God distracts the faithful

Whilst God distracts the faithful I see eleven films over four days, only two of which are new. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Garden of The Finzi-Continis; the latter had been sitting on my shelf since just before Christmas and as I’d seen The Conformist on Netflix only a few weeks ago, it would complete a Dominique Sanda double-bill. The Conformist is visually striking but in that category of ‘appreciate’ as opposed to ‘love’, whereas Finzi-Continis, having a gorgeous colour palette, is not only beautiful to look at but a film I’ll watch again; this despite a soundtrack that on occasion appears off, apparently the result of being post-synchronised rather than recorded live. Something I couldn’t help noticing with both Italian films is that voyeuristic regard to female nudity you find in late 60’s and early ‘70s European cinema. There are some who will call this a brave (for the time) expression of female sexuality; you believe that if you want, it looks like a wet t-shirt to me.

Giorgio Bassani's story is of a wealthy Jewish family separated from the rise of Italian fascism by the walls of their estate; odd that I too came to believe the high-walled garden would shield them from the world outside. There were many festival highlights, but the other that springs to mind is an old favourite, Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind. My reaction each time is the same. It starts quirky, turns rather clever and - just at the moment you feel a danger of it disappearing up its own fundament - becomes something quite wonderful. Joel shows Clementine an embarrassing moment of his past, to which the younger Clementine leads the younger Joel away through a gap in the fence. “I’m so ashamed” he says. “It’s OK”, she replies “you were a little kid.”

Phil's four-day film festival

12

Something Wild; Jonathan Demme (director), Melanie Griffith, Jeff Daniels, Ray Liotta.
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis; Vittorio De Sica (director), Dominique Sanda.
Wonderland; Michael Winterbottom (director), Gina McKee, Shirley Henderson, Molly Parker.
Revolutionary Road; Sam Mendes (director), Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet.
City of God; Fernando Meirelles (director), Alexandre Rodrigues, Leandro Firmino.
The Machinist; Brad Anderson (director), Christian Bale, Jennifer Jason Leigh.
The Dark Knight; Christopher Nolan (director), Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart.
Moon; Duncan Jones (director), Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey, Dominique McElligott.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; Tomas Alfredson (director), Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, John Hurt.
The Fountain; Darren Aronofsky (director), Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; Michel Gondry (director), Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet.

The hills are alive with the sound of pretentiousness

It's the Japanese film that won the Oscar for best foreign language film of 2008. It shouldn’t have. Departures is a good film, I liked it, but I find it difficult to believe it best. I should watch The Baader Meinhof Complex whilst it’s still on iPlayer so I can rate one of the competition. Daigo Kobayashi is a cello player who through circumstance becomes a mortician. In a country where death is the subject of much ceremony - yet is also taboo - Departures offers another view on a culture so different to our own. I’m all for difference, and on those universal themes of sorrow and loss it was very moving, in places, but I have some reservations.

To start, it’s a film with two endings; there’s a really good end to this film - about 20 minutes before the actual end to this film. There’s the lovely conclusion (that should have been) when the cute wife, who to that point hasn’t been too supportive of his new career, looks lovingly at her husband whilst he handles another customer. And then, unfortunately, there’s the mistaken need to tidy up any loose ends - the whole back story of his father. And then there’s the cello, oh God...

Daigo is a cello player, and in common with other cello players he likes to drive into the middle of nowhere and position himself on a small grassy ridge with snow-covered mountains in the background. If you’ve seen the poster and want to know what it has to do with the film, let me answer that one for you - absolutely nothing. This isn’t a film about a cello player - that’s the ‘cultured man in culture clash’ device - it’s a film about a man who handles dead bodies; though to be fair, showing a dead body in front of a mountain backdrop might have been more difficult to sell. There’s a few of these cello-playing intervals too; some featuring the player himself, some with swans or other wildlife. Oh and while I think about it, there’s a bit about some fish who “swim upstream only to die”. As luck would have it there happens to be an old man on hand to utter some wise words underscoring the message of the film, though I’m damned if I can remember what they were.

