Internet Review of Film & TV

Will 3D Movies and Television Die a Slow Death? Ron Schenone, MVP

2011-06-02T09:09:00.000+01:00

Will 3D Movies and Television Die a Slow Death? Ron Schenone, MVP

BCB Movietime 2011-06-01

2011-06-01T17:05:00.000+01:00

BCB Movietime 2011-06-01

Banksy ♥ Murdoch « LRB blog

2010-10-14T17:03:00.000+01:00

Banksy ♥ Murdoch « LRB blog

In his new title sequence for The Simpsons, already shown in the US and due to air in Britain on 21 October, the graffiti artist Banksy tracks away from the Simpson family on its suburban Springfield sofa to show a subterranean Asian sweatshop making Simpsons merchandise. A child dips images of Bart into a vat of acid, kittens are pulped to make stuffing for Bart dolls, the tongue of a beheaded dolphin licks envelopes, an enslaved panda hauls a cart, an exhausted, broken unicorn punches holes in DVDs.

Why would the producers of a TV show that rakes in billions of dollars for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Entertainment Group allow a notoriously subversive artist to satirise so bitterly the exploitative underside of its own comedy? Because it knows that by doing so, by being big enough to contain and hence neutralise mockery of itself, it will make more billions.

Murdoch’s plan to take full control of BSkyB in Britain, with all the potential for Foxification of British TV that this entails (in the US, the English X-Factor producer Simon Cowell shares a network with the ranting, weeping American nationalist demagogue Glenn Beck, whose show he has hinted at emulating) has so given media rivals the heebie jeebies that papers as mutually hostile as the Guardian and the Daily Mail have made joint representations to the government to try to stop it.

It would be more comforting if Murdoch were an ideologue, but what the Banksy Simpsons sequence points to – rather like Beck himself, whose manner teeters between hate-mongering and comedy – is less the desire to promote an ideology than to contain all ideologies for the purpose of profit, with entertainment being the preferred container. What Murdoch seems to want to be is the context of all things, the ultimate Manichean media shell. Inside, left v. right, tree hugger v. petrol head, local v. transnational. Outside, profit, the void, and Murdoch, looking down.

MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW (Masters of Cinema) released on DVD

2010-09-30T17:37:00.001+01:00

Make Way for Tomorrow a film by LEO McCAREY is released in the UK on Blu-ray on 25, 2010

SYNOPSIS:

Of Make Way for Tomorrow, Orson Welles told Peter Bogdanovich: "Oh my God that's the saddest movie ever made." Long unavailable for home viewing, Leo McCarey's personal favourite among all his films (which included The Awful Truth and An Affair to Remember) is sad, yes, but it also stands as cathartic affirmation of the dignity of human feeling, and in the testament of such achieves a subtle complexity of characterization on par with Renoir, Ford, and Hawks.

Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi, two of the great Hollywood character actors, appear makeup-aged beyond their actual years to portray the couple whose house the bank has foreclosed upon (the film was set and produced in the midst of the Great Depression), and who are forced subsequently to move into their children's homes in the city. A near-musical restructuring of gratitude and debt ensues once the offspring deem the couple's lodging an imposition: the two are separated, then reunited weeks later... as they glide inexorably into an uncertain future.

Unrelentingly unsentimental, yet maintaining a balance of pathos and levity unseen in not only American studio pictures but most of the rest of world cinema, Make Way for Tomorrow exerted a powerful influence on Yasujirô Ozu's Tokyo Story and several other key entries in the Japanese master's body of work. It is a film profoundly concerned with questions of filial obligation and the way we treat one another as human beings; it is a film that, to give Welles the last word, "could make a stone cry." The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Leo McCarey's truly great Make Way for Tomorrow for the first time on Blu-ray anywhere in the world.

Make Way for Tomorrow is released on October 25, 2010

SPECIAL BLU-RAY ONLY EDITION INCLUDING:

• Gorgeous high-definition transfer of the film in its original 1.37:1 aspect ratio

• 20-minute video piece with filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show; The Cat's Meow) discussing the film and Leo McCarey's career

• 21-minute video piece with writer Gary Giddins discussing McCarey's work and the social and political contexts of the film

• Optional English SDH subtitles for the deaf and hearing-impaired

• Lengthy booklet featuring a new essay on the film by writer and Library of America editor Geoffrey O'Brien, and an excerpt from Josephine Lawrence's source novel Years Are So Long

DETAILS:

Blu-ray Catalogue No: EKA70025

Blu-ray Barcode: 5060000700251

Blu-ray RRP: £22.99

Release Date: 25 October 2010

Certificate: TBC

Run Time: 92 min

Format: 1.37:1 OAR/ Colour

Genre: Movie Classic

Director: Leo McCAREY

Year: 1937

Country: USA

Language: English

Subtitles: English SDH (Optional)

Taking time off

2010-03-23T09:21:00.002Z

Following two bad bouts of flu I'm taking a couple of weeks off. If urgent, please call my cellphone.

New 'Metropolis' for UK cinema release

2010-02-26T09:43:00.003Z

Fritz Lang's 1927 scifi classic Metropolis, a reconstructed and restored edition of which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival on Friday February 12, is to have a UK cinematic release later this year, followed by a new DVD and Blu-ray edition in The Masters of Cinema Series.

Fuller details will be posted here in due course.

Extracts from the unreconstructed movie

Peter Greenaway's Nightwatching out on DVD March 26

2010-01-30T10:03:00.001Z

View trailer

Peter Greenaway explores the romantic and professional life of Rembrandt and the mystery surrounding his most famous work of art, The Night Watch in this 2006 film, now to be released on DVD in March.

Featuring a cast led by Martin Freeman, (The Office, Love Actually) and starring Eva Birthistle, (The Children, Breakfast on Pluto) Jodhi May, (Emma, Defiance) Toby Jones, (Frost/Nixon, Infamous) and Nathalie Press, (My Summer of Love, Bleak House) Nightwatching is set in the year 1642, which marks a dramatic turning point in the life of Rembrandt, a sudden fall from grace as a wealthy respected celebrity, into a broken and discredited pauper.

