the chance to see a woman kick the shit out of a handful of famous male stars. But in a film with such tactile, raw physicality, Haywire sets up an unresolvable tension between the glamorous stardom of its male cast and the realistic tableaux in which they perform. They're given character names, but beyond that, none of the men here are constructed as anything more than opponents or allies to Carano (with some, inevitably, shifting, as Carano discovers the level of duplicity occurring). So we automatically fill in these personality chasms with what we know of the actors themselves. The fiction falls apart, leaving the audience lost between the vivid intensity of the action set pieces and the floating spectre of Hollywood stardom.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD5jr6_SLlsKJkvVmpfuBj1Df-qd66R8oa3TdXugjHRcBkJR0cwbLbkDPfE6oBod0yljaTBx0NM3itSx52l0QXnBGgNuxM5PJXKaLEpoZB98E4WJqJ28nGzRgi-mSTpGYw-9nf/s1600/haywire05.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD5jr6_SLlsKJkvVmpfuBj1Df-qd66R8oa3TdXugjHRcBkJR0cwbLbkDPfE6oBod0yljaTBx0NM3itSx52l0QXnBGgNuxM5PJXKaLEpoZB98E4WJqJ28nGzRgi-mSTpGYw-9nf/s320/haywire05.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
<i>Haywire</i> can't present a viable alternative to the Hollywood action kickers, despite its roster of stars, because it exists outside of the usual parameters of implicit genre codes and the style they inform. The choreography of the fights is undeniably impressive, but the constant tension between the invader (Carano) and the natives (the men) means they play out with a trenchant inevitability that can never coalesce, because this is a reality beating up on a fiction. Certainly this speaks less of <i>Haywire</i>'s quality as a film than of how years of convention have shaped expectations and responses, but it cannot be denied that there are critical fractures between Soderbergh's conception of this endeavour and how the disparate elements cohere on-screen. <i>Haywire</i> doesn't work as what it wants to be, nor as what it actually turns out to be.Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-69130187706670983232012-01-20T15:22:00.001+00:002012-01-20T15:24:30.723+00:00Not Over the Hiller<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4b2EPx4EfvKbCMbWxKZHtEYXPc4nMO6HXmAbWA46xnwLlKg8957dLfWIPbDCw-Ms0A2azhF4MnVB5k8uqjufNWG4BI9RvH0SKItfYaCc3i5QAlYmJaFZcQUMqWMDXuaJgqI-S/s1600/hiller01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4b2EPx4EfvKbCMbWxKZHtEYXPc4nMO6HXmAbWA46xnwLlKg8957dLfWIPbDCw-Ms0A2azhF4MnVB5k8uqjufNWG4BI9RvH0SKItfYaCc3i5QAlYmJaFZcQUMqWMDXuaJgqI-S/s1600/hiller01.jpg" /></a></div><br />
For an actress who was the pet of the densely linguistic George Bernard Shaw, Wendy Hiller was a remarkably physical actress. At least, that's what my notes are overflowing with - bullet points about how she holds herself, or moves, or doesn't. But this physicality is never at odds with Shaw's politically and socially pointed scripts, because Hiller's movements and vivid expressions are all in service of corroborating the words her character's speak, and how she delivers them. Throughout the highlights of Hiller's limited film career, this approach has its successes and it has its limitations. In the first two films that brought her Oscar nominations, separated by a clean twenty years, we can see a remarkable progression.<br />
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<i>Pygmalion</i>, the film that brought Hiller to global attention, casts her as Eliza Doolittle, a rather mangled posy seller who crouches on the streets and speaks out of the side of her mouth, missing out half of her letters. As becomes even clearer having watched the second Shaw-Hiller cinematic adaptation, <i>Major Barbara</i>, Hiller's natural mode is the creature Eliza is transformed into by Henry Higgins (Leslie Howard, whose brisk, emphatic style nails Higgins' scholarly fascination), rather than the bedraggled creature we meet initially. Indeed, the mode of Hiller's most famous characters is exactly this sort of poised but earthy character, one whose control is constantly poised, never quite a facade but certainly a conscious effort. When strong emotions really get to her, Hiller's change in body is always noticeable, even if her characters quickly gather themselves back to their smooth gait and implacable stare.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMGl5i4IqyBoUJcFEYsI25u99vvkGTScO9jUH5Ml4AjSXdzU-9Te0zYSuaVcHgYDpv80S5abfW08H-UHXQ22bMQM-cOVDYl0XTfcqpQKQh_Rh5NJmkW7KqEDg8Tnyfl4GvAg-2/s1600/pygmalion01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="292" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMGl5i4IqyBoUJcFEYsI25u99vvkGTScO9jUH5Ml4AjSXdzU-9Te0zYSuaVcHgYDpv80S5abfW08H-UHXQ22bMQM-cOVDYl0XTfcqpQKQh_Rh5NJmkW7KqEDg8Tnyfl4GvAg-2/s400/pygmalion01.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
The clean structural arc familiar both in <i>Pygmalion</i> and its musical adaptation <i>My Fair Lady</i>, exposes Hiller's approach so thoroughly and openly that, to some extent, it gave away too much. Her Eliza Doolittle is a very accomplished technical accomplishment, carefully charting the physical education that less prolifically accompanies Higgins' vocal teachings. She progresses from a duckish walk and an unbecoming thrust forward when she speaks to a poised, straight posture and cleanly rounded vowels, taking in along the way a deliciously exaggerated sequence where Higgins takes her to tea with his mother. She performs her learning with robotic, stilted speech, sucking in her cheeks so the words seem to pop out of her mouth.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHgIGpUrqyzSS4-vRDMc5Lztd1XlkTXT7mdpRas8mjdA7ohlcTBe26Pq0s1xVkjkqpWFcjCcVpHiG_VQT96X-NOzqS8eITKWHE678Q6_cDnleNb15cPV9pSoRATklHne-Y5SsO/s1600/pygmalion02.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHgIGpUrqyzSS4-vRDMc5Lztd1XlkTXT7mdpRas8mjdA7ohlcTBe26Pq0s1xVkjkqpWFcjCcVpHiG_VQT96X-NOzqS8eITKWHE678Q6_cDnleNb15cPV9pSoRATklHne-Y5SsO/s320/pygmalion02.png" width="320" /></a>But Hiller rarely seems able to anchor this technique into a vibrant emotional experience of Eliza's journey (something Audrey Hepburn also suffered from years later), almost always seeming conscious of technique first and feeling second. To a certain extent, this makes narrative sense, reflecting Eliza's focus and dedication on improving herself. There is marvel in the scene where Eliza rails against Henry and comes to the realisation that her mode of expression has irrevocably changed - her <a href="http://youtu.be/i0a5xz2S1Ok?t=1h7m19s" target="_blank">"No! No. Thank you."</a>, in one brief moment, charts this epiphany, a sharp rejection giving way to a sad, muted nicety, the choked sound of her "no"s one of the most peculiarly heartbreaking moments I've ever seen.<br />
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More often, sadly, Hiller gets trapped in theatric precision, the flight of any emotions betraying a long-limbed bodiliness that makes sense for neither cockney Eliza nor the newly cultured one, and her face restrained to a limited amount of expression that seem mostly to involve the shape of her eyebrows. These features hamper <i>Major Barbara</i> more (at least when her titular character is allowed control of the narrative, which wanders all over), where she's stuck in business mode, only occasionally pricking her smooth voicework despite different attitudes to the diverse characters around her, hitting emotional notes with completely inexplicable reactions, and seeming to forget to act at all when the camera isn't focusing on her.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Fastforward to 1958 and Hiller's victory in AMPAS' Best Supporting Actress category for her work as Bournemouth hotel owner Pat Cooper in <i>Separate Tables</i>. Though the film's split focus on a a sour David Niven being lusted after by a jittering Deborah Kerr, and a taunting Rita Hayworth bothering Burt Lancaster pays very few dividends, Hiller quietly brushes through the crowd to a worthy performance. Pat has Hiller's familiar smooth walk - carefully closing swinging doors behind her - and implacable orderliness, but it cracks sooner, and so Hiller can't try to build Pat through the same bag of techniques. And how, when it cracks! Taking aside John (Lancaster), it quickly becomes apparent that he and Pat are involved in a relationship, because Hiller suddenly gets to play sexy, and suddenly her sharp face softens in coy, cowed lust, her body undulating as she uncrosses her arms and leans towards him.