There's always a bigger fish

A silly amount of time spent trying to size three hyperlinked images of the same dimensions into a mosaic collage that would fit the width of a blog post; that's easy for me to say, easy enough until I added in consistent spacing between the images. I cheated; I hard-coded the sizes and the two smaller images were stretched slightly, but I think with a proper use of divs acting as columns, 100% widths and the overflow property, it should be possible to write something slightly more dynamic. Only, not today; I’m chewing up too many evenings working on minor side-projects that can be filed under “how” rather than “where”; not always a bad thing, I’m sure I’ll find a suitable use for “where” at some point.

In the 1,056th redesign of this blog the search box has a (CSS3) transition in width, which looks good where supported (Chrome, Firefox etc) and jerky where not (IE). It’s a bit of a gimmick either way since it requires screen real-estate to expand into; perhaps this is the reason Twitter recently changed their search box to fixed width? On the other hand, the on-focus transition in background colour looks good and has an acceptable degradation on IE. But let’s face it, who uses the search box on a blog? I might occasionally search within a niche blog but mostly I rely on The Google; why restrict myself to one source when I can search them all? And I have no niche, no idea from one week to the next what I might write about, so it’s even more difficult to imagine a reader having read a post on minimum priced alcohol, then wondering what I have to say on that masterpiece of modern cinema, Shoot 'Em Up. I love a good film...

I love a good film... and Shoot 'Em Up isn’t one of them. Yet despite this love of film, I’ve been thinking of cancelling my Lovefilm subscription. I’ve signed up to Netflix, using the free trial to watch season five of The Office, but there’s enough to keep me interested, for a few months at least. The picture quality - through the Wii - is adequate, not as good as that provided by BT Vision; use the iPlayer on both devices and the Wii appears a little fuzzy in comparison. Netflix does however have an easy interface; I’m not keen on the large sideways scrolling tiles, but there are other views and I like features such as automatically lining up the next episode in a series. It’s the convenience of streaming versus the better picture and newer releases afforded by DVD. Only my last three rentals on Lovefilm have been a mixed bag. Rise of the Planet of the Apes was as good as I’d heard but Captain America hugely disappointing, and Bad Teacher so bad I’d almost call it evil; I got what I deserved. Not like In the Mood for Love, my first film on Netflix, moving and understated, it suffered an unscheduled pause an hour into the film and - entirely unrelated - from a cruel suspicion the subtitle font was in Comic Sans; it wasn’t, but it was close. I mean, what kind of person notices things like that?

A truth universally re-imagined

Praise be, I have finally read Pride & Prejudice; at the third attempt, or possibly the second since I’m not sure picking up the book and never opening it counts. It wasn’t, in case you’re wondering, the graphic novel depicted - I just like the idea and since I’ve seen so many adaptations, perhaps one day this will be another? How could I have doubted Jane Austen having seen this story told so many times? There’s an old version with Laurence Olivier that takes huge liberties with the story, but it helps if you have a crush on Greer Garson. I vaguely remember a BBC series from the 1980’s before their more famous effort with Colin Firth. And there’s the Keira Knightley film of which I’m unsure, despite having seen it a few times. I suppose familiarity was a problem but it proved its worth, despite taking a while to settle on who was who; Firth as Darcy, Mary Boland as Mrs Bennet, Melville Cooper edged out by David Bamber for the role of Mr Collins, yet I could never settle on an Elizabeth; it was no matter, the book was the star. I knew it to be a clever, sharp humour, but never imagined romance could be portrayed so well.

Courtesy of my Kindle which, despite Amazon continually reminding me of a newer, cheaper version with a better form-factor, has proved the spark necessary to get me reading again. I love my Kindle. Pride & Prejudice is the twelfth book I’ve read this year, it’s not a lot I know; I am in awe of you book-a-week types, for me it’s a recovery from near extinction, so I’m happy. Of the dozen, I’d seen film or television adaptations of five. I’m not sure what that says, whether it’s a good or a bad thing, whether it’s a normal ratio, but since I’m planning to read Any Human Heart next, it’s not worried me too much. I bought it on Blu-ray but to be fair, I am going to read the book first... oh alright, second; I saw it on Channel 4 last December.