When Rembrandt reluctantly agrees to paint the Amsterdam Musketeer Militia in a group portrait that will later become to be known as ‘The Night Watch’, he soon discovers that there is a foul conspiracy afoot amongst the Amsterdam merchants playing at soldiers, an insidious plot surrounding a thirst for power and wealth, undertaken with the bloodiest of means.

Determined to expose the conspirators and their plot, Rembrandt builds his accusation meticulously in the form of the commissioned painting.

Unveiling to the world what will become his most celebrated work; Rembrandt has also unleashed exacting revenge from the conspirators in question, sealing his fate in history and imminent downfall.

Hre is an extract from the movie.

South Bank Show Awards 2010

2010-01-26T16:54:00.000Z

THE SOUTH BANK SHOW AWARDS 2010

FULL WINNERS LIST

Comedy – presented by Billy Connolly

The Thick Of It – BBC2 - Armando Iannucci’s dark political comedy set in the corridors of the British government.

· Home Time – BBC2

· The Inbetweeners – E4

Dance – presented by Royal Ballet principle Tamara Rojo

E=mc² – David Bintley – Birmingham Royal Ballet - David Bintley’s new ballet for the Birmingham Royal Ballet, named after Einstein’s theory of relativity, with force fields of dancers.

· Diversity – Dance Troupe

· Limen – Wayne McGregor – Royal Opera House

TV Drama – presented by Rob Brydon

Red Riding – C4 - Adapted from David Peace’s cult noir novels, an ambitious, dark and thrilling trilogy of interlinking films set in Yorkshire in the 1970s and 80s.

· Being Human – BBC3

· Collision – ITV1

Pop – presented by Jarvis Cocker

Florence + the Machine - Lungs (not in attendance – acceptance speech through VT) - Her soaring, epic vocals, quirky melodies and self-contained musical world, found in her debut and platinum selling album Lungs.

· Frankmusik – Complete Me

· The xx - xx

Visual Arts – presented by Grayson Perry

Anish Kapoor – RA - Anish Kapoor‘s joyful mid career retrospective exhibition, including his shooting cannon, which by the end of the exhibition had fired over 20 tons of molten wax.

· Richard Long – Tate Britain

· Roger Hiorns – Seizure

Film – presented by Rachel Weisz

Fish Tank - Academy-award winning writer/director Andrea Arnold’s second film, Fish Tank – set in Essex, is the story of Mia, a volatile 15 year old.

· An Education

· The Damned United

Literature – presented by PD James

The Quickening Maze – Adam Foulds – A sympathetic and poetic exploration of John Clare’s madness.

· Forest Gate – Peter Akinti

· The Little Stranger – Sarah Waters

Opera - presented by Rolando Villazon

Peter Grimes – ENO - David Alden’s coruscating production of Peter Grimes.

· Into the Little Hill / Down by the Greenwood Side – Linbury Studio – ROH2 / The Opera Group / London Sinfonietta

· The Fairy Queen – Glyndebourne

Theatre – presented by Dominic West

A Streetcar Named Desire – Donmar Warehouse - The Donmar’s revival starring Rachel Weisz.

· Jerusalem – Jez Butterworth – Royal Court Theatre

· The Habit of Art – Alan Bennett – National Theatre

Arts Council England’s Diversity Award – presented by Jo Whiley

· Julie McNamara – Playwright and performing artist.

· Jenny Sealey – Graeae Theatre Company

· Clean Break – Theatre, Education, new Writing

Classical Music - presented by trumpeter Alison Balsom

Nielsen; Inextinguishable – A cycle of concerts performed by The Hallé Orchestra and The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra - Two leading British orchestras, The Hallé Orchestra and The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, join forces for a cycle of symphonies by arguably Denmark’s greatest composer, Carl Nielsen.

· City of Dreams: Vienna 1900-1935 – Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen

· Easter Reflections – The Sixteen

The Times Breakthrough Award – presented by Sir Ian McKellen

· David Blandy – for Visual Art

· Alina Ibragimova – for Classical Music

· Emma Fryer – for Comedy

· Melissa Hamilton – for Dance

· Carey Mulligan – for Film

· Peter Akinti – for Literature

· Daniel Kramer – for Opera

· The xx – for Pop

· Lucy Prebble – for Theatre

· Suranne Jones – for TV Drama

Outstanding Achievement Award in association with The Dorchester – presented by Sir David Attenborough

· Melvyn Bragg

National Theatre dramatisation of Terry Pratchett's 'Nation'

2010-01-26T15:16:00.000Z

Review to follow

Hamlet - a work in progress

2010-01-26T14:57:00.000Z

This is a placeholder for an analysis of David Tennant's Hamlet, comparing it with other classic renditions. Meanwhile, here's a playlist of available clips, mostly based on the soliloquy, "To be or not to be".

There's also a series of clips from the Soviet film version, played by Innokenty Smoktunovsky, music by Shostakovich (these may be out of order - difficult to tell on YouTube!)

Playlist

Bright Star shines not so brightly

2009-12-04T09:15:00.006Z

I have been meeting with poets, both famous and unknown, for over sixty years, and I never met any worth their salt who was like John Keats. But I have met many bad poets who tried to be like him.

Jane Campion's film perpetuates the La Boheme-style image of the consumptive poet consumed by unrequited love. It also falsifies the story, presenting Keats' life as a conflict between love and poetry, whereas it is clear that the former informed and inspired the latter.

Though there are brief references to poets like Wordsworth, we are shown nothing of the poetic ferment of the day, which made it possible for poets to live on their writings. And where was Shelley? How could Keats be in Italy without Shelley even meriting a mention?

This is basically a soft-focus, soft-centred view of life and love, unworthy of the director of The Piano.

The photography is gorgeous, and Abbie Cornish's clothes are fantastic. But the screen only really comes to life when Paul Schneider (Keats' irascible friend, Mr Brown) and the charming young Edie Martin (as Fanny Brawne's little sister, Toots) appear.

