The New World

A large part of me really doesn't want to admit to renting this movie - a Hollywood movie that openly describes itself as an epic romance - but the other part of me feels that it is my social responsibility to warn others who may be silly enough to consider watching it.

I'm still not sure if this was actually a movie or a two hour advertisement for a Calvin Klein fragrance without the final scene announcing the fragrance. Noticeably missing from the movie is dialogue. In it's place they have random deep thoughts that emanate like bubbles out of characters' heads.

But then, who am I to judge?

If you like to watch Colin Farrel brooding, then this may be just the movie for you. And brooding he does. We get to see him brooding in the galley of a ship. Brooding while constructing a fort. Brooding while admiring his new found love. Brooding while being tortured by his fellow settlers. Brooding while almost being killed by the Indians. We even get to seem him brooding forlornly on what looks to be the shores of Newfoundland, mysteriously being greeted by Eskimos holding fish, no doubt wondering what they are doing in Newfoundland and why Colin Farrel is brooding on the rocky beach.

And of course, there is something for the guys as well. The ever hot, Pocahontas (at least I think it was Pocahontas) looking stunning in her designer deer skin dress while frolicking in grassy fields - deep thoughts of love floating gently out of her head. I wish Pocahontas was my girlfriend.

I guess I rented the movie because I had the mistaken belief that no matter how bad of a job you do, you can't possibly remove all of the intrigue and adventure from a story about sailing across the Atlantic ocean in a sailboat and setting up a new colony in a new land. Poor foolish me. Pity me.

Imagine a movie you watched that you thought was ok except for an annoying romantic subtheme. Now remove everything from the movie except for the annoying romantic subtheme and I present to you, The New World!

In praise of Tim Burton

I like the way Tim Burton's films are so stylized and his vision is for me so perfectly quirky. I like the way he always uses Danny Elfman to write his music and I like the way Elfman always uses mellow low sounds like the bassoon, bass clarinet and the really funky alto flute. I love the way he uses old style animation made in Manchester and I love his constant collaborations with the wonderful Jonny Depp.

Birth

Have you seen Jonathan Glazer's film Birth? I found it quite disturbing but rewarding. Especially (for once) the music - and the way it is employed to manipulate the viewer's feelings/ understanding of the film without words. It is essentially about grief and obsession but it is the atmosphere created that fascinated me...and gripped me. I'm not sure how 'worthy' the film really is, but it certainly caused me to react so it must be good in some way hey?

Spring, summer, autumn, winter.....and spring

The Korean director Kim Ki-Duk's 2004 film 'Spring, summer, autumn, winter...and spring' is perhaps the film I would have liked to have made myself one day - had I had the talent and been wise enough to have had the vision. Prayer, meditation, and appreciation of nature are the sacraments by which two monks live as master and apprentice in a tiny temple on the most beautiful lake. There is very little dialogue during the film - just AMAZING photography of the most beautiful place on earth, symbolism without cliche, and brilliant understated acting as the seasons change and the younger monk grows up and experiences life through both virtue and vice. The film is about wisdom, inner peace, suffering, forgiveness and acceptance. It is gentle and mesmeric yet thought-provoking and I think everyone on the planet would benefit from seeing it....

Awesome; I Fuckin' Wrote That!

Bleary eyed on Saturday morning after a late night in London, I went to a screening of Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That! This documentary is the result of handing out High-8 digital cameras to 50 fans to record The Beastie Boy’s Madison Square Garden gig on October 9^th 2004.

The screening was organised by the people behind the film magazine Little White Lies www.littlewhitelies.co.uk . Each issue’s cover features one film which informs the rest of the magazine’s visual and thematic style; the first ever issue last year featured The Life Aquatic. Issue 6 (due out June 3^rd) will feature this documentary as its cover film. This wasn’t any old screening. Our mission was to review the film in 50 words for publication in the next issue and there were 50 of us, which by unearthly coincidence is exactly the same number of fans who shot the film. Do you see what they’ve done there?

I know very little about The Beastie boys, but had heard of some of the people featured in the gig like ‘Money Mark’. I’m not sure how interesting watching someone else watching a concert can ever be (especially if you’re not into the music). I like the concept, but I have to admit I was fairly bored at times. The concert footage itself was far less interesting than some of the behind the scenes stuff, like a group of fans attempting to get past some bouncers into a restricted area and trying to break into the Beastie’s dressing room. The Beastie Boys in a lift with accompanying ‘lift’ music, cut between footage from the concert made a really funny contrast. And one guy took his camera to the bathroom with him and filmed himself peeing, which was for some reason the most entertaining footage in the whole film.

I’ll let you know my 50 words if they don’t get published, suffice to say that what interested me most was the surplus of Bs…

“What’s the time? It’s time to get ill’

investigating cognitive dissonance

Everything is connected. You don't believe me? Well, how come my I &hearts Huckabees dvd arrived through the post the day after a friend referred to it quite by surprise in a talk on Sartre, cinema and the concept of 'engagement'? Ha!

It's easy to dismiss lighthearted, silly-too-clever-by-half films like I &hearts Huckabees. Don't they just raise a bunch of serious issues about self, society, ecology, identity etc. but in an offhand way, giving us an 1 1/2 happy hrs of laughs and farcical situations, kooky characters, 'leftfield indie' stars like Jason Schwartzman, Isabelle Huppert, Naomi Watts, Mark Wahlberg... oh and Jude 'eye-candy' Law (not my cup of tea) and Dustin 'The Graduate' Hoffman...? Don't they just dilute and ridicule philosophy, like the drivel spouted in the Matrix, isn't it all just superficial dumbing down?