Five days off, five days on

There’s the rub, all that lovely time away followed by a period reintegrating myself into society. Following The White Ribbon I watched The Road, which I’ve seen a few times before having read the book a while back. It’s a film I like more and more, in the same way I ‘like’ The Elephant Man; both have me teary-eyed at the end. My procrastination meant there would be no festival of film, but there were the occasional moments of quality and that’ll do; I’m trying not to feel too guilty that I can’t remember what I did with the remaining time. I ate too much, but I exercised too. A little, though since I dragged Little Miss R on a regular walk and without too much complaint, there’s hope for me yet. And I’m back at work reminding myself how it all works. I ask that question a lot.

Loose ends

Another three-day break from everything, where I unexpectedly found myself looking after Little Miss R - I hadn't realised it was half term. This might have meant a curtailed film program were it not for the distraction of YouTube and iPlayer and every other high-end consumer of my broadband allowance. As it turns out, I find I don't watch nearly as much as I can, and my reading is equally abject. I am without purpose, wandering up and down the TV schedule unwilling to commit; I even gave up on Tilda Swinton, that’s how bad it got.

Today however, I kicked the malaise. Not through the last episode of Hidden, a conspiracy thriller from the BBC conjuring an old trick; appear more than you are through leaving key questions unresolved. My temporary redemption came through a drama altogether different, unsettling and at first unsatisfactory. The White Ribbon doesn’t provide a neat resolution either but there is, I realised on reflection, a strong message. Michael Haneke described it as a film about "the origin of every type of terrorism, be it of political or religious nature", but it’s not nearly as indulgent as that might sound. Violence corrupts; rarely has this been expressed so well.

Kind hearts are more than coronets

Over a year after buying an Ealing box set, I put on the only film in the collection I hadn’t seen as a boy - Kind Hearts and Coronets. Terrific stuff, unexpectedly dark, though given its premise I don’t know why the surprise. I think I was taken aback by how sharp it was and how, though the roles of Alec Guiness are a reference point, it is the performance of Dennis Price I will remember, if not Joan Greenwood as the artful Sibella. Ah, Joan, we shall meet again in The Man in the White Suit; I wonder if I’ll like you quite as much then?

I corrected my omission in response to a spot-on review in The Guardian - who’d have thought I’d ever say that - which starts “There are four great voiceovers in cinema”. Voiceovers; whilst I try not to judge, I regard them suspiciously, chuckle when the somewhat unsympathetic McKee dismisses it as “sloppy writing”; though that’s Adaptation, a film with a wonderfully recursive quality, featuring much ‘off-camera commentary’ itself. Occasionally I do have my prejudice stoked by the truly awful; drama such as The Body Farm - what were you thinking BBC? - or irritated when otherwise they have something to recommend, such as Submarine. On the whole, they magnify any fault, and if that’s the case I have no excuse - and every reason - to look up the others in the list; Sunset Boulevard and The Age of Innocence for instance - how can I have missed those two?

Smurfing hell

Somehow I contrived to raise my hopes, and suffered the consequences; The Smurfs was terrible. It only took a few comments of 'exceeded low expectations' for me to take leave of my senses; it might prove to be a guilty pleasure or a hidden gem... well maybe not that far, but I'd thought there might be something to enjoy, beyond a flimsy excuse to post a picture of Katy Perry.