BTW, who was the butterfly wrangler? And were any of these beautiful insects harmed during the making of the film?

Order Keats' poems from Amazon.Co.Uk

Pre-order the DVD from Amazon.Com

David Tennant's Hamlet on BBC TV

2009-11-19T19:22:00.002Z

David Tennant's Royal Shakespeare Company Hamlet is to air on BBC2.

No date as yet but rumour has it that it'll be on Christmas Day, the same day Tennant bows out of Dr Who on BBC1.

Cast:

David Ajala (Reynaldo), Sam Alexander (Rosencrantz and Second Gravedigger), Edward Bennett (Laertes), Ricky Champ (Lucianus), Ewen Cummins (Barnardo), Robert Curtis (Franciso), Tom Davey (Guildenstern), Peter De Jersey (Horatio), Penny Downie (Gertrude), Oliver Ford Davies (Polonius), Samuel Dutton (Lord), Ryan Gage (Osric), Mariah Gale (Ophelia), Mark Hadfield (Gravedigger), Andrea Harris (Lady), Jim Hooper (Priest), Keith Osborn (Marcellus), Roderick Smith (Lord and Captain), Patrick Stewart (Claudius/Ghost), Riann Steele (Lady), David Tennant (Hamlet), Zoe Thorne (Lady and Player), John Woodvine (Player King).

THE FINAL SOUTH BANK SHOW: THE ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY

2009-11-19T18:03:00.001Z

***The final SOUTH BANK SHOW: THE ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY is on 20/12/09 and will be followed by the final SOUTH BANK SHOW AWARDS at the end of January 2010.***

18 November 2009

THE FINAL

THE SOUTH BANK SHOW:

THE ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY

SUNDAY 20 DECEMBER 2009

The final South Bank Show, goes behind the scenes of The Royal Shakespeare Company, as it embarks on an ambitious and exciting new programme of work inspired by Russia and the ex-Soviet Union.

Bringing to life artistic director Michael Boyd's bold vision for an ensemble company, a concept almost alien in today's celebrity led climate; the South Bank Show goes backstage, revealing the everyday reality of one of the country's biggest and most dynamic theatre companies. For the actors involved this means taking the brave step of signing up to a three year contract, agreeing to play a range of parts as and when they are needed across the programme.

The film joins Michael Boyd in the Ukraine to meet the author of The Grain Store, Natal'ia Vorozhbit, one of the new ex-Soviet plays to be premiered in the season, and gains exclusive access to some of the few survivors of the 'Terror-Famine' in the 1930's upon which it is based.

The South Bank Show follows the production of The Grain Storm right through to its world premiere. The film reveals an extraordinary insight into the rehearsal process at the RSC, including free-form improvisation sessions, warm up and daily voice classes; the cast getting to grips with complex Russian dances; the heated discussions behind the scenes between the writer Natal'ia Vorozhbit, the translator and Michael Boyd; and the backstage preparations in the costume, wig and set design departments – not forgetting the thirteen hour post-performance laundry cycle to get the costumes ready for the next day.

The South Bank Show interviews members of the Royal Shakespeare Company involved in the season: from cast to designer, movement director, dramaturge, director and voice coach.

With extracts from As You Like It and The Grain Storm, this is a South Bank Show for all theatre fans.

Presented and edited by Melvyn Bragg

Produced by Jonathan Levi

Directed by Naomi Wright

ITV plc Head Office Tel +44 (0) 20 7156 6000 itv.com

Please consider the environment before printing this email

ITV Press release: Wayne McGregor on South Bank Show

2009-11-18T12:33:00.002Z

THE SOUTH BANK SHOW

WAYNE MCGREGOR: ACROSS THE THRESHOLD

SUNDAY 13 DECEMBER 2009

The South Bank Show follows a year in the life of the choreographer Wayne McGregor.

In 2006, following the huge success of his work Chroma at Covent Garden, there was a frisson of shock when Wayne McGregor was appointed Resident Choreographer at The Royal Ballet. The mantle of Ashton and Macmillan was to be inherited by an iconoclast who was not even an alumnus of The Royal Ballet School… and he had barely had a ballet class in his life.

Melvyn Bragg talks to Wayne McGregor about his unusual route to Covent Garden via being inspired to dance after seeing John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. They discuss the way in which Covent Garden is embracing new directions in art and the relationship between traditional ballet and contemporary dance.

The South Bank Show has gained complete access to Wayne McGregor’s creative work and over the year sees him curate the first Ignite Festival at Covent Garden; and the daunting challenge of creating, rehearsing and presenting two new works on London’s main dance stages within three weeks. One will be his new work as Resident Choreographer of The Royal Ballet,Limen. The other is a new work for Wayne’s own company, Wayne McGregor | Random Dance,Dyad 1909 (part of the Sadler’s Wells world premiere production In the Spirit of Diaghilev); conceived at the University of California’s San Diego Cognitive Science Department and commissioned by Sadler’s Wells, for whom he is an Associate Artist, to celebrate the 100^thanniversary of the Ballet Russes.

The South Bank Show films Wayne McGregor’s scientific research in San Diego, with an experiment in “group cognition”. With the dancers, the scientists there examine how individual brains working closely together combine to create a work of art.

From scientific frontier to baroque opera, Wayne McGregor returns from California to direct a Purcell / Handel double bill, combining his La Scala Dido and Aeneas with a new production ofAcis and Galatea. Surprisingly, it will be the first time that the Royal Opera and the Royal Ballet have combined for many years to mount a production.

The film also explores Wayne McGregor’s work with Royal Ballet principals, Edward Watson,Marianela Nuñez, Steven McCrae, Mara Galeazzi, Sarah Lamb and Leanne Benjaminalongside his unusual collaborations with the likes of visual artists and Turner nominees Jane & Louise Wilson, Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho and Japanese conceptual artist Tatsuo Miyajima.

