And a Car made of Blood

There have been times in their careers when the Coen Brothers have taken time off from making astonishing movies to make very good ones. The Hudsucker Proxy emerged from one of these periods as did The Man Who wasn’t There. True Grit is the latest.

On first glance, this seems like a vessel built from borrowed lumber. Jeff Bridges admirably reprises his Lebowski role (a useless man who is startled to find that he is useful), while Matt Damon strings out his famous Matthew McCanaughey impression to feature length. It will also be noted that this latest offering from the eclectomanic Coen’s is their second Western in three or four years.

None of this knowledge dampened my enjoyment of the movie at all. This is far from rehash. In fact, it slowly dawned on me as I watched, this is perhaps one of the most truthfully Coenish things they’ve ever done. It plays to their strengths perfectly: It is hysterically dark and appallingly funny. The setting also allows them to experiment with language in a way that has often sat uneasily in their other movies. Who the fuck knows how these 19^th Century nutjobs spoke after all? I’m pretty sure it was well peculiar.

Intelligent Westerns have been the order of the day in recent years, and the fad has served up some good movies and some bad movies. Over the past decade we’ve seen Home on the Range, Brokeback Mountain, The Three Burials of Melchiadez Estrada and of course No Country for Old Men. So, in a season when its traditional to talk about the true meaning of things, its refreshing to watch a movie which reminds us of the true meaning of Westerns: Blood, dead, horse, gun, man, beard.

Fist pump.

A pudding made with champagne.

When I'm riding in my pink limousine, clutching a globeful of napoleon brandy and fondling two mixed race ladies, I like to watch movies about famous people. Especially ironic 'uns. Make me feela better about myself.

Only joking about the limousine and stuff. But I did just watch Somewhere.

Its a film about a famous man who, in his relationship with his daughter finds meaning to his existence.

Its essentially a pornographic enquiry into the way the other half live. I would imagine that this is the extent to which most people will enjoy the movie. It tries to redeem some vestige of intellectual credibility at the end, by cleaving on an existential crisis from the protagonist.

The most insidious thing about this movie is that it is one which Sophia Coppola has made before. Four movies is too soon into a directing career to begin rehashing.

Debauchee becomes jaded. Meets girl. Girl shows him the meaning of life. Debauchee has existential crisis. This movie is called Lost in Translation.

In fact, the only innovations made in this movie are the most insipid and saccharine and fraudulent elements. Almost everything interesting about Lost in Translation is chiseled away.

There are some redeeming qualities. There are several very wry visual gags. The acting is exceptional at times particularly from Ellie Fanning and the quite remarkable Chris Pontius. There is also some experimentation with audio. But all this serves to highlight one daunting fact: Sophia Coppola is an excellent film-maker, just not a very interesting one. If you disagree with me, feel free to through champagne in my face.

A Good Movie

I feel like maybe The Kid Are Alright is an important film.

Before going into that let me just say why it is a good film. This is a movie made with clarity and attention and diligence. Its characters are expertly drawn. There are no villains and yet they are all villains. There are no heroes and yet they are all heroes. There are moments of heartbreak. There are moments of real heartbreak.

I think this movie might be important because, really its not important that the protagonists are gay. Like, this is a movie about a gay couple without being a gay movie. Maybe this is really semantic of me.

Whatever. Thats the feeling I got. This is a movie about some people who find themselves in a difficult situation. Its not about gay people. The people in the movie happen to be gay. I think that thats an important moment in our culture.

Less importantly, or maybe more importantly, this is a movie which is unabashedly about the middle classes, about liberals, about trendy suburbanites. In that way it sort of reminded me of Jonathan Franzen's novels.

I think that its very difficult for people to make movies which aren't self-conscious about being familiar with these people. Which is strange because I imagine that most people in the movie industry come from this demographic. I think its interesting. Maybe movie-makers won't feel that they have to be Mike Leigh anymore. Just in the same way, perhaps, that Will Smith felt like he didn't have to be Paul Robeson.

I don't know if I'm being melodramatic, maybe I am. I certainly thought it was an interesting movie. I also think maybe its an important movie. I have been wrong about these things in the past.

Man with beard masturbates for money

Literally the whole point of sarcasm is like to emphasise the opposite point. Like if you want to say that something was really stupid you have to say:
"Yeah that's clever."
If you want to say that a girl is really ugly then you might say:
"Yeah she's so pretty."

The point of I'm Still Here, an exclamation mark, filmed by good-time pals Joaquin Phoenix and Casey Affleck, is that Joaquin Phoenix is not an irritating, self absorbed, neurotic naughty.

Phoenix bamboozles his way through the movie pretending to be a drunk, pretending to be pretentious, pretending to be an absolute twat.

It leaves a bad taste in the mouth. A taste like semen. For two reasons.