And in eye-popping - I mean that literally - 3D too. I have only seen one film done well in 3D, though from a sample of four it’s hardly scientific. Coraline managed to make it part of the story; its use restrained in her ‘normal’ world, it’s only in the ‘other’ world that we get the full effect. In the other three films, which it occurs to me would have been crap in any dimension, it was full-on, all the time. This has two immediate side-effects; the first is the eye-wrenching alluded to earlier; the second is that you notice the limitations. I could distinguish layers, but with the result that each seemed more flat than if I’d been watching something ‘normally’; it reminded me of those cheap cartoons of the past, with a few overlaid backgrounds to give a sense of depth. Perhaps it’s a drawback pertaining to films converted to, rather than made in 3D. Hence I’ve not given up altogether, despite the film industry’s seemingly suicidal tendencies with this technology. I’ll have to be a little more discerning instead; not easy when you have a ten year old.

The run-down

My reviews being suspect, I shall resort to lists; of the seven, only those at either end were new to me. The damp squib was Saturday’s conclusion, Empire of the Sun; one of Spielberg’s early ‘serious’ films and of interest because in addition to not having seen it before, it featured child actor Christian Bale. Wednesday began with I’ve Loved You So Long and ended with The Luzhin Defence. Thursday was restricted to Downfall whereas Friday was glorious; Lost In Translation and Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind were joined in the evening by Brokeback Mountain - I’m not sure I can say which I thought best.

Each wish resigned

I’d forgotten it had a soul, and I made the same mistake as before. Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind is a clever film, but the world is awash with such. It’s a film I’ve seen three times now and whilst its cleverness will always impress, it has a point; about making the most of the time we have, reminding me that the good memories aren’t cancelled out by the bad. It was the second-half to a double-bill, though in retrospect I wonder if subject might have been best served by reversing the order.

My morning was taken with another favourite, Lost In Translation. It’s not nearly as technically accomplished and its faults are many; it’s voyeuristic, the depiction of the Japanese is at times caricature (accusations of being racist are simplistic), Scarlett Johansson’s character wanders and wonders, and her husband is such an asshole I wonder why she married him. I even thought all that walking around in her underwear unnecessary; suggesting either my new found maturity or - more likely - a cry for help. Yet it too is a film with heart; two people of different backgrounds, brought together by virtue of being lost and alone. I’m at a time where I can remember being adrift at either age.

Six thousand dollars? It's not even leather!

On second thoughts, £350 for a web browser? It doesn’t even have an optical drive! Out of curiosity I shall persist with the challenge of web-only use on my home machine, though since all this means is giving up Microsoft Office... well, I think I can manage that. I have greater challenges ahead. On Monday I have to correct the disaster that was Friday, where I managed to live my life backwards; now, nothing works. Nothing on my virtual desktop; my old fashioned right-in-front-of me desktop (though since I was working from home, I had remote access to that too) carries on regardless, whereas its replacement can’t even finish installing a service pack before rebooting.

Courtesy of BBC iPlayer, Saturday was better. Rubicon, which has occasionally threatened the fate of a shaggy dog story, defied my expectations and delivered the best episode yet. Will’s private investigation into his boss and the shady company Atlas McDowell, is dovetailing nicely into his team’s search for terrorist mastermind Kateb. It’s a throwback to those conspiracy films from the seventies, such as The Parallax View and Winter Kills; that sense of an individual’s hopeless stand against the tide, overwhelmed by events.

I could say the same for the best drama of the year, The Shadow Line; of which - save for an unnecessary salute at the end - I don’t think there was a duff moment in the whole series. What impressed with the final episode was how, even with the nature of the conspiracy revealed to Jonah Gabriel early on, I wasn’t sure how it would be resolved. I didn’t see it coming, though I really should have; the scene where Joseph Bede, played by Christopher Eccleston, leaves his house and stops momentarily when he sees his car waiting for him, was perfect. He knew.

Follow up some excellent television with some equally good films in Sin Hombre and There Will Be Blood, and the result is a quality weekend... albeit a bit grim. I’ll need a week or more of Pixar to restore the balance. And it would help if I could get my machine to work.

A socialist and her money

As a result of an accidental Cate Blanchett triple bill - what a fine actress - I heard the following exchange. Says the matriarch of a self-described “socialist family”:

We don’t care about money here, Mr Hughes.