Finally, The South Bank Show follows the choreographer behind the scenes as the two works are revealed to the audience for the first time.

Contributors include: Dame Monica Mason - Director of The Royal Ballet and Judith Mackrell - dance critic for The Guardian

I am not a number - I am a remake!

2009-11-12T07:42:00.002Z

Oh no! The Yanks have done a remake of classic 1960s Brit TV series The Prisoner and - wouldn't you know it! - writer Bill Gallagher(Lark Rise to Candleford)'s six-part "reimagining of themes and characters" has made some significant changes. In fact, the only good thing about the series promises to be Ian McKellen as Number Two.

Prisoner aficionados will recall that in the original series, a different actor played Number Two each week.

Sir Ian comments: “The original ITV series, starred Patrick McGoohan who created the story with George Markstein in 1967. There were 17 episodes of which I saw only a couple first time round. Google identifies numerous support groups for the cult classic. Like them, I admire Patrick McGoohan's acting as 'Number 6' but I also cherish memories of his stage performance as Ibsen's Brand, which is available on DVD. I hope he takes this new version of The Prisoner as a compliment rather than a challenge to his great achievement. "

Actually, since he died in January, McGoohan is unlikely to take it as anything, unless they have Cable TV in Heaven.

McKellen continues: "Our director Jon Jones has cast the charismatic Jim Caviezel ["Jesus", in Mel Gibson's The Passion of Jesus Christ-ED] as 'Number 6' and it was exciting to meet him on 30 July, when the producers from AMC treated a few of the creative team to dinner at the Century Club in London. The following day was the first read-through of the six hour-long episodes, on the 14th floor of the ITV centre, next-door-but-one to the National Theatre on the south bank of the river Thames. Not all the actors were present, as at least half of them live in South Africa where much of the filming will take place . . . In attendance were the hierarchy of AMC who are following their success with Mad Men with another adult television screenplay in association with ITV in London. I hope they weren't disappointed!

"Apart from the director and producers, the writer Bill Gallagher was there at the far end of the long refectory table where we all sat. I couldn't see him clearly and I doubt he or anyone near him could catch all the tentative mumbles and whispers of the cast as the hours rolled by. Read-throughs are nerve-wracking for the actors, still unfamiliar with their roles and so not much willing to commit to any sort of performance and yet, we feel being somehow judged by our employers. But by the end, the room was full of enthusiasm (as well as relief) and some kind soul started a round of genuine applause.

"What was obvious was that none of us had misjudged the scripts. Bill has written his heart into the story, which is at least as gripping as the one on which it is based. More than that, it's difficult to add without spoiling your eventual enjoyment of the show. The Village remains, though no longer in Wales where McGoohan railed against his imprisonment. Number 2 (my part) is still in charge, though I'm glad to report no longer played by a number of actors. As for Rover and the rest, you will just have to wait and see.”

What else has changed? Well, the setting is no longer Portmeirion, but Swakopmund, "a Bavarian-style resort in Namibia that is surrounded by desert and has an eerily striking collection of pastel A-frame cottages".

But then, as Caviezel insists: “I feel this project stands on its own. There’s a huge allegorical piece in the background, but there’s a lot of eye candy as well. It’s definitely a commentary on right here and right now."

As is TV's inability to think up new material (remember the re-imagined Minder, anyone? No, nor do we!)

Check out what the New York Times had to say: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/arts/television/11prisoner.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2

Alien prequel due in 2011

2009-08-04T07:49:00.004+01:00

According to The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/03/alien_prequel/), "Ridley Scott, the original director of science fiction horror classic Alien, has signed up with Fox to helm an upcoming prequel." Release date is planned for 2011.

A fairly unknown writer, Jon Spaihts (three other projects in development) has been hired to write the show.

It seems unlikely that Sigourney Weaver (RIGHT, in the original movie) will feature as Ripley, since (a) she's too old to portray a younger space girl, and (b) this would make nonsense of her ignorance in the original story of the menace of the xenomorph.

While none of the Alien sequels has been as effective as Scott's original (though Alien Resurrection comes close), they have all grossed more.

Is this a boom?

2009-07-28T15:12:00.004+01:00

An article in last Friday's Guardian highlights the economic facts of life behind the current artistic success of British art films like Sleep Furiously (pictured right), Hunger, Unrelated, Better Things, Soi Cowboy, and Of Time and the City.
According to the article, Sleep Furiously took £74,000 at the box office. "(It reportedly cost £230,000, itself a relatively tiny sum.) Helen, did much worse, mustering around £22,000 – 'It got very good reviews but nobody went.' Joanna Hogg's Unrelated took £102,000, and won the inaugural Guardian first film award." The most successful recent art film, Hunger, took £750,000, against a £2m budget and a £250,000 Film Council grant to assist distribution.

"Clare Binns, the programming director of the arthouse chain City Screen Picturehouses (which owns 18 UK venues and programmes films for more than 30 others), has the job of deciding, every Monday morning, what stays and what goes. Binns is matter-of-fact about prospects for British art cinema: 'There's certainly commitment out there for people to release these films, but were you to ask me if they were huge successes, I think it's a struggle. The fact of the matter is, a film like Sleep Furiously, which got good reviews, did not do well at the box office. So you have to make decisions every week, and it's got to be about people choosing to spend their money to go and see them.'

"Does she feel any responsibility to nurture talented but less popular film-makers? 'On a Monday, when these decisions are made, it's about who takes most money. We have always tried to support as many films as possible, but this is a tough old world. We could fill our cinemas with all the films we like, but then we wouldn't have the cinemas to put them in.'"

Is sex too good to be wasted on the young?

2009-07-28T09:32:00.007+01:00

Cloud 9 (Wolke Neun)

Andreas Dresen, 2009

Some of the sweetest love-scenes in cinema feature a man in his Seventies and a woman barely a decade younger. Their bodies are weathered, used, matured like old wine - and (in Malcolm X's oft-quoted words) they are beautiful.

But there is more to this touching and ultimately tragic tale than its soft-porn love scenes.