Its the same semeny tang left by movies like Oceans 13 and Cannonball Run II, movies which were actually made from little slices of testicle. These movies are about how fun it is to be a famous person. CCTV cameras are trained on prepubescent millionaires as they have ostentatious fun together. The same semen has been weaved into a movie in the case of I'm Still Here.

Also its like "The Dude is way protesting too much." It seems like way too much effort for a previously cool man to expend on proving to people that he's not a twat. I for one never thought that he was a pretentious person. I sure as hell do now.

What a bumhead he is. No scratch that. He's a boring cockhead.

Carlos the Cock-Tease

On occasion I will watch a movie in order to make me feel cool. Mean Streets might be one. Otto e Mezzo or Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I used to watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s to make me feel like a writer. I will watch the Sopranos to make me feel cool.

I sat down to watch Carlos when I was feeling less cool then ever. Some boys had just been picking on me because of the poor attempt at a moustache that was accumulating on my upper lip. I trudged home and illegally downloaded Carlos, the Olivier Assayas epic about Carlos the Jackal, to make me feel 5 hours cool.

Dissapointment and horror. A film which is soul destroyingly uncool. Carlos is to cool what the Khmer Rouge is to nice.

This is good and thoughtful work from Assayas, a movie which achieves a magnificent feat of deglamorisation. The violence and danger which Carlos the Jackal makes you think of is written off as posturing and pretention. The depiction of Carlos himself, played with effortlessness and sleaze by Edgar Ramirez is of one man too long on a gap year. His speeches and ponitifications ring false and narcissistic and irritating. What more needs to be said: The man wanted to be Che Guevara. Into his forties. 

The movie tumbles along through all of Carlos' bunglings and comes to a cripplingly depressing halt with a moment of perfection and symmetry: Carlos gets botox. This revolutionary, this gigantic, terrifying piratical swashbuckler, gets botox. What a knob.

It felt like a subtler, cleverer, more bilious, more ruthless Spinal Tap.

Maybe I’m off kilter here. Maybe the movie is more forgiving, less clever than I am giving it credit for. Maybe Carlos just reminded me of a bellend I met at university. Who cares. I loved it.

You stab my kids, and I'll stab yours...

If your late for anything at the cinema then owlish eyes glare at you in the dark while you find your seat. This time I was a bit late to see a double bill of Frank Capra films at the British Film Institute HQ but it was worse because there was only five pairs of eyes in the place. Five pairs of owlish eyes swivel. Famous eyes. But the jokes on them because I seen the movies already. The movies are It Happened One Night and Forbidden.

They've been polished up and re-released by our country because we think Frank Capra is so good.

When I came into the cinema, I was so nervous about being late, that my heart was going “Potato Potato Potato!” Thats the kind of thing that a snappily dressed, hack journo might say in a Frank Capra film, the kind of thing they frequently do say. Pure Runyonese. I wonder if people really did speak like that back then or if these guys just created a whole language. I don't know what is more interesting. I think the second one.

Staples? Gruff amoralists with hearts of gold. Mephistophelean newspaper editors. Sassy, intelligent flappers. Homeless men. Chauvinists. All of them jollying along in the foothills of the Big-Rock Candy Mountain.

This is not to say that Frank Capra is pantomime and gaiety. Nor is it to say that these things are bad things. At the heart of these films is something good and important. It Happened One Night manages to pull off being a pretty graphic, Steinbeckean social commentary while making you laugh. It is a demonstration of a quiet fury, a smiling, passive aggressive film. Violence is never far off, but it is always throwaway, comic, empty threats. Claudette Colbert asks for a burger and burly six-footer Clark Gable threatens to break her neck. Another time Gable threatens to kill some guy’s children. The guy is scared and so he runs away and falls over.

It makes you laugh, but it's hard. It's difficult.


Even more anachronisticky is Forbidden. Its the story of a librarian who fucks a politician but holds onto his secret and his lovechild til he dies. Powerful stuff. In 1931 it must have been insane. Like Taxi Driver and L'Etranger and Brief Encounters (or Close Encounters!), it holds up the monster by the scruff of the neck to show the douche-bags that (Hello?) the monster is (of course) a human being. No mean feat.

Even in a technical sense, these are movies that feel suspiciously of our generation. They are snappy. The scenes race across the screen with accuracy, and exactitude and economy. There is no fluff. It feels way more adult and clinical than the flabby poesy of, say, the Magnificent Ambersons, or even Casablanca with its mawkish soft-focus bullshit on the hour mark. (You forgot about that right? Those flashbacks?) He's classy Frank Capra. Like Frank Sinatra. I get the feeling that if he had been as good at Facebook as he was at making movies he'd be like the most popular guy I've ever met.

I still feel like I’m underselling all of this?