To which Howard Hughes replies:

Well that’s because you have it.

Old favourites

I watched a couple of favourites on the weekend in The Godfather and Gattaca. Francis Ford Coppola’s mafia classic of such renown now, it’s difficult to imagine the trouble involved in making the film, from assembling the cast - for example, the studio didn’t want Marlon Brando - or even hiring a director; Coppola wasn’t first choice and was constantly on the verge of being fired. I’ve read that when asked he at first refused for fear of glamorising organised crime, but was won over when he thought of making it a metaphor for capitalism; funny because whilst I’ve never noted the metaphor, I’m aware of the criticism. I’d always assumed this was the reason for a change in tone between it and the sequel which followed a couple of years later; both films end with a settling of scores, but the latter contains no sense of triumphalism.

These two films (a third was made 16 years later) have been treated dreadfully on television. I remember on one occasion they were spliced up (part two contains story lines set before and after the events in part one) and shown in chronological order as a mini-series; worse and somewhat bizarrely, it was dubbed to remove the language that so offends, whilst maintaining the violence. Nowadays I notice the frayed edges; the blood isn’t the colour of blood, and there’s a noticeably phony fight scene between Sonny and his brother-in-law, Carlo; but these are minor details, even if you do see Brando as hamming it up, the story wins through. It’s always the story.

Gattaca suffers from this same nit-picking. Science fiction (if it can be labelled as such) often will; this time I found the the romantic subplot ropey, and the murder more MacGuffin than of any interest. In the past, when asked I would always list three films; Un Coeur en Hiver, The Elephant Man and Gattaca. And despite any faults, Gattaca would remain as its feel, particularly for the future - with an increasing ability to alter our DNA and ever insistent demands for a database - is truer today than when I first saw it all those years ago. I wonder, when it happens, if we’ll still have the self-awareness to realise what we’ve done - and whether it would be better if we didn’t?

The wild west

Desperate to find something to keep me occupied, after dropping the family off to see Joseph! at the Bristol Hippodrome (I wasn’t desperate enough to join them), I remembered there was a cinema entrenched within Cabot Circus. It had “de Lux” in the name, it was showing True Grit and best of all it had an online booking service - I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone.

But the online booking service wasn’t working so I took a chance with the 24 hour booking line; (I thought) all you have to do is press numbers. Alas, whilst that’s enough for Barclays it’s not enough to book a film and I was obliged to speak to the software on the other end. It was a short conversation:

Good afternoon and welcome… If, for example, you are calling for the Showcase cinema in Birmingham, simply say Birmingham, otherwise please say which Showcase cinema you are calling for.

Bristol.

I’m not sure if you mean the Showcase cinema in Cabots Circus, Bristol City centre or… Leeds.

Then I remembered I'd been using Chrome earlier; maybe I should try the old-timer, good old Internet Explorer, still good for something… and my ticket was booked.

All I needed was a cover story. It’s easier than explaining to Little Miss R why she can’t watch certain films, Black Swan was bad enough, and since she holds back from talking to people she doesn’t know - can’t imagine where she gets that from - I decided to meet a friend.

What’s his name?

Oh… ummm… Rooster Cogburn.

And then I added:

He probably looks a little different to how I remember.

Yet despite being a Coen brothers production, this new version is reassuringly familiar. It’s more subtle than I expected, the guys in black are mostly a shade of grey, and surviving, like the rest of us.

The best time of all

Not bad for three days. On the first I saw Black Swan, the next Atonement followed by Waterland, and on day three I finished with The Green Mile and The Road. Planning to watch Casablanca on Saturday evening, I commented to a friend how it was interesting that the film likely to have the most upbeat ending was one set against a backdrop of Nazi occupation and collaboration.

But I didn’t get to see Casablanca, my daughter took control of the television and I was banished to the PC upstairs, where I had to decrypt a region 1 DVD of American Beauty before I was able to play it. Together in the evening we watched Batman Begins; she loved every moment – a film not entirely suitable for a nine year old and shown well past her bedtime. Well... I won’t tell.