Though it ends (disappointingly) with a bow to conventional sexual mores, the scenario challenges a number of contemporary conventions. The married woman, Inge (played wonderfully by Ursula Werner), cheats on her husband (Horst Westphal) not because she has fallen out of love with him, but because she is consumed with lust for this other. True, the husband is a bit of a dry old stick, listening to his LPs of classic steam engines (the one we hear is actually a loco from the old GDR), but see observe similar tenderness in their love scenes. And as she tells her lover (Horst Rehberg), she enjoys the mystery excursions her husband plans, rail journeys to who knows where, so much more interesting than autobahn trips.

And then when she confesses her transgressions to her daughter, Petra (Steffi Kuhnert), instead of being disgusted at her mother's romps with another man, Petra kisses congratulates her - making her promise not to tell anyone else about it.

Needless to say, this is a promise she can't keep, and everything spirals out of control when she tells her husband about the affair.

And the film spirals down into a more conventional morality.

It might have been more interesting if, instead of getting angry, he also had embraced her and assured her that he would love her through thick and thin.

It gets worse: having set up an unconventional (but far from unique) situation, the director then settles for a rather unconvincing denouement, in which the husband (conveniently) dies, and Inge faces a guilt-ridden future.

Yawn!

Nevertheless, this is a remarkable piece of film-making, all the more remarkable since the dialogue was entirely improvised.

There's a moment, during shooting, when the lover was supposed to be sharing the secrets of his past life, which went through take after take, and just didn't work.

Andreas Dresen instructed Rehberg to tell a joke. He does so, and Ursula Werner (who hadn't known the joke) is convulsed with laughter, which seems just so real. Later, she re-tells the joke to her husband, who doesn't find it at all funny (he doesn't know, at that time, what she's been up to).

Actually, it's not very funny, but it it does provide one of the high points in the story.

The film will be released on DVD next year. It's available in Germany right now.

A War in Hollywood (Hollywood contra Franco)

2009-07-24T08:14:00.005+01:00

The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives & the San Francisco Laborfest Film Festival
presents the U.S. premiere screening of A War in Hollywood (Hollywood contra Franco)
Directed by Oriol Porta, with Walter Bernstein, Susan Sarandon, and Moe Fishman, the film will be shown on Sunday, July 26, 2009, 2pm in The Delancey Street Screening Room, 600 Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94107.
A WAR IN HOLLYWOOD is an in-depth look at the impact that the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship had on the North American film industry.
Hollywood used the Civil War as a subject in more than 50 films. The defeat of democracy in Spain left an “open wound” in the heart of liberal actors, directors and screenwriters in the US, who used affection towards democratic Spain as a symbolic feature to define the romantic spirit of their characters. This sympathy, however, was shaped according to the American political tendencies of each period.
This evolution is narrated through the personal story of Alvah Bessie (pictured above), a Hollywood screenwriter who fought as a member of the International Brigade.
This documentary includes excerpts from Casablanca, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Way We Were among others, and commentary by actress Susan Sarandon, screenwriters Arthur Laurents and Walter Bernstein and cinema historians Román Gubern and Patrick McGilligan.

The Wire: "It ain't about right - it's about money"

2009-04-28T11:46:00.006+01:00

When Randy Newman sang in 1990 that 'it's so hard to live' in Baltimore, few outside the 'vibrant city on the water where you will find something new around every corner' (as the city in Maryland's website puts it) knew what he was on about. Now, thanks to the sensational success of The Wire TV crime show, everyone knows that the 'something new around every corner' in Baltimore is likely to be your friendly local drug dealer, and the cops who bust him are just as corrupt as the criminals.

The Wire is certainly a phenomenon. At a time when the TV channels are awash with (mainly US-based) crime series, and BBC's Ashes to Ashes is puzzling all of us with its strange combination of time travelling hokum and Sweeney-style hard cop mayhem, The Wire is seemingly conquering the world (according to The Independent, the finest television show ever produced).

Not that it's garnering sensational viewing figures. The first BBC-2 series in March and April attracted a modest 568,000 viewers – though that could be because all the real fans had already seen it on the FX satellite channel, or had borrowed the DVD from their local Blockbuster or (my preferred option) the Guardian's sofacinema.co.uk DVD rental site.

To my mind, setting aside a whole evening to watch three episodes on DVD is actually the best way to understand what the hell is going on, because its multi-stranded mosaic of complex story-lines is otherwise too complex to comprehend.

However, a lot of the complexity is purely on the surface, since each of the five series majors on one aspect of life in this dysfunctional city, starting with the setting up of the eponymous wire-tap in the first series, ending with an examination of the role of the media (by one who knows, since he was a reporter with the Baltimore Sun City Desk for twelve years) in the last.

But it was the first season which set the style of all that followed. In the non-fiction documentary volume which acts as a sort of prequel to the series, Homicide – a year on the killing streets (Canongate, ISBN 978 1 84767 311 4, 646pp, £12.99), which itself was made into a Home Box Office drama, Wire creator David Simon records the way in which a real-life detective, Harry Edgerton, ('the son of a respected New York jazz pianist, [actually Dave Edgerton, a rather bland jazz café keyboardist], he was a child of Manhattan who joined the Baltimore [police] department after glancing at an ad in the classifieds'), was detached from the homicide squad to investigate drug-related killings in precisely the manner depicted in The Wire:

'Edgerton's detachment from the rest of the unit was furthered by his partnership with Ed Burns [a former Baltimore police detective and Baltimore city public school teacher, who co-authored the book The Corner with Simon], with whom he had been detailed to the Drug Enforcement Administration for an investigation that consumed two years. That probe began because Burns had learned the name of a major drug trafficker who had ordered the slaying of his girlfriend. Unable to prove the murder, Burns and Edgerton instead spent months on electronic and telephone surveillance, then took the dealer down for drug distribution to the tune of thirty years, no parole. To Edgerton, a case like that was a statement of a kind, an answer to an organised drug trade that could otherwise engage in contract murder with impunity. . .