</div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4tLPeZwBtDiOguWLsXg9fbBaLI4NhfDDocvRpw5Y0ohT8TSght02YoCTntMUDpLFPbDTeYSSmKn6cOGiyJV1dLW-whmKpo3LCB3NuDnYb0AA2-nnDaZO2ggLufZGF58zILAJ9/s1600/hiller-st.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4tLPeZwBtDiOguWLsXg9fbBaLI4NhfDDocvRpw5Y0ohT8TSght02YoCTntMUDpLFPbDTeYSSmKn6cOGiyJV1dLW-whmKpo3LCB3NuDnYb0AA2-nnDaZO2ggLufZGF58zILAJ9/s1600/hiller-st.jpg" /></a></div>The mark of twenty years is remarkable - Hiller has moved forward with the shifting acting styles of the time, and none of her physicality is exaggerated as it once was. Pat's horniness burns off the screen, but rather than forced by sharp gestures, it exudes from Hiller's small adjustments - breasts sticking forward just a little, eyes fixed but slightly drawn back. The sex folds back into her as Pat recognises the boundaries of propriety, but Hiller makes it clear that Pat's reticence isn't due to any shame, but self-respect. Pat shifts from a surprisingly desperate plea to John into ordinary hotel business with natural ease, because Pat, and Hiller too, are experienced enough at this stage of their lives to understand the shape of their emotions. Her physicality separates the different parts of her life while seeming unconscious - her more controlled body while around the hotel guests speaks more of her general disinterest in them, not allowing them views of sadness that her body betrays when alone. You finally understand how she is the centre of a misshapen bunch of people when she gives a little worldly smile at Niven's dramatic suggestion of suicide - Pat's assessment of his situation takes on a kind, non-judgemental mood in Hiller's imploring reading. She convinces as caretaker and as woman without ever denigrating the other side of her character.<br />
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A third and final Oscar nomination followed for Hiller in 1966, with a supporting role as Thomas More's wife Alice in <i>A Man For All Seasons</i> - the period film a more traditional source of awards attention for British cinema than the contemporary films Hiller made her rare camera excursions for. Her tendency towards emotional compartmentalisation perhaps more sense in a historical context, and you certainly can't imagine Hiller being greatly successful in today's landscape, and not merely because roles relying so heavily on the face are so few and far between. But her linguistic alertness and her angular features make Hiller's legacy bigger than merely the first Elisa Doolittle of the silver screen. If nothing else, that surprising but deserved Oscar win will keep her as a stop on any obsessive's tour of the past, and maybe, like me, they'll stay longer than expected.Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-21643511097239681772012-01-15T18:44:00.000+00:002012-01-15T18:44:07.727+00:00Oscar Season: The Visible Edges of Hollywood Reflexivity<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikBv6S_vsWB9ZgqgBjIVpJjpVX4sOh4ZPHEKmBpbbEDo21_BUfodbO8UgnU0F8uGsUQYtszWzlvRFFQsi6rKKgzNLMDQlUN7ilXJZYGvpEgC9wmK1lVNso1KmAzSrLBCbaGgMG/s1600/warhorse-couple.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikBv6S_vsWB9ZgqgBjIVpJjpVX4sOh4ZPHEKmBpbbEDo21_BUfodbO8UgnU0F8uGsUQYtszWzlvRFFQsi6rKKgzNLMDQlUN7ilXJZYGvpEgC9wmK1lVNso1KmAzSrLBCbaGgMG/s400/warhorse-couple.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
There is something disturbing about <i>War Horse</i>. Unsurprisingly, I find I was not the first to note the <a href="http://www.welovethisbook.com/news/spielberg-war-horse-whisperer" target="_blank">direct influence</a> of John Ford's <i>How Green Was My Valley</i>; early on in the film, the village setting for an auction scene appears to be that monochrome Welsh mining town resurrected. The family home, meanwhile, seems to have reclaimed the hill Scarlett O'Hara was so fond of wandering over. Much of <i>War Horse</i> was filmed on location, and although I've no idea which locations are pre-existent and which studio, there's not really any excuse for the way the actors appear to pop off the backgrounds like cardboard cutouts. None of the locations in <i>War Horse</i> seem particularly real, and while this rankled with me in the early stages, by the end, having choked back some tears so ashamedly I ended up audibly gasping for emotionless air, I came to realise it didn't matter. Or I didn't care.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>There often seems to be a critical tendency towards valuing realism in modern cinema above everything else. I would certainly admit that it's something I personally tend towards, although mainly because it's the most straightforward route towards delivering emotional truth (though the best two films from last year, <i>Margaret</i> and <i>Melancholia</i>, take diversely unreal structural and conceptual approaches towards a much greater clarity of emotional truth). At absolutely no point did I find realism or even emotional truth in <i>War Horse</i>, because it isn't there. By being so deliberately - and, though the mounting of it can be a bit shaky, I think it is deliberate - fantastical, <i>War Horse</i> delivers a different kind of cinematic emotionality, one hardly ever projected or indeed aimed at since Hollywood's Golden Age faded over half a century ago. The film gallops past even the most nostalgic of Spielberg's previous films, never achieving the warmth or upholstered buoyancy of his best work, but rolling in the green green grass of Hollywood's fetish for fake English hills and getting a bit of mud in my eye.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrHVYL4m1en-ylaExVVKtxvg_vfzFCmw9W0eg6uanaUleDNyQG3MCWRmdIPY-kGAJPfJI1FwN1ytcf1Pl3PHSyTHt77OTJUR-HTIilg1FnV0bBjUAImpOOIGBuZM3yvPrIHcNH/s1600/warhorse-wire.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="181" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrHVYL4m1en-ylaExVVKtxvg_vfzFCmw9W0eg6uanaUleDNyQG3MCWRmdIPY-kGAJPfJI1FwN1ytcf1Pl3PHSyTHt77OTJUR-HTIilg1FnV0bBjUAImpOOIGBuZM3yvPrIHcNH/s320/warhorse-wire.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Joey (unconfirmed number of horses) races through No Man's Land</td></tr>
</tbody></table>There's safety in those very visible edges to a world. It's a quality so obvious in the classics that its reemergence in <i>War Horse</i> is difficult to re-acclimatize yourself to, but the consistency in the empty or merely unseen boundaries of nearly every scene eventually catches the eye, so to contradict. The painted fakery of something like <i>How Green Was My Valley</i> is a past foible, but <i>War Horse</i> hermetically seals you off all the same, following the fabled journey of Joey through a variety of pastoral or desolate landscapes. In this, despite the obviousness of a cinematic inflection to such a large story, we can see the after-effects of <i>War Horse</i>'s success as a play. Locations such as Niels Arestrup's farm play as disconnected locales, where invasions of army regiments suddenly wave through, and the war exists as sound not heard, but discussed. Even the wider, starker design of No Man's Land, which we travel through twice in very different moods, seem lost in a stagy mist beneath a black ceiling, reminiscent not of the startling realism of Spielberg's <i>Saving Private Ryan</i>, but the battlefield which the heroes of <i>Blackadder</i> memorably charged onto.<br />
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It never plays as particularly stagy - the camera gets too close, and the shifting connection to the horse as a character gives the whole thing an odd elasticity - and so instead this visible falseness feels antiquated even before Janusz Kaminski floods the final scene in vivid sunset orange. <i>War Horse</i> does explore the darkness of war, using the pressure of the unreal locations to bolster the emotions of particular scenes to the same kind of dramatic pitch of Hollywood's Golden Age - the acting style is larger, more direct (although it could have done without the alarming shots of Joey's bloodshot eye), and the narrative constructs itself in fragments that build up to a variety of dramatic climaxes, each of which sustain piquant emotional pitches.<br />