Resurgam

Since I have some time free before returning to work, a week no less, I am resolved to lock myself in a room where I cannot be disturbed and do something useful with my life: read a book. Since this will fail I am resolved to allocate some time to myself during each day in which to read. Since this will also fail I can only hope that the resolve I showed last night in actually switching off the television will be maintained for the short time I have left – before I start making excuses again.

Last evening’s sacrifice was to skip the opportunity to complete the Die Hard experience with Die Hard 4.0; a film that is from all accounts awful but something I need to see for what I believe is called closure. Come to think of it, though I enjoy the original there’s a particularly nasty scene near the end where John McClane’s new friend Al, deskbound because of an accidental shooting, learns how to kill again. I was sure I’d written about that in the past but a quick search on my blog reveals that I haven’t – either that or the search isn’t working.

Instead I read, and of all things I have started with Jane Eyre. I confess my choice was encouraged by the knowledge that classic literature on an eBook reader is free, and if nothing else I am cheap. It’s good; I’m already on chapter ten and though the chapters are pretty short, let’s accentuate the positive.

Santa bought me a Kindle - I didn’t want one but now I have one I quite like it. I figure 30 to 40 more classics will cover the cost; parsimony will make me a more rounded person!

Jane’s friend, Helen Burns, is dead; and I’m sure there’s something I wanted to say, prompted by her instruction concerning the nature of love. Similarly I was struck by the numerous adaptations of this story compared to a recent adaptation of Any Human Heart, the portrayal of religion and such, but I must save that for another time, gather my thoughts if I’m able and do them justice. That'll be the day.

Accent this day

A blog is good for many things, though I'm not sure what makes a good blog. One moment I decry the tribalism of political life, the next I'm all too happy putting the boot in. Last night I had a dig at those complaining about Russell Crowe's accent, today I say the following:

...except for the accents in Oliver Stone's Alexander; those were terrible.

They were rubbish; which unfortunately says as much about me as it does the film.

Feared by the bad, loved by the good

What an odd film the new Robin Hood turned out to be. I’ve no complaint about the accents, it strikes me that any such reviews are rather puerile, but I’ve not seen a film nosedive that badly since I Am Legend or maybe Lady in the Water.

It was a film with possibilities, it had Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett in the leading roles and Ridley Scott threw them away - or did he lose interest? Despite the worrying subplot involving Maid Marian and the lost boys of Sherwood Forest I thought it redeemable - and then just as the pace picked up the script bottled it. As if in sudden memory of the (from all accounts) Kevin Costner helmed comic-book predecessor we were ambushed with a few hammy one-liners and it was downhill from there, culminating with the absurd sight of Marian and her mini friends arriving in time to give battle to the French. What a waste.

When I was younger, so much younger

The stage and screen actor, Victor Spinetti, tells a story of how during the filming of Help, the Beatles appeared on a balcony in Austria and gave the Nazi salute to thousands of adoring fans below. Naturally they screamed their appreciation at the stupidity of the gesture. Imagine what the reaction would be today.

Sometimes I think we’re more prudish, but then there was Lennon’s “more popular than Jesus” comment kicking off a huge fuss at the time that would now be unlikely to elicit anything more than a few raised eyebrows. The changing relevance of the subject or perhaps our changing fear on what the subject represents plays a part, however the feeling persists that in some ways we have become more puritanical; throwing morality into the mix and passing laws accordingly.

For example, when I was younger the solution to my dislike of fox hunting appeared obvious - ban it – but much as I abhor making sport from such an activity, I find suspect this idea that we can legislate people into becoming ‘better’ human beings. More than that, it demonstrates intolerance; we have failed to persuade so we impose our belief.

And I am guilty too, for in just over four weeks I will have animals killed for my enjoyment of a Christmas meal. I’m not sure where this sits on the shifting moral compass, though since I could never kill an animal myself I am at the very least a hypocrite.