'Two years after that initial DEA case, Edgerton and Burns again proved the point with a year-long probe of a drug ring linked to a dozen murders and attempted murders and attempted murders in the Murphy Homes housing project. Every one of those shootings had remained open after detectives followed the traditional approach, yet as a result of the prolonged investigation, four murders were cleared and the key defendants received double life sentences.

'It was precision law enforcement, but other detectives were quick to point out that those two probes consumed three years, leaving two of the unit's squads short a man for much of that time.' (Pp. 57-58)

This is precisely what happened in 'The Target', first episode in the series, except that there the narcotics squad has already been set up before the beginning, with Narcotics Lieutenant Cedric Daniels ordered to organize the detail in a somewhat half-hearted manner, and the person who stays with all the differing cast lists of the five series, the alcoholic but gung-ho law'n'order obsessive Detective Jimmy McNulty (played by the Sheffield-born British actor, Dominic West – no relation to the Timothy/Sam West acting dynasty) is brought into the squad as a result of his having spoken out of turn with a local judge.

Interestingly, McNulty's de facto boss in the fictional series bears the same name – Jay Landsman – as one of the real-life Detective Sergeants in the Homicide book, where he is described as:

'A mental case. They give him a gun, a badge and sergeant’s stripes, and deal him out into the streets of Baltimore, a city with more than its share of violence, filth and despair. Then they surround him with a chorus of blue-jacketed straight men and let him play the role of the lone, wayward joker that somehow slipped into the deck. Jay Landsman, of the sidelong smile and pockmarked face, who tells the mothers of wanted men that all the commotion is nothing to be upset about, just a routine murder warrant. Landsman, who leaves empty liquor bottles in the other sergeants’ desks and never fails to turn out the men’s room light when a ranking officer is indisposed. Landsman, who rides a headquarters elevator with the police commissioner and leaves complaining that some sonofabitch stole his wallet. Jay Landsman, who as a Southwestern patrolman parked his radio car at Edmondson and Hilton, then used a Quaker Oatmeal box covered in aluminum foil as a radar gun.

“I’m just giving you a warning this time,” he would tell grateful motorists. “Remember, only you can prevent forest fires.”

According to the official synopsis of The Wire, McNulty

'is warned by Sgt. Jay Landsman that another such stunt [such as talking out of turn to a judge], will likely leave him walking a beat in the Western District. When McNulty seems unconcerned, Landsman asks about his worst-case scenario. "The boat," McNulty says, laughing. The marine unit.'

Which actually happens in the second series, beginning its terrestrial TV airing in the UK on May 4. This switches the main focus from the drug-dominated 'jects to the Baltimore waterfront, in a sequence of 12 episodes which have echoes of Elia Kazan's 1954 Marlon Brando vehicle, On the Waterfront, though no one actually says they 'could of bin a contender'. These are perhaps the most interesting of the five seasons, since they are the only ones to allow a role for the organised working class, albeit one as riddled with corruption as the police and city hall, centred on the character of Frank Sobotka, secretary-treasurer of the longshoreman's union of checkers, the men who oversee the loading and unloading of cargo ships, and thus able to allow through the contraband shipped in by 'the Greek' (whose true name we never discover, though he himself denies Greek ancestry).

I don't think I'll be spoiling it for you if I reveal that in it McNulty has been relegated to his "worst-case" posting, as a uniformed "poh-leece" (the suffice '-man' seems to have been demoted from Baltimore vocabulary) with the Harbor Unit, described by one of his new colleagues as 'the sweetest detail in the whole damn department if you give it a chance.'

Another feature which has attracted a lot of attention, both from viewers and the media, has been the jargon. Various attempts have been made (by The Independent in UK, and the Wall Street Journal, of all people, in USA) to publish glossaries; a self-defeating process, since just as street slang changes more quickly than the rest of us can keep up with, so it goes also in this fictional representation of life over several years. For instance, at the beginning, warning cries of 'Five-oh' warn dealers and users that the police have arrived (itself a demonstration of the way, despite its protean nature, popular terminology can also lag behind history, since the Hawaii Five-O police series wound up in April 1980, more than 20 years before the first airing of The Wire, and long before these fictional characters would have been born; no doubt they had caught the re-runs, which are a feature of daytime cable in USA, as in UK). But by the time of the final series, first aired Stateside in January last year, six years after the show began in July, 2002, this has changed to 'Poh-poh', which is far less arcane.

David Simon, who created the series, follows the precedent set by William Gibson in his Neuromancer series of SF novels, of never explaining anything. We have to work out from the context that, for instance, a 'burner' is a disposable mobile phone, 'cheese' is money, and 'fiend' is a customer for drugs (from drug-fiend, get it?).

Actually the precedent goes back further than science fiction. When Shakespeare mentions 'kerns and gallowglasses' in Macbeth, he doesn't have one character explain to the other for the benefit of the groundlings, that they're talking about Irish soldiers, carrying battle-axes.

(I wonder if, when our distinguished former PM was addressed by George Bush as 'Yo, Blair', he realised his American boss was using a derogatory term applied to a street-corner drug dealer?)
Incidentally, the comparisons that have been made to Shakespeare are not so pseudish as it might seem. One of the great things about The Wire is the way in which it demonstrates the street poetry of popular speech – and especially black speech – in exactly the same way as the Bard of Avon would have done, were he working for HBO.

The writers often do this in digressive riffs, like the discussions in the ''ject' (project, or in British usage, housing estate) about the provenance of the MacDonald chicken nugget:

'Man, whoever invented these, he off the hook! Motherfucker got the bone all the way out the damn chicken. Till he came along, niggas be chewing on drumsticks and shit, getting their fingers all greasy. He said, "Later" to the bone. Nugget that meat up and make some real money.'

One says to the other that if he didn't get a lot of money from the innovation, 'Nah, man, that ain't right'.

He's told 'Fuck "right". It ain't about right, it's about money.