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Two stronger contenders this awards season appropriate similar styles. <i>Hugo</i>, Martin Scorsese's love letter to silent cinema, is compiled in a similar set of climaxing vignettes, although its clockwork MacGuffin and caricatured secondary characters are less supportable in terms of their contribution to any overall narrative thrust or emotional clarity. Like <i>War Horse</i>, Hugo's production design creates a sealed off world, though the snowy enchantment of the edges of this one are less John Ford than Robert Zemeckis. <i>Hugo</i> has to manifest the dreams of its titular character, as well as its farcical chases, inside this world, and combined with the 3D, it sets a flexibility to a world where the narrative is suggesting the problems of restriction for Hugo. Better, in every sense, are the scenes where we flashback to George Melies' studio - shot with less glow and mist, their isolated existence - nothing in the skylines beyond - quietly evokes the magic revolution going on inside the glass walls, without having to visibly romanticise them.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixCz32-FgTEdIG-2eEnJNE0yNY-VoMtW5DZ3ZeNQTo0hYJkH588XROi0aft3ovkSL3AGo-a5SttkG1wJFmGx0vTXqlLkIvyY5dfKHO6vsAYCvhB03QB384cbidQxYZKn13-C8a/s1600/theartist-plane.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="191" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixCz32-FgTEdIG-2eEnJNE0yNY-VoMtW5DZ3ZeNQTo0hYJkH588XROi0aft3ovkSL3AGo-a5SttkG1wJFmGx0vTXqlLkIvyY5dfKHO6vsAYCvhB03QB384cbidQxYZKn13-C8a/s320/theartist-plane.jpg" width="320" /></a><i>The Artist</i>'s Kinograph production studios are similarly shot - no industrialised skyscrapers surrounding the stage hangers and dressing rooms - and its public locales, like the cinemas and residential streets, echo the kind of recreations made for <i>Singin' in the Rain</i>. The most interesting scene from a production design standpoint, though, is the pivotal scene where Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo) and George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) physically enact the narrative trajectory of their characters - Peppy going upwards, George down. Most of this scene is shot in romantic mid-shot, but, after they part ways, director Michel Hazanavicius cuts to a square long shot of the entire staircase. It looks like an opened dollhouse, with such minute historical detail recreated for this one moment in order to visualise the largess of the movie business and the shifting power within it.<br />
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It seems, in a general sense, to be a year of looking back. <i>The Help</i> resurrects and somewhat updates the social issues pictures that were all the rage in the late 1950s and 1960s, while <i>Midnight in Paris</i> is besotted with the liberté and decadence of the Parisian past. <i>War Horse</i> seems to be less <i>en vogue</i> than these similarly nostalgic films because its animal hero is inconsistently characterised, the human surrogates are (excepting Jeremy Irvine, who induced my misty eyes) summarily dismissed with little feeling, and it never digs too deeply into anything. But, finally, I think that's what worked for me. What Spielberg gets right, and what perhaps awards voters want to firmly leave behind, is the rosy pastoral warmth of Hollywood's Golden Age. The free expression of the silent era mined by <i>The Artist</i> and <i>Hugo</i>, a skim away from the sexual liberté of 1920s Paris, mixes nostalgia with the modern relevance we suspect the Academy so desperately desires. <i>War Horse </i>brushes itself down to deliver a certain inescapable emotional claustrophobia, but the dust still lingers on the chisels and hammers the crew left behind, and I'm not sure dirt is in this season. (Except maybe Minny's.)Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-19148900358797079912011-12-30T20:41:00.000+00:002011-12-30T20:41:38.004+00:00Prancer is this year's most valuable reindeerA trip home to the family for the holidays inevitably informs your holiday viewing. For me, it means a return to the tastes of my mother, as she dominates the music on the radio (always classical) and generally gets her way on the television as well. More than that, though, it returns me to the whim of the obsession of hers than heavily influenced my childhood - dance.<br />
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On Christmas Day, the BBC put out an hour and a half programme where Darcey Bussell, one of the most famous ballerinas of recent years, flexing her leg muscles again after a few years of retirement. But instead of ballet, she took on recreating four famous dance numbers from the glory days of the movie musical. Just days after <a href="http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2011/11-240.html" target="_blank">the news</a> that the National Film Registry's latest inductees include some "family home movies" of the Nicholas Brothers, tap dancing contemporaries of Fred Astaire, dance experts name-check them here. Bussell's first challenge - and ultimately her biggest - was reenacting Astaire's famous 'Puttin' on the Ritz' number from the otherwise obscure <i>Blue Skies</i> (1946). As the programme progressed, the documentary sections before each filmed performance shortened, so most of the technical issues of adaptating to a vastly different style of dance were included in this first passage. Where classical ballet requires clean, long lines and telegraphed positioning, tap required Bussell to loosen up and bring her body inwards - while redirecting her precision, because Astaire's performances were no less controlled and perfectly choreographed than Bussell's graceful ballet roles.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bussell recreates Astaire's 'Puttin' on the Ritz'</td></tr>
</tbody></table>This first number - pleasingly blasé about inverting the gender of the performer - turned out to be the highlight of the programme. Recreations of <i>Top Hat</i>'s 'Cheek to Cheek' number and <i>Singin' in the Rain</i>'s 'Good Mornin'' were appealingly staged and brightly performed, but, perhaps because she was returned to the female parts, where Ginger Rogers and Debbie Reynolds had been less technically adept than their male co-stars, they felt considerably less spirited. The fourth, meanwhile, was a curious reinvention of the famous 'Girl Hunt' number from <i>The Band Wagon</i> - always a highlight of the enormously talented Cyd Charisse's career. But here, its modern mishmash of a score and rather garish sets were the background to a mix of dancing styles that just didn't spark. Though Charisse herself came from a background in ballet, Bussell's lengthy background in ballet still seems to be what undid her here - her leg extensions and polished line finishes seemed uncomfortable in the louche jazz setting. But major points for trying.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW4n9Wx0SJzST-0Xa5dwEY3Y7TbNuvvMDVjX9KoH0vs1FRky90m2vN1lUxl8pDzLizzBsNdLi5yQPJ33ldvzboNlcOX24G6xXEuaJPHqBuZ_-TRBrKrJPalkx2B-Qd4I8hjW2X/s1600/bussell-girlhunt.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW4n9Wx0SJzST-0Xa5dwEY3Y7TbNuvvMDVjX9KoH0vs1FRky90m2vN1lUxl8pDzLizzBsNdLi5yQPJ33ldvzboNlcOX24G6xXEuaJPHqBuZ_-TRBrKrJPalkx2B-Qd4I8hjW2X/s400/bussell-girlhunt.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bussell stretches out for the Girl Hunt</td></tr>
</tbody></table>So then, in those lingering days before the New Year in which no one is really sure what to do with themselves, I noticed that the house had acquired the new DVD issue of 1968's <i>Isadora</i>, for which Vanessa Redgrave was a somewhat forgotten Oscar nominee in the year of the infamous Hepburn-Streisand tie. With Redgrave back in Oscar circles this year for her fiery turn in <i><a href="http://thefilmexperience.net/blog/2011/10/19/london-coriolanus-nyc-and-an-oscar-reject.html" target="_blank">Coriolanus</a></i>, I realised I'm woefully uneducated on her career, so what an unexpected boon this was.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAMG3hw7m2Tu2_lIUz5peVw93FIVbvMqRV3PeaJ9oEC0lkdWLUtmkHhAB-hMEDy4nys4Wo4lACh4gV_aOrPiadgTUTmQ3YuPvwns8zARxrqAfEeLBAcZC9SpHeYf955xWNlSZO/s1600/vlcsnap-2011-12-30-18h33m03s51.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAMG3hw7m2Tu2_lIUz5peVw93FIVbvMqRV3PeaJ9oEC0lkdWLUtmkHhAB-hMEDy4nys4Wo4lACh4gV_aOrPiadgTUTmQ3YuPvwns8zARxrqAfEeLBAcZC9SpHeYf955xWNlSZO/s200/vlcsnap-2011-12-30-18h33m03s51.png" width="200" /></a></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOcnZYDBimLU2KSDJtVx9w55gSVSkS80GifSSWTgrVe2fZLkx-GCXBAFVEozjsesP8aBmJ4u1oHhXlg9FxUhB2DS_GGfMgHKPQrpfos9EwGDHO8AcmAwfM3i-uQFcqW0Y4XV2h/s1600/vlcsnap-2011-12-30-18h35m15s61.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOcnZYDBimLU2KSDJtVx9w55gSVSkS80GifSSWTgrVe2fZLkx-GCXBAFVEozjsesP8aBmJ4u1oHhXlg9FxUhB2DS_GGfMgHKPQrpfos9EwGDHO8AcmAwfM3i-uQFcqW0Y4XV2h/s200/vlcsnap-2011-12-30-18h35m15s61.png" width="200" /></a>Isadora Duncan was a dance revolutionary. The film <i>Isadora</i> doesn't leave you without this knowledge, but ultimately it feels more like knowledge and not <i>feeling</i> - you know it because you have been told, but less because you've witnessed and experienced it. <i>Isadora</i> gets hijacked by Isadora's love life, and while that wouldn't necessarily be a detriment, the script quickly loses the connecting tissue between these romantic tangles and Isadora's dancing. It's there in the passionate encounters with her first lover, Edward Gordon Craig (James Fox), a theatre designer who declares "You see, I invented you". Isadora does dance in these passages, a sprightly expression of her youthful sexuality finally blossoming ("Why did nobody tell me how beautiful men are?"). A sex scene is evocatively intercut with Isadora seemingly dancing on the ceiling (<i>left</i>), an aerially filmed series of movements that vividly suggest the thrill, fear and lust in Isadora's physical reality.<br />