Listen. I'm the kind of guy who thinks Preston Sturgess is better than Frank Capra. That Hannah and Her Sisters is better than Annie Hall. All that should tell you is that I am a speccy, circumcised pansy, gym shorts around my ankles and my underwear wedged into my behind. It should tell you, also, that Frank Capra is the land that's fair and bright, where the handouts grow on bushes and you sleep out every night, with the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees and the lemonade springs, where the bluebird sings. He's the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

Forehead Mowing: Part 4

When I was a kid I pissed myself in class. Now every time I think about it, I have to phone my adrenocorticotropic hormone, She sorts me out. She tells me it was about my parents not getting along.

When I pissed myself on Tuesday though, it was because of different things. It was because Combo came back and I'm scared of him. It was because this is England was over. It was because my favourite little dandelion lady, Lol (out of this is England) got nearly raped by her dad.

I covered my eyes again. It was so awful. So, so awful and so hideously inevitable. Some other things happened in the episode but really who cares.

There was actually some miserable anti-climax after that. Shaun fingered Smell in the pub toilets, Lol and Woody pieced things back together again and England lost in the football. I can't quite believe anyone was really watching, watching. Not by that point.

And then that was it.

There have been a few things which were a bit shoddy about this series. It felt like the gap between the episodes was too big. Things changed without you seeing it. The moped gang stuff felt heavily cut. Combo's comeback wasn't given the attention it deserved and felt distinctly anti-climactic until the very end. Even with that, I'm not sure this morality, redemptive thing sits well with me, or in any way provides the equilibrium that it intends. Felix Culpa? Nah bruv.

But importantly, the series didn't feel accidental, or done on a whim. I came away from it feeling like that was essential; like it completely changed the movie for me; like the Lord and the Rings and the Hobbit. Because this is one of those curious things when the sequel acts like a prequel. Shane Meadows has taken the canvas of a four hour epic and made something which didn't feel like a waste of time. He's taken the characters that we enjoyed in his movie and discovered them for us.

I mean who makes stuff like this anymore? Who pulls it off. Once, I heard someone say that This is England was like an English Gummo. I agreed at first but really its not because: Football, and Thomas Turgoose, and Roland the Rat and Thatcher and Special Brew and underpasses. This isn't effeminate, pebble-dashed surrealism. This isn't an experiment. This is industry and meat and violence. Just because its good, doesn't mean its shite. Hallelujah.

Forehead Mowing: Part 3

I rate the guy who made up numbers. I think he's up there with the guy who made up sex. Without him having made them up we could never have built stuff or done the internet or anything. But the thing about numbers is there is always maths.

Bear with this because it’s brilliant.

Maths is like Gadget: sixteen, with a scum-tash and an Arran jumper being beckoned by a bosomy middle aged woman into bed. No joy in his sex. He's grown sideways. What a waste of time.

Maths is like Lol and Woody: two whole episodes in an hypnotically convincing cycle of misery, and mistrust and palpable, palpable, sexlessness.

Lol and Milk are well maths. It was all so exciting a week ago. Now Lol is beckoning Milk into a public toilet promising to let him do her from behind. Shane Meadows has got a maths brush out, painting everything good, bad.

There's so much sex around and so much misery that it’s impossible, at least for an evening hour, to separate them in your head. What comes out of it though, what has happened across the TV this nine o’clock, is a hideous burlesque.

Its an old trick but done well and innovatively. For ten minutes there is colour and excitement and football. Then suddenly its all misery and misery and (suddenly) horror.

It’s all so sudden!

And it’s suddenly so horrible at the end. Then you find out why Lol is so mathematical. Joking aside, the end of this episode was one of the most harrowing things I've ever seen on screen. The brutal and catastrophic rape scene which finishes the episode off, made me put my fingers over my eyes. It is a brave and hideous thing to do.

I think that that’s what I think about it.

Soz that isn't the end. The end was a big twist, smashing onto the carpet like 15 stone of scouse, neo-Nazi, mumbo jumbo. But that’s for next week. For now: well done to you Shane Meadows. I have a vein pumping in my head.

Forehead Mowing: Part 2

Dad’s are shit. But the only thing worse than Dads is men.

This is England was a photograph about some children whose parents were conspicuous in their absence. We never met Woody or Lol or Gadgets parents. The implication was that these kids (not much more than kids) were gossamer who had wandered into the lions den and then floated out again, careless and jobless and parentless.

In the second episode of This is England ’86, the characters of these absent parents are taken by the scruff of the neck and hauled into the dock. Lol’s mother re-unites with her abusive husband, Woody’s is a paragon of disinterested suburbanism, while Vomit’s dad has returned and appears to be giving free reign to his dangerous temper. Meanwhile we discover that Cynth is shagging Mr. Sandhu and even Meggy has abandoned his only son to the clutches of nymphomaniac registrar Trudy.

As the master of grit, Shane Meadows movies always run the risk of the soap opera tag. Transferred to TV series, the shadow creeps nearer. Of course there are hints of melodrama, but its in the relentlessness of its theme, the catastrophe of absent parents, that This is England