'You think Ronald McDonald gonna go down that basement and say, "Hey Mr Nugget, you the bomb. We selling chicken faster than you can tear the bone out. So I'm gonna write my clowny-ass name on this fat-ass check for you."

'Shit. Man, the nigga who invented them things still working in the basement for regular wage, thinking of some shit to make the fries taste better, some shit like that. Believe.'

Again, this didn't spring innovatively from David Simon's brain. It's reminiscent of the dialogue between Jules and Vincent Vega in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, about what the French would call a McDonalds Quarter-pounder.

Another such digression is the chess lesson given to a couple of yo-boys by the young drug-dealer, D'Angelo (Dee) Barksdale, nephew to the drugs boss, Avon Barksdale in the second show in the first season:

DEE: 'Look, check it, it's simple. It's simple. See this? (Holds up king.)
'This the kingpin. And he the man.
'You get the other dude's king, you got the game. But he's trying to get your king, too, so you gotta protect it.
'Now the king, he move one space, any direction he damn choose, cos he's the king.
'But he ain't got no hustle, but the rest of these motherfuckers on the team . . . they got his back. And they run so deep, he really ain't gotta do shit.'
YO-BOY: 'Like your uncle.
DEE: 'Yeah, like my uncle.
'You see this? This the queen. She smart and she fierce. She move any way she want, as far as she want. And she is the go-get-shit-done-piece.'
YO-BOY: 'Remind me of Stringer [Avon's right-hand man].'
DEE: 'And, this, over here, is the castle. It's like the stash. It moves like this. And like this.' (Stash, I may not need to explain, as the show does not, is the storehouse for drugs.)
YO-BOY: 'Dog, stash don't move, man.'
DEE: 'Come on, yo, think. How many time we move the stash house this week? And every time we move the stash . . . we move a little muscle with it, to protect it.'
YO-BOY: 'True, true. You right. All right. What about them bald-headed bitches right there?'
DEE: 'These right here. These are the pawns. They're like the soldiers. They move like this, one space forward only . . . except when they fight. Then it's like . . . Or like this . . . And they like the front lines. They be out in the field.'
YO-BOY: 'So how do you get to be the king?'
DEE: 'It ain't like that. See, the king stay the king, a'right? Everything stay who he is . . . except for the pawns. Now if a pawn make it all the way down to the other dude's side . . . he get to be a queen. And like I said, the queen ain't no bitch. She got all the moves.'
YO-BOY: 'A'ight, so . . . if I make it to the other end, I win?'
DEE: 'If you catch the other dude's king and trap it . . . then you win.'
YO-BOY: 'But if I make it to the end . . . I'm top dog.'
DEE: 'Nah, yo, it ain't like that, look. The pawns, man, in the game . . . they get capped quick. They be out of the game early.'
YO-BOY: 'Unless they're some smartass pawns.'

Simon displayed his reporter's ear for speech patterns in the Homicide book. Here, a detective is trying to get a witness to a murder to testify, but she won’t even open her door to him:

'Heavy pounding on the door is answered at last by a light from upstairs, where a frame window is suddenly and violently wrenched upward. A heavyset, middle-aged woman—fully dressed, the detective notes—pushes head and shoulders across the sill and stares down at Pellegrini.
'“Who the hell is knocking on my door this late?”
'“Mrs. Thompson?”
'“Yeah.”
'“Police.”
'“Poh-leece?”
'Jesus Christ, Pellegrini thinks, what else would a white man in a trenchcoat be doing on Gold Street after midnight? He pulls the shield and holds it toward the window.
'“Could I talk to you for a moment?”
'“No, you can’t,” she says, expelling the words in a singsong, slow enough and loud enough to reach the crowd across the street. “I got nothing to say to you. People be trying to sleep and you knocking on my door this late.”
'“You were asleep?”
'“I ain’t got to say what I was.”
'“I need to talk with you about the shooting.”
'“Well, I ain’t got a damn thing to say to you.”
'“Someone died . . .”
'“I know it.”
'“We’re investigating it.”
'“So?”
'Tom Pellegrini suppresses an almost overwhelming desire to see this woman dragged into a police wagon and bounced over every pothole between here and headquarters. Instead, he looks hard at the woman’s face and speaks his last words in a laconic tone that betrays only weariness.
'“I can come back with a grand jury summons.”
'“Then come on back with your damn summons. You come here this time a night telling me I got to talk to you when I don’t want to.”
'Pellegrini steps back from the front stoop and looks at the blue glow from the emergency lights. The morgue wagon, a Dodge van with blacked-out windows, has pulled to the curb, but every kid on every corner is now gazing across the street, watching this woman make it perfectly clear to a police detective that under no circumstances is she a living witness to a drug murder.
'“It’s your neighborhood.”
'“Yeah, it is,” she says, slamming the window.'

Having started viewing the show, as I say, on DVD (I can't afford a FX contract), as I tuned into the BBC-2 re-runs, I began to become somewhat disenchanted, seeing the gears working under the surface.

Let's take the title. The 'wire' is a wire-tap, and a lot of the police by-play is about how they manipulate the rules and get round them to allow them to bug the perps' phones ('perp' equals 'perpetrator', or criminal). So the whole show could be considered a very clever justification for the growth of the surveillance society, especially given that its six-year run coincided exactly with Bush's abuse of the system.

But it's the amoral insistence that in this life, everyone loses, no matter how good their intentions, that sticks in my craw. Yes, that's the way it is, most of the time, in this entropic world, but there are sufficient exceptions to keep hope alive.

Like Woody Guthrie,

'I hate a song [or a TV series] that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing.
'Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling.
'I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built.
'I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work.'

On the other hand, the sheer professionalism of The Wire as a piece of work makes me proud to be a fellow-writer, so my feelings about it are rather ambivalent.

The fifth and final season of The Wire centres on the media. Simon has explained: 'It made sense to finish The Wire with this reflection on the state of the media, as all the other attendant problems of the American city depicted in the previous four seasons will not be solved until the depth and range of those problems is first acknowledged. And that won't happen without an intelligent, aggressive and well-funded press.'