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But dance is soon relegated to merely Isadora's career, something she inconsistently maintains through her relationship with Paris Singer (Jason Robards), and away fall the intriguingly filmed dance sequences of the early passages of the film. Late in the film, as Isadora moves to Russia, dance's capacity as a political expression, and moreover a political tool, flares up as an intriguing theme, but still one which blanks on really evoking the feeling of movement. Lost too, is the briefly glimpsed Duncan <i>rehearsing</i> - a friction between the supposed loose heartfelt nature of her dancing style and the idea that she can still rehearse such a thing.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Isadora's vibrant Russian red confronts an American audience</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="text-align: left;">Of course, a biopic has to tell the story of a person's life, and Isadora's love affairs were a huge part of her particular existence. But so, too, was dance, and her fame in this area is what makes her specifically interesting as a subject. The ultimate fustiness of <i>Isadora</i> leaves a lingering disappointment that the connections between life and art seemed to fall through the cracks here. Isadora Duncan herself would likely have felt better served by a filmic treatment than was less narrative and more by some sort of 'arty' evocation of the passion and feeling and torture behind her dancing.</div>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-71139264773750753342011-12-03T16:52:00.000+00:002011-12-03T16:52:24.654+00:00Margaret, unthatchedYou can understand why <i>Margaret</i> has taken five years to make it to cinema screens, as few in number as those screens were. You can understand why it was the subject of editing headaches for director Kenneth Lonergan and his editor Anne McCabe. The film has been edited into as smooth a narrative curve as it sensibly could have been (apparently by Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker) , but, even though it is as close to a masterpiece as any film this year, you sense that there's a bigger, more amorphous, even more majestic film lying in pieces on the cutting room floor. Because <i>Margaret</i> is not about plot points or closure or linearity, not in a strict sense at least. Despite the clearly stringent editing process, <i>Margaret</i> still feels inescapably loose, a quietly ambitious collage of the human existence that barely makes the slightest pan or track without acutely demonstrating an astonishing understanding of the individual and their relationships.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGTvLV8S6hCc-4Hj6gcNezR2lYKhQW3mw5uEEH_SYR-EJnaVp3XpMAJakVEb-kHfsxb7tO2otUgoYVFvqFf9tky0ZDsl7VptsAh3lCuzzPfC34M9mKE3rDfq4NqO1J-Q4wJTzi/s1600/margaret03.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="188" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGTvLV8S6hCc-4Hj6gcNezR2lYKhQW3mw5uEEH_SYR-EJnaVp3XpMAJakVEb-kHfsxb7tO2otUgoYVFvqFf9tky0ZDsl7VptsAh3lCuzzPfC34M9mKE3rDfq4NqO1J-Q4wJTzi/s400/margaret03.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jean (J. Smith-Cameron) and Lisa (Anna Paquin)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Ostensibly the film follows the repercussions of a tragic road accident, partly caused by and witnessed by Lisa (Anna Paquin). Confused, petulant, argumentative and naive, Lisa is driven by guilt and self-righteously drives this into seeking legal action against the bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) who was also partially at fault. As the film progresses, the legal processes Lisa undertakes with the deceased woman's best friend Emily (Jeannie Berlin) do dominate, but even they prove more symptomatic of the tangled trappings of modern society's convoluted, emotionless systems than of any sense of resolution or finality in any of the characters' lives.<br />
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At one point, the idea of Lisa as the centre of a narrative is explicitly disputed by one character, their mouth practically spitting with disgust at the idea of such a self-centred idea. <i>Margaret</i>'s title seems to take issue with this too - Margaret is none of the characters, not even the dead one, but a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem read out by one of Lisa's teachers. There is a sense of latent resentment as the film aligns with Lisa; passages that spend time with her mother Joan (J. Smith-Cameron) vibrate with a peculiar jealousy, stemming from Joan being slowly pushed out of her daughter's worldview, while her father (Lonergan) exists only in phone calls to his daughter, sympathetic but disconnected, trapped in an airless Los Angeles beach house. Students who are forced to witness Lisa's circular political arguments with a Muslim classmate yell to reinstate themselves in Lisa's narrative. Characters who are at one moment integral to Lisa's narrative fall away, her life shifting in a different direction - youthful romantic possibilities shed for starker, more cynical sexual entanglements. Among many things, <i>Margaret</i> is a story of a girl struggling with adulthood, a question of how a confrontation with death might mature her, and twist her self-perception.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRsaKOpB0iFuVKUqmZ8hjS3YaXeoX-ycqXTQ7aI6H5hzMbRqXIy1LJkD2e4OQzrDFWekr4h3SmL8oyCDi6fjksVtosIe80aE_HcUKDDJx6atu4nyVi-9aRwVevUbfhGLFPOqBA/s1600/margaret05.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRsaKOpB0iFuVKUqmZ8hjS3YaXeoX-ycqXTQ7aI6H5hzMbRqXIy1LJkD2e4OQzrDFWekr4h3SmL8oyCDi6fjksVtosIe80aE_HcUKDDJx6atu4nyVi-9aRwVevUbfhGLFPOqBA/s320/margaret05.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lisa shrinks from the world around her</td></tr>
</tbody></table>On more than one occasion Lonergan abandons identification altogether, instead observing crowded sidewalks, or gliding across the cityscape to Nico Muhly's delicately sad score. These moments never feel awkward or pontifical, but an expressively cinematic way of expressing the essence of the film: the world overwhelming the individual, the multitude of tangled stories of isolated human beings. It recalls something mentioned by Glenn Close in The Hollywood Reporter's recent <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/video/video-award-season-roundtable-series-actresses-full-video" target="_blank">Actress Roundtable</a> - the concept of "mirror neurons" and acting being a "reflection" of a scene partner. "You can elicit an emotion in someone else by how you look into someone else's eyes." But <i>Margaret</i> is about averted eyes, missed glances, defiant avoidance of gaze. Lisa chooses to disconnect herself from Jean, who desperately tries to draw her daughter's gaze but in turn fails to really look at the new man (Jean Reno) in her life.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwMjhbGWF09Q5hb3VS4iP-xjA0vHzIaeFrOK9olbPN3INKLVIcunFqBP3jdsmckM5_CRY6-is3NCaHgc7bF4-xFYC_uwxkUtTQtslBT92c6QbKUuxFO3Ts4QonSvh5UGzaApPb/s1600/margaret01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="248" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwMjhbGWF09Q5hb3VS4iP-xjA0vHzIaeFrOK9olbPN3INKLVIcunFqBP3jdsmckM5_CRY6-is3NCaHgc7bF4-xFYC_uwxkUtTQtslBT92c6QbKUuxFO3Ts4QonSvh5UGzaApPb/s400/margaret01.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lisa's gaze rests on sympathetic teacher Mr. Aaron (Matt Damon)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Its convoluted journey leaving it a strange window into the past, <i>Margaret</i>'s foundations are closer to post-9/11 society than the present, something explicitly referenced in the debating scenes at Lisa's school. But these moments never feel as if they're trying to elicit a particular response to anything; they are simply a more verbal example of a friction between two human beings, with Lisa and Angie (Hina Abdullah) tellingly positioned on opposite sides of the room. <i>Margaret</i> at once feels timely and specific yet displaced, a strange window to a recent past where the ideas seem alternately innocent and prescient.<br />
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I left <i>Margaret</i> in a similar way to that in which I left <i>Melancholia</i> - my sense of the word around me felt irrevocably different. But where <i>Melancholia</i>'s florid, epic ambition left me on some other plane of existence, <i>Margaret</i> thrust me back out into a world full of people, a fresh tactility and almost hyper-awareness of all the individual stories and issues brushing past me. <i>Margaret</i>'s lack of grand scope is what makes it so ambitious, as if it's epic qualities have been turned in on themselves, expanding within character rather than in the form of a terrifying planet. It pinpoints, finally, the difficulties of living, and the precious moments we'd all do our best to ensure we actually look at. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">(<b>A</b>)</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Margaret</i> is playing three times at a day at the Odeon Panton St. in central London until next Thursday. If you can get there at all, <i>run</i>.</span>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-9052998800533469342011-11-17T18:53:00.000+00:002011-11-17T18:53:12.166+00:00A Few Notes of a Tokyo Sonata<i>Tokyo Sonata</i> begins with the patriarch of a Japanese family being dismissed, in a roundabout way (basically he costs too much and the Chinese are younger and cheaper), from his job at some nameless company. Hardly what someone currently unemployed (like me) wants from their evening's entertainment, but Kiyoshi Kurosawa's film turns out to be a deft, freewheeling, surprising portrait of a nuclear family dissipating amidst the worsening economic depression.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The urban wasteland awaits Ry<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">ûh</span>ei</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Japan has been stuck in an economic downturn longer than the rest of the world, so it's no surprise that when the patriarch, Ryûhei (Teruyuki Kagawa), puts his head down and visits the job centre that the queue spirals down the several levels of building and out the door. Ryûhei doesn't tell his wife or sons about being fired, but their lives spin out of normality too - oldest Takashi (Yû Konanagi) is disenchanted with his homeland and wants to help the world by enlisting in the U.S. military, youngest Kenji (Kai Inowaki) has to develop his prodigal talent for the piano behind his father's back ("How could our child be a prodigy?"), and wife Megumi (Kyôko Koizumi) lingers in the house, her food slowly losing its power to bring the family together.<br />
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<i>Tokyo Sonata</i> is about the broken communication in Japanese society, the stiff traditions of internalisation and secrecy combusting in the modernised world, though it's story of masculine pride and generational divides is not unlike <i>American Beauty</i>. It finds human counterparts for the family's problems - Kenji runs into a classmate who is (physically) running away from his father; Ryûhei meets an old friend who is also unemployed, and keeps up a facade that involves his phone automatically ringing five times an hour - to contextualise and strengthen the issue Kurosawa is broaching.<br />
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But in its singularly poignant moments, which often blossom from the odd plot turns, particularly in the last half hour, the film sources an involving personal affection. Take this scene, where Ryûhei returns home after dining with the friend he made in the unemployed queue. Megumi is lying on the sofa, exhausted. He wakes her, turns down her offer of tempura and disappears, but he's not out of earshot when she asks:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbYQAsdvep6VDZdbeVGanRynfq7beh4fnu1UdUufA5n-sOrohMicr3201i_7FXsMlDT7N3D-OFGhs0gpjUGCLbs3SRe8vmJSvpotNjJyjAx1pzslj-99JwHUHc_gxYbuLYNNc4/s1600/vlcsnap-2011-11-16-23h58m31s50.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbYQAsdvep6VDZdbeVGanRynfq7beh4fnu1UdUufA5n-sOrohMicr3201i_7FXsMlDT7N3D-OFGhs0gpjUGCLbs3SRe8vmJSvpotNjJyjAx1pzslj-99JwHUHc_gxYbuLYNNc4/s400/vlcsnap-2011-11-16-23h58m31s50.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />
Unheard, her arms hang in mid-air, and she lifts them further, up towards the ceiling. Whether asking her husband or some higher power, or just anyone who'll listen, the emptiness in Megumi's life is evident in her hazy, bewildered eyes as they gaze upwards.<br />
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Ryûhei doesn't touch Megumi until the end of the film.<br />
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<i>Tokyo Sonata</i> seems to demonize the patriarch to excess, hating him as much as it pities him, and the way it deals with him in the final stretches, especially in comparison to the piquant sequences granted to Megumi, leaves doubtful questions hanging over the ending. But these questions linger, and perhaps they are intentional worries about how everything resolves itself. The final sequence of the film is remarkably evocative and enthralling, and the silent wondering over it only strengthens the experience of a pointed social critique.<b> B+</b>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-60093736135545387712011-11-15T14:44:00.000+00:002011-11-15T14:44:52.245+00:00McCabe, maybe, but definitely Mrs. MillerAt points, <i>McCabe & Mrs. Miller</i> is a film that exists only through a fog. Director Robert Altman and his cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond purposefully 'flashed' the negative and several of the camera filters to irreparably distinctify the film style, but this eerie distance isn't merely achieved visually. Leonard Cohen's nostalgic compositions make moments feel consigned to myth as we watch them. The first half of the film is about McCabe's (Warren Beatty) efforts to build a new town, and so <i>McCabe & Mrs. Miller</i> itself builds reality out of the fog, slowly gathering an heavy earthiness as it progresses, eventually becoming overwhelmed by the elemental. It's an experience that makes the mundane disquieting, where Mrs. Miller's (Julie Christie) matter-of-fact business smarts slice through the muted atmosphere with startling bluntness.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">So obtuse I had to add a white circle so you'd even <i>notice</i>.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Mrs. Miller's introduction is the briefest of glimpses - a purposefully obtuse concealment. It fits perfectly into Altman's filmmaking style but it's a tease. Julie Christie is a movie star and you're waiting for her. There she i- <i>no</i>. Not yet.<br />
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When she finally reappears, it's perched on a carriage pulled by a steam engine struggling up the hill, puffing deafeningly. An inconspicuous entrance into McCabe's life, but then she hops off and marches into the film without any nonsense. "You John McCabe? Mrs. Miller. I came up from Beatport to see ye'," she says, an astonishingly Cockney accent in the American Northwest. The accent is never discussed or disputed, and is merely an element of the difference of the character that hangs over proceedings. She and McCabe are the different, the focus, and though she's been absent for a quarter of the film already, Altman seems to inject her straight into the film's centre. As she pauses in the half-built saloon, the camera seems to take breathe with her, a short sharp shot of her at an angle 90° apart from the neighbouring frames:<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheYVSyGH9UcFjszJhyG0P7KLIomydyT0JtME797xe4G89VLE9_WROYxBenFEtA-FpV2f54zZFlIBGGIP5nNog2e8Nr6GWRmzqZRJaJSgDcyE_GT8vWbcDqHtJFTRjYF7M6x2zZ/s1600/breathless02.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="113" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheYVSyGH9UcFjszJhyG0P7KLIomydyT0JtME797xe4G89VLE9_WROYxBenFEtA-FpV2f54zZFlIBGGIP5nNog2e8Nr6GWRmzqZRJaJSgDcyE_GT8vWbcDqHtJFTRjYF7M6x2zZ/s400/breathless02.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"></span></span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
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</tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht60C8uU6u8qgr_bXwrEtITV6yF69qcNmz2shretv0gvboMBLCRhdEx8AUmteD9D96KbXdVmI2wrkVMXLwotpYvd1IE_4rDOD-BwiZHHqfg4SoN8RsUFWfCNfl7d4J8cf-s8xz/s1600/vlcsnap-2011-11-15-12h40m20s219.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht60C8uU6u8qgr_bXwrEtITV6yF69qcNmz2shretv0gvboMBLCRhdEx8AUmteD9D96KbXdVmI2wrkVMXLwotpYvd1IE_4rDOD-BwiZHHqfg4SoN8RsUFWfCNfl7d4J8cf-s8xz/s320/vlcsnap-2011-11-15-12h40m20s219.png" width="320" /></a></div>When in the restaurant, the camera isolates the eponymous pair, the naturalist aesthetic retaining the sound of the community around them but this lofty angle setting them into a dark, reclusive corner, glowing in their own light. Christie's accent compounds the brisk, straightforward mundanity of what her entrance brings to the film - she yanks it back from the misty nostalgia, talks of the prostitutes' "monthlies" and greed for money and blows her nose like a foghorn. Unlike that which surrounds her, we know nothing about Mrs. Miller's past, her directness, and Christie's brusque, unfettered characterisation ensuring that her present is her sole existence for the majority of the film.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"You get out of my shot, you wanker."</td></tr>
</tbody></table><i>McCabe & Mrs. Miller</i> is about masculinity. It's about McCabe's bravado, his cowardice hiding behind a legend, and how Mrs. Miller cracks straight through it, leans him out of the frame and challenges his restricted dreams. She is the reality, the smart and the active; where he is the fool, the coward who has a distorted sense of the real world, of its currency and its death. It is also about modernity - the steam engine shuddering up the hill - and, as the economic crux of the film makes itself apparent in the suited agents, the film slowly gets heavier, earthier, more present. The romantic gauze of the early scenes seems to vanish, and the whistlingly nostalgic music fades away, lost and entwined in the howling wind. The physical reality of the town he built up ultimately surrounds McCabe and suffocates him.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Finally, lost in Mrs. Miller's observation too...</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Mrs. Miller's own ending stares into the vibrant red and answers nothing about her feelings for McCabe. Altman frequently zooms breathlessly onto people merely observing, no answers to be found in their own face, nor any questions being asked. <i>McCabe & Mrs. Miller</i> is an escape into a nostalgic past where people are just as inert as they were in 1971, and as they are now. As colour and music drain from the film, it is not accidental that proceedings become more realistic. This is a life without colour, and possibly without love. But it is that possibility that lingers, and where the masterpiece might lie. <b>A-</b>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-36813750747597431312011-10-12T21:48:00.002+00:002011-10-12T21:49:06.111+00:00LFF Review: Martha Marcy May MarleneUSA<br />
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written and directed by Sean Durkin; starring Elizabeth Olsen, Sarah Paulson, John Hawkes, Hugh Dancy, Brady Corbet, Louisa Krause<br />
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screens on Friday 21st, Saturday 22nd and Monday 24th October<br />
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<b>A-</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcJvGiOUKn3dfcGcgYgHar3GhihXGCoyKrvL2GbdH5t4JU9om8naJKNbYtzU7tsdhP-H17J8CqEElSdZhyphenhyphenyvQskqBaWmESXNbd1P5le_Vsxfw94Wzn5k-aeAVedS4MT2wWMmQf/s1600/marthamarcy.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="152" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcJvGiOUKn3dfcGcgYgHar3GhihXGCoyKrvL2GbdH5t4JU9om8naJKNbYtzU7tsdhP-H17J8CqEElSdZhyphenhyphenyvQskqBaWmESXNbd1P5le_Vsxfw94Wzn5k-aeAVedS4MT2wWMmQf/s400/marthamarcy.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />
"I know who I am," proclaims Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) in rude defiance, decrying not only the concerned eye of her sister but the title of the film itself. <i>Martha Marcy May Marlene</i> is a sharp confusion of a title, one which compounds the collusion of identities that threads lucidly through the film. On first appearance, she is without a name, a silent figure setting a table which she must wait to eat at. Sexist oppression has tired for her, though, and just as quietly she slips out of the house in the dawning light, the camera ever so gradually receding backwards as she slips through the woods opposite. Then, <i>snap</i>; close, breathless, the camera runs with the terrified girl through the forest, wild hand held turns matching her panicked confusion. Martha, Marcy, May or Marlene: whoever she is, we're in this with her now.<br />
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Sean Durkin's debut feature is an striking combination of prickly panic and eerie calm. Once Martha escapes her overcrowded abode - which is soon confirmed to be the site of an earthy misogynistic cult headed by the frighteningly charismatic Patrick (John Hawkes) - the film establishes past and present not as distinctly separate narratives, but as inextricably entwined, constantly bleeding into one another. Echoes of one repeatedly appear in another, accomplished by quiet tricks of editing and photography. Often shocking but never cheaply utilized, this confusion craftily reflects Martha's damaged state of mind, unable to truly escape what she has run away from, and with a mind unconvinced that she even <i>need</i> leave it all behind.<br />
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No judgments are made on what possible benefits Martha might gain from either the cult - which, though a harrowing and abusive environment, seems at least to give Martha a steelier edge, a far cry from the naivety we glimpse of her before her move into the communal house - or the bourgeosie, consumerist lives of her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and her critical husband (Hugh Dancy). The continual suggestion is that Martha cannot reconcile herself to either world; though, since her personality before joining the cult is only briefly glimpsed, the audience can only guess whether her awkwardness in normal society was always an issue. The possibility that Lucy's way of a life is as damaging as the cult often seems overstated, particularly through Lucy's reactions to Martha's strange behaviour, which are often shaming, outraged chastisements rather than the bewildered concern Paulson otherwise emits so superbly. But fold these shifting reactions into the quiet discussions the sisters have about their pasts, and another layer of mystery is added - Lucy never really knew her sister, so she, like us, can't know how deeply rooted Martha's issues are. It's a clever, frustrating revelation that obscures Martha even further.<br />
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In Olsen, you can see the limpid ghost of her infamous elder sisters, her face a construction of ovals; eyes large pools that glass over, a face that sours and turns in on itself when Martha tries to shut her sister out, as if she's trying to remove herself from the room. It's a brave performance that interiorises the pain and confusion, which then bursts out into the film like shards of glass, thrusting into the narrative at awkward angles through the spurring of dark memories, and the shattering clarity of the sound design (a taunting phone, reverberating shrilly in the middle of the night). The teasing final shot essentially leaves Martha as a figurehead for any woman escaping an abusive environment, but due to Olsen's superb work, Martha has become sympathetic through her unknowability - the audience feels for her confusion, her instability, impressed and scared by her barbed tongue and her aloof naivety.<br />
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Durkin and his cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes develop a slow, observant style of shooting, using gradual zooms and curving pans to give illusions of perspective and shift the viewer's eye. As the film progresses, camera, edit and sound work with the script to ratchet the tension to a distressing pitch, their weaving of past and present pressurising Martha to unbearable effect. The palpable dread of Martha's situation, and of Lucy's inability to deal with it, becomes harder to watch, since we become increasingly <i>less</i> certain of the people we're watching. Martha, Marcy, May, Marlene - she is all of them, and she is none of them.Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-42207285333047162282011-10-09T22:01:00.000+00:002011-10-09T22:01:53.834+00:00Woody's Witching Hour<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKv0xZTUv-4fcOZ38LFq4bny3dW0uFR0mCo268VX88S_Z0xlYVFV3_7XfwY4deMaPcBDQi9Edq4bj47V9NG95maqouscWamQsch5uB7AS4VXdDLEk3tiiLoVbIuEWvvEQl0yjE/s1600/midnight-in-paris-poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKv0xZTUv-4fcOZ38LFq4bny3dW0uFR0mCo268VX88S_Z0xlYVFV3_7XfwY4deMaPcBDQi9Edq4bj47V9NG95maqouscWamQsch5uB7AS4VXdDLEk3tiiLoVbIuEWvvEQl0yjE/s320/midnight-in-paris-poster.jpg" width="216" /></a>Colour me surprised that <i>Midnight in Paris</i> burst into UK cinemas a mere five months after its US release, but then you'll all have heard by now that this nostalgia piece by one of America's most prolific and speediest directors is his most financially successful film <i>ever</i>. Earlier this year, on the delayed release of <i>You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger</i>, I wrote <a href="http://victimofthetime.blogspot.com/2011/03/woody-allen-conjecture.html">this piece</a> on Allen's last two films, closing with the question, "... will he ever recover his talent for funny, perceptive human insights, or even the romantic visual sense that was once so palatable?"<br />
<br />
You've been waiting with baited breath for the answer, and, since it was rather fittingly released into the darkening twinkle of autumn's beginning, you didn't have to hold your breath and go red and collapse with exhaustion in the meantime. <i>Midnight in Paris</i> is Woody's best film in years; certainly his most vibrant since <i>Match Point</i>, and unlike that arch and slightly morbid exercise, this feels like classic Woody. It isn't, don't get me wrong, because he's still lost his touch at writing personable, funny, truthful female characters and in the final event, Rachel McAdams' shrill fiance almost sinks the entire ship.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcpMfqoMNo4B83IhcUHsQwe3cFILBrz9UgV9xrAKRXOE5oQknGx-WWx23fdLoR3Rt-QTxnWQ5VG-0GQrVuEoSd79QKa9DNHRG_ls6XuK_PPg8NWhxv_gTVOP7dgQIm1huwFC_D/s1600/mip-bed.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="175" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcpMfqoMNo4B83IhcUHsQwe3cFILBrz9UgV9xrAKRXOE5oQknGx-WWx23fdLoR3Rt-QTxnWQ5VG-0GQrVuEoSd79QKa9DNHRG_ls6XuK_PPg8NWhxv_gTVOP7dgQIm1huwFC_D/s320/mip-bed.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">You'd never be able to tell they're not really in love.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>But if we put that aside - and, after so many years experiencing the same (and probably worse) from him, I have to, or I'll never enjoy anything ever again - <i>Midnight in Paris</i> is a film that sparkles with the romance and spirit of the city its set in. Again, a revelation - Woody's managed to capture the essence of a city again, after so baldly missing anything special in Barcelona and consistently misrepresenting London. The bizarrely prolonged montage of shots around Paris that begins the film worried, then relieved me; it was as if Woody was exhausting himself and the audience of all these generic shots, before approaching his real depiction of the city through the nostalgia trip that is the basis of the narrative. The imitation of such major historical cultural figures is so daringly brash that he pulls it off, the clearly fictional imaginings lending a joyous vibrancy that reflects off the walls, the steps and the pavements. The restraint he shows in shying away from any of the iconic buildings means that, even though it's a city chased down a hazily nostalgic rabbit hole, it comes alive because the central character is so in love with the setting.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2ZBn5-joVs29Ri-3rEc0FhXecSBfRR9MaPvjq3l1thOdkiITnVLa9mEIqysFWolqTR2Plmz62SsOouh-pepOnh9NiCnbmowy4O276MzO6IeE2vAYH-X9W-UW0eJhS3s88xcy-/s1600/mip-walk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2ZBn5-joVs29Ri-3rEc0FhXecSBfRR9MaPvjq3l1thOdkiITnVLa9mEIqysFWolqTR2Plmz62SsOouh-pepOnh9NiCnbmowy4O276MzO6IeE2vAYH-X9W-UW0eJhS3s88xcy-/s320/mip-walk.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">They're looking at each other. I'd say that's a good first step towards romance.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>And in Owen Wilson, Woody's found a substitute for himself who really works (whatever works won't do after all), and ensures that this feels more like one of the classic Woody-starrers than the past fifteen years of his back catalogue have. He's aloof and slightly rude without being unsympathetic, his foppishness subbing well for Woody's reediness. As perhaps befits the plot, the modern day cast are of little interest (though Michael Sheen has predictable fun as a pretentious pedant), but the players of '20s Paris shine, particularly Corey Stoll as an uncompromising, darkly charismatic Ernest Hemingway. And Marion Cotillard is just a shimmer away from undoing the damage McAdams' character does - winsome, elusive, though ultimately just a little too idealised.<br />
<br />
To return to my months-old question, I'd be hard-pressed to say that there are any particularly revelatory human insights to be had here. That's a shame, because once upon a time, Woody Allen was one of those writers who could start a scene with a joke and end it with a revelation. Woody the scribe is still stuck in convention, ending the film with a message that's far too bluntly delivered, and rather at odds with his entire career of late. Does Woody actually recognise his own situation - a writer in need of a Gertrude Stein - in Wilson's? Doubtful. But Woody the director has livened up again, and the final point is this. <i>Midnight in Paris</i>, for the first time since, oh, <i>Everyone Says I Love You</i> (just fifteen years ago! ...), is a Woody Allen film genuinely alive with the sense of its title. It might not be Woody back on his unchallenged classical form but it's a Woody who seems to have recovered a sense of the magic of cinema, of the discovery of a troubled character's ventures, and of a sense of romantic purpose. The clock has struck, and I can spy <i>Manhattan</i> down the street. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">(</span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">B-</span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">)</span>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-28535168412585267092011-06-04T17:01:00.000+00:002011-06-04T17:01:20.842+00:00Freaks in LoveLet's get this out of the way. There's only one reason people see <i>Freaks</i> these days. Here it is.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRuLsxrprYQExBgEPClj0sLnJZKjKeDzuZtrnpogLdwHgmLr4ZJwlGhSn3pFQNeqPeGcRk-AbNT75F6kc0daFqekqXX9nzIOjnhrpte0vEY3A0ZC6zbClOeEKI7v6wbSN5UT0H/s1600/vlcsnap-2011-06-04-17h30m51s18.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRuLsxrprYQExBgEPClj0sLnJZKjKeDzuZtrnpogLdwHgmLr4ZJwlGhSn3pFQNeqPeGcRk-AbNT75F6kc0daFqekqXX9nzIOjnhrpte0vEY3A0ZC6zbClOeEKI7v6wbSN5UT0H/s400/vlcsnap-2011-06-04-17h30m51s18.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />
Scientists and I are still baffled as to how this is realistically possible, but look at that jacket! Quite swank for a duck-lady, I think you'll agree.<br />
<br />
I'd seen <i>Freaks</i> a few years ago and somehow managed to forget this deliciously insane revelation, so I do admit, I rolled up for a packed screening in the centre of London with slightly embarrassed anticipation at the madness I'd blanked on. What I recalled from my first viewing was a rather frightening climax where the freaks move like terminators through sticky midnight mud, preceded by the most boring and stilted machinations concerning circus freaks that had ever been filmed.<br />
<br />
But lo! What I found on second viewing were the most stilted machinations concerning circus freaks ever filmed, that somehow had a tragic romance at its heart. Real-life husband and wife Harry and Daisy Earles bagged the plum roles here, as Hans, the rich midget taken in by eventual duck-lady Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova), and his girlfriend Freida, powerless to prevent that gold-digging whore!! from stealing her man. Despite the awkward, halting manner in which the pair deliver their dialogue, there is something affecting in their performances, particularly Daisy's. As Freida becomes increasingly forgotten by Hans, the faltering speech even adds to the devastation she feels and that we feel for her.<br />
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Mostly, though, it's in the facial expressions. Harry Earles is certainly expressive - watch as he mimicks Cleopatra's sycophantic pretence - but the emotional power of Freaks is almost entirely in Daisy Earles' melancholy faces. Observe.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiihQjlreSirW89A19eBZ45vJmYM4ZcBjKbYuOp1UHTgDEaP_J9qIPlBnKKkMyTZz4_tP-KhDJq1picQ26pElBR8abpUZPEEjWVjHXrTDn1-Cn-Y2m9WynNPU6t2lZ-mdqG5GSp/s1600/vlcsnap-2011-05-30-14h12m08s27.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiihQjlreSirW89A19eBZ45vJmYM4ZcBjKbYuOp1UHTgDEaP_J9qIPlBnKKkMyTZz4_tP-KhDJq1picQ26pElBR8abpUZPEEjWVjHXrTDn1-Cn-Y2m9WynNPU6t2lZ-mdqG5GSp/s400/vlcsnap-2011-05-30-14h12m08s27.png" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIaGiYe5hyphenhyphenXxaIPwRQqAvteSk9BDknU9puGnVGm84wIuKTSgtdyMx9YMU5xHMmFooCxWG313_NKDjTRjHKnpUeJNTVCBycaq01EMM84ANRHggWwFJ_y1uaQ6tu9xQHWfmnrcVq/s1600/vlcsnap-2011-05-30-15h49m50s27.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIaGiYe5hyphenhyphenXxaIPwRQqAvteSk9BDknU9puGnVGm84wIuKTSgtdyMx9YMU5xHMmFooCxWG313_NKDjTRjHKnpUeJNTVCBycaq01EMM84ANRHggWwFJ_y1uaQ6tu9xQHWfmnrcVq/s400/vlcsnap-2011-05-30-15h49m50s27.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiv0dHjUy4AYOgL-a2FRR6qd54Y_R2nKU6c6UXPv5KKsJobbjTTx95yeS7DfWUMoC1w38KgiUe6VGasP14ZoFj5YCZ8OdtoDwB_vl0N1puMYsiRaXoTkw4IAnES4QZkU0l1bOp/s1600/vlcsnap-2011-05-30-15h57m12s89.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiv0dHjUy4AYOgL-a2FRR6qd54Y_R2nKU6c6UXPv5KKsJobbjTTx95yeS7DfWUMoC1w38KgiUe6VGasP14ZoFj5YCZ8OdtoDwB_vl0N1puMYsiRaXoTkw4IAnES4QZkU0l1bOp/s400/vlcsnap-2011-05-30-15h57m12s89.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />
I think this unexpectedly beautiful shot telegraphs the tenderly tragic, and surprisingly straight, romance at the film's core, though.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJai2LpyaRe3rH5zKwqKG1oJXj8n4VZgq5w7S_uH77gJ_ccaxXXwBTZ9WZW9FqfWCPszRLs5WSeqXlXPvviZO3YwGBrYJ1Acvl0WQvCYoL9St6IkUQB-Ifk4SWD4hayRhC8xUj/s1600/vlcsnap-2011-05-30-15h51m14s101.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJai2LpyaRe3rH5zKwqKG1oJXj8n4VZgq5w7S_uH77gJ_ccaxXXwBTZ9WZW9FqfWCPszRLs5WSeqXlXPvviZO3YwGBrYJ1Acvl0WQvCYoL9St6IkUQB-Ifk4SWD4hayRhC8xUj/s400/vlcsnap-2011-05-30-15h51m14s101.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />
Although if you've not seen the film, that probably just looks like two people facing away from the camera. AMATEURS.<br />
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P.S. Of course, none of this is as wonderfully 'hilare' as the scene where the suitors of the Siamese twins discuss how they should visit each other sometime. Just imagine the sexual intercourse.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjcV8EBmVkFLJSZZqWaYqPbnH9pQNLONRePxuNStPGDcwx7f-m149w5tOvCfBUivu8dFB0cmjZXYRpqVDi98AvSLqTC0CCddz5pMHVLGMjz6ociB4EuJbqMmk67Y7EKShY1apm/s1600/vlcsnap-2011-05-30-15h49m13s165.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjcV8EBmVkFLJSZZqWaYqPbnH9pQNLONRePxuNStPGDcwx7f-m149w5tOvCfBUivu8dFB0cmjZXYRpqVDi98AvSLqTC0CCddz5pMHVLGMjz6ociB4EuJbqMmk67Y7EKShY1apm/s320/vlcsnap-2011-05-30-15h49m13s165.png" width="320" /></a></div>Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21707901.post-62269720893666879172011-06-01T19:37:00.000+00:002011-06-01T19:37:21.322+00:00Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Curtain Rouge<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">This post is a contribution to the <a href="http://thefilmexperience.net/blog/tag/hit-me-with-your-best-shot">Hit Me With Your Best Shot</a> series at <a href="http://www.thefilmexperience.net/">The Film Experience</a>.</span><br />
<blockquote style="text-align: center;"><i>Another mindless crime... behind the curtain...</i></blockquote> Part of Baz Lurhmann's 'Red Curtain' trilogy (the effervescent <i>Strictly Ballroom</i> and the searing <i>William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet</i> precede it), <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0203009/">Moulin Rouge!</a></i> is like the mama's boy to its director parent, the teacher's pet - it opens with a red curtain. And there are red curtains behind the red curtain. The film's melee and mishmash of songs, styles and the sheer speed of the editing make <i>Moulin Rouge!</i> such a dazzling spectacle that it's hard to know where, if anywhere, the show stops. But just as freedom, beauty, truth, and of course love are layered into the range of pop songs interpolated and performed, they are similarly hot-wired into every shaking skirt and wavering note.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheB7Vfhjiw7j3BcotpakVmnQhB1IvfotuF17wi_PEuLWoxnJ_84TYTEdjhbDhJ7QLeOBX4dBADhb_2uYPdmVF209IWiDa0EMIOF9oLL-isKEj9ch_7DjrKeFFXy0jT1vRjRTZO/s1600/vlcsnap-2011-06-01-19h13m04s33.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="137" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheB7Vfhjiw7j3BcotpakVmnQhB1IvfotuF17wi_PEuLWoxnJ_84TYTEdjhbDhJ7QLeOBX4dBADhb_2uYPdmVF209IWiDa0EMIOF9oLL-isKEj9ch_7DjrKeFFXy0jT1vRjRTZO/s320/vlcsnap-2011-06-01-19h13m04s33.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Red Curtain throughout: as Christian walks out on the <br />
tango, the curtains separate that performance space.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Trying to take shortcuts (I'm pressed for time, and I watched the film not a month ago just because I wanted to), I did some quick thinking about the scenes that stick out in my memory, and this sequence is one of them. It's filmed with what seems like a hand-held camera, generally used these days to signify a greater 'realism', but here it seems to add instead the frisson of danger that proves to be a valuable warning: Zidler (Jim Broadbent) spots the careless lovers, Satine (Nicole Kidman) and Christian (Ewan McGregor), on the walkway above. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi19ZCpKKYxEULbCF6rMOpqDzlCljPXshsRWSC8CjTaT_Ih2FXtVVVwzEPYu3V1fUzM0gvAmKAB2wJDiV_SMIUJAJ3NWkjHgbR6oh-ZkekA2AJcmZmKX0pNYGerlqBhbYOz9AJD/s1600/vlcsnap-2011-06-01-19h01m04s4.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi19ZCpKKYxEULbCF6rMOpqDzlCljPXshsRWSC8CjTaT_Ih2FXtVVVwzEPYu3V1fUzM0gvAmKAB2wJDiV_SMIUJAJ3NWkjHgbR6oh-ZkekA2AJcmZmKX0pNYGerlqBhbYOz9AJD/s400/vlcsnap-2011-06-01-19h01m04s4.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />
I love the empty, clean lines on each side of this composition, framing the frantic, lusty mess of Kidman and McGregor in the centre.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ5mLzben39AQUyVHgGRGC7NjIiD_7yWSNDbNWjzHW9Pj28w5tp-IA3mAfYo_A56QEfQuHU42MbpOWE91135E2RXqQtDCKx8gYHMCiC46Fn03TZ_PPFuSp08KiozIyXl0dXhk2/s1600/vlcsnap-2011-06-01-19h02m51s45.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ5mLzben39AQUyVHgGRGC7NjIiD_7yWSNDbNWjzHW9Pj28w5tp-IA3mAfYo_A56QEfQuHU42MbpOWE91135E2RXqQtDCKx8gYHMCiC46Fn03TZ_PPFuSp08KiozIyXl0dXhk2/s400/vlcsnap-2011-06-01-19h02m51s45.png" width="400" /></a></div><div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Or this, focusing in on the beauty of the messy kiss (if you don't love this pair, you don't believe in love at all!) with the block of light grey in the centre separating them from the mess of the main auditorium.</div><div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk_C_2tOgxokbib9UwkhQsP2qsemPpaM66oORvKU9_Y62UHjX4LgBPPIJvtww1M-sIsaRHh_H9ufcgEWWrG_dQGeFtW8K_vV0kPlE0x1QniU4pXaMd7MFcWjxHj1aAqUf99xTj/s1600/vlcsnap-2011-06-01-19h05m17s231.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk_C_2tOgxokbib9UwkhQsP2qsemPpaM66oORvKU9_Y62UHjX4LgBPPIJvtww1M-sIsaRHh_H9ufcgEWWrG_dQGeFtW8K_vV0kPlE0x1QniU4pXaMd7MFcWjxHj1aAqUf99xTj/s400/vlcsnap-2011-06-01-19h05m17s231.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My pick for <b>best shot</b>.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Perhaps Satine's final moment of happiness; this is just before Zidler appears, spooking her and telling her it has to end. Here, he's already metaphorically creeping up on her, the bottom left of the frame filled with darkness, a gilded kind of black; but she's lost in the stars in the red canopy above. They meet in the centre and on the diagonal, a singular moment where the rosy happiness and desire of the red crosses diagonally and horizontally with the black. And they meet on Satine, too: her dress is intoxicatingly dark to conflict with the thorough red of Kidman's hair (a key focus of the photography throughout). It's a darker colour scheme than is often typical of the movie, but a perfect reflection of Moulin Rouge!'s dark drama and its vibrant infatuations.Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825700768032126915noreply@blogger.com2