Well I'm not so sure. In his talk, my friend pointed out that the film is engaged because it raises contemporary issues without any easy resolutions. The narrative arc may resolve but the discourse on the struggle of existence is left open, with the existential detectives and the nihilist French dominatrix looking almost as bemused as the now-slightly-more-content-with-pain-and-suffering protagonists, Albert and Tommy. It's not entirely clear whether Brad (the corporate slick Jude Law Huckabees guy - and for Huckabees read Walmart) did a good or a bad thing saving the marsh and half the woods in return for letting Huckabees build on the other half of the woods. He betrayed the cause by playing the game... but also undeniably saved the marsh and half the woods (all kind of metaphorical for not being able to see the woods for the trees, of course - this film loves its knowing, almost ironic, symbolism).

The film does kind of mix everything up - and I think that's the point. It's all about how everything is mixed up, however much we'd like to seperate our lives from the hated corporate giants like Walmart & co - we're all in it together whether we like it or not. That doesn't mean we have to work with the bastards, we just have to recognise that and suffer and keep chaining ourselves to bulldozers or doing whatever we have to do...

Or maybe it's all just silly?

Mountain Patrol

I've just watched a fantastic film called Mountain Patrol directed by Lu Chuan. The film is in Mandarin chinese. It is a bleak account of true events that took place betwee 1993-6 in Northern China. A brave and moral group of men set up a voluntary mountain patrol to try to stop poachers from mass murdering the endangered Tibetan Antelope...a Beijing reporter follows them on their futile persuit of the most destructive poachers and it is his reports that were the basis of the film. I know I seem to have a small obsession with the maltreatment of animals and the barbarism of man, and I am utterly fascinated by chinese art (music, cinema, theatre - whatever), but this film is so expressive in the most understated way and really highlights the ultimate value of both life and death with no romanticism or cheap 'string-pulling' tactics whatsoever. It is concerned with the idea of death - whether natural or murderous - and how small one life is in the bigger picture however huge that life seems to be to the individual. Often uncomfortable to watch (for me at least - in my hypersensitive state) I think it provides important philosophical stimulus......and the mountain scenery is unbelievable.

Lords of Dogtown

Another film by Catherine Hardwicke really worth watching I think is Lords of Dogtown. It's about the start of the skateboarding movement as we know it today...how it sprung from a ghetto seaside town on the west coast of America and the three adolescents who were catapulted into crazy lives as skating heros. It's not a subject I know much about although I am totally in awe of skateboarders and have watched international competitions so I did enjoy that aspect of it I guess. What I really love about the film however is the way it utterly captures the feeling of that short period of life where you feel invincible, optimistic and totally free - purely through footage of teen boys on skateboards enthusiastically perfecting moves - before the pressures of life force them to make decisions that necessarily restrict their innocent exhuberance. The skating scenes are almost balletic in their choreography and breadth which provide a nice contrast to the way the majority of the film is shot; in a psuedo-documentary style. Although the allure and danger of vice is present in drugs and sex it is very much on the edge of the film and therefore refreshing in it's absence.

13 and never been kissed

Hey look, it’s Jessica and me when we were teenagers! Ha ha only joking this of course is Thirteen, a film by Catherine Hardwicke. In it a 13 yr-old girl makes friends with the cool girl in school and suddenly finds herself stealing, getting piercings, skipping school, giving blow jobs to boys and taking a lot of drugs... And her family is falling apart.

I have to try to recapture my feelings about the film, since I wrote quite a detailed post about it yesterday which disappeared in a weird internet blip...

So, anyway, what I liked about the film was the way it caught that teenage feeling where everything is intense yet fleeting, where suddenly whole new worlds of experience, pleasure and pain are opening up and it's all very exciting and frightening and new. Hardwicke uses tried and tested but effective techniques to render this - hand held cameras, lots of disjointed close-up images, saturated colours (hyper-yellow in a tripped-out candy store, cold blue when her Mum is crying and trying to hug her so much they end up on the kitchen floor) and very high or low angle shots giving a feeling of intensified or exaggerated perspective.

What I didn't like so much was the way the whole thing was tied-in very much with Tracy's family situation, as though only kids from a 'broken homes' or whatever would go off the rails... It ends up being a lot less shocking than it sets out to be, and actually quite conservative, I think. Personally I'm more interested in how adolescence (whether in an extreme way like this or on a much subtler level) is more generally a period of something like experimental madness - a time when things can potentially go very wrong for pretty much any kid. I think Larry Clark's films capture this really well (Kids, Bully). He forgets about blaming the parents and just goes right into the kids' worlds - yes it's the terrible, nightmare extreme of adolescence but I still think it gets something more universal about that moment. So Hardwicke may think she's found the new Chlöe Sevigny (Evan Rachel Wood's resemblance is striking!) but I don't think 13 makes such a big mark as Kids nearly 10 yrs earlier, or the 1981 German film Christiane F about a 14 yr-old who gets drawn into the drug scene in Berlin.

What do you reckon?

As promised... Bettie Page reissued!

OK so it's a repeat but I promise also there will be some fresh copy soon!

A while ago I watched The Notorious Betty Page at a preview screening. I don't usually like biopics but this was really good. It didn't use voiceover or explanation, just gave hints and clues, leaving the viewer to make up her own mind or go find out more. My favourite thing about it was the way it blended archive footage from the period with images that perfectly recreated the feel of the film stocks of the era - black and white for Bettie in New York, kitsch saturated technicolor for her vacations in Miami. Afterwards, on my way into work, I found myself buying a pair of totally Bettie-esque shoes. Very frivolous of me... I don't need new shoes. I do feel guilty when I think of Jessica happily patching her jeans... Anyway here is a photo. I can't bring myself to regret it or return them. I will think of sweet, innocent, god-fearing Bettie Page as I sashay around the room in them at a party I'm going to tonight.