In keeping with its jargon-littered scripts, this final chapter is entitled "-30-", which happens to be how print-and-typewriter-based journalists in pre-computer days used to end their stories. Nobody seems to know why, though I think it had something to do with telex machine codes.

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2008-05-20T21:43:00.001+01:00

This is a test of emailing a posting.

Kubrick 2001: Flash

2003-12-09T10:42:00.000Z

Fascinating Flash movie which seeks to "explain" what Kubrick's Space Odyssey was all about. Worth checking out as an example of what can be achieved with Flash:
Click HERE to watch the movie, which lasts 20 minutes or so.

2003-11-10T13:33:00.000Z

REVISITED: Wagner (Tony Palmer, 1983)
Bradford’s wonderful Museum of Photography, Film and TV commemorated the twentieth anniversary of Tony Palmer’s Wagner film with an all-day showing of this innovative nine-hour biography of a composer who is still controversial and hated as much as he is loved. Wagner’s music was effectively banned in Israel until the year 2000 because of the composer’s anti-Semitic views, and it’s undoubtedly true that, in a wider sense, his ideas provided the intellectual justification for the horrors of the Holocaust.

Indeed, Wagner’s grandson Wolfgang, whose blessing made the project possible, was Hitler’s godchild.

Palmer’s epic makes no effort to disguise this unattractive aspect of his subject, and in fact his constant harping on about the way Jews were responsible for his money worries – when, in fact, many Jews helped bail him out of his self-induced penury – did get a bit wearing after over 800 minutes of it.

Though Burton was not Palmer’s first choice for the title role – he originally wanted Albert Finney for it – his larger-than-life public persona filled out the performance so that the audience brought to his picture of the tortured self-destructive artist something that another might not have been able to bring. The use of an actor in the last few years of his life – Burton died a year after its release – suited admirably the end of Wagner’s life, his ravaged face entirely appropriate to the events portrayed on screen, but added some strange discrepancies to Wagner’s earlier life as a young revolutionary in 1848 Dresden.

In fact, though the movie’s box-office must have been improved by the star-studded cast – not only Burton, but a rare occasion to see John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier on screen together, plus lesser-known stars like the Berliner Ensemble’s Ekkehardt Schall as Franz Liszt – this was very much of an ensemble piece. Burton’s all-on-one-note ranting did tend to grate after a while, and the three theatrical knights didn’t really earn their crust.

Richardson was typically wooden and Olivier did that thing with his eyes and eyebrows he made such a feature of in John Mortimer’s Voyage Around My Father, which didn’t seem to have much to do with his role as Bavaria’s chief of police, and only Gielgud seemed to get inside the skin of his character.

A stand-out performance was Lásló Gálffi as King Ludwig II, probably Wagner’s most consistent financial supporter, and of course Vanessa Redgrave, as Cosima, Wagner’s last wife. In fact, much of the pleasure of this film was in watching the individual performances of the superb cast, such as Ronald Pickup’s very believable Nietzsche, and the exquisite Marthe Keller as Mathile Wesendonck, one of Wagner’s early loves. To watch the passage of thoughts across their faces as, seemingly, nothing much was happening, was a salutary lesson in non-Method acting.

But what really made the whole thing effective was the epic scale of the piece, aided, of course, by the superb cinematography of Vittoro Storaro. Much of the action was actually filmed in the original settings, though parts of old Budapest stood in for Nineteenth Century Dresden, and the Hungarian army were marshalled for the battle scenes.

I missed the satirical possibilities of some of Wagner’s more ludicrous posturings, which one of Palmer’s early mentors, Ken Russell (Palmer was producer on Russell’s Isadora at the beginning of his movie career) would undoubtedly have made too much of.

Of course, ardent Wagnerites will be asking: what about the music? It is absolutely wonderful. Palmer tells a delightful story about how Sir Georg Solti was persuaded to conduct for a much-reduced fee on condition that his daughter appeared as one of the Wagner children, thus beginning a successful career in film for her – she is now a successful director in her own right.

Since Solti is arguably the world’s greatest Wagner conductor, the music is superb. Some purists may object to the way that Palmer has used Wagner’s leitmotif technique to associate different musical themes with different emotional moods, so it appears that the inspiration for Tristan, say, lies in Wagner’s love life, while this isn’t necessarily how artists use their personal experience in their work.

It might also be complained that this usage reduces Wagner’s monumental compositions to the status of mere incidental music, though this is unfortunately a feature of much modern film, Kubrik plundering Ligeti for 2001, for instance. At least, using Wagner’s music in a film about Wagner keeps it in context.

Filmically, it is interesting that Palmer also uses the leitmotif technique in his visuals: the Nibelungen beating out weapons on their anvils at the very beginning recurs throughout, and especially at the end, when Wagner’s words about the German nation being purified by blood and fire remind us chillingly of how exactly that prophecy was fulfilled in the Holocaust.

The movie was screened in a video version, which lost some of the definition of film, but I was surprised to find that it is apparently not available in either VHS or DVD format, though the extended length would certainly lend itself to the latter format.-Karl Dallas
(Originally published in the Morning Star newspaper.)

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Peter Greenaway's Nightwatching out on DVD March 26

View trailer

South Bank Show Awards 2010

National Theatre dramatisation of Terry Pratchett's 'Nation'

Review to follow

Hamlet - a work in progress

Playlist

Bright Star shines not so brightly

Order Keats' poems from Amazon.Co.Uk

Pre-order the DVD from Amazon.Com

David Tennant's Hamlet on BBC TV

***THE FINAL SOUTH BANK SHOW: THE ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY***

ITV Press release: Wayne McGregor on South Bank Show

I am not a number - I am a remake!

Alien prequel due in 2011

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A War in Hollywood (Hollywood contra Franco)

The Wire: "It ain't about right - it's about money"

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Kubrick 2001: Flash

THE FINAL SOUTH BANK SHOW: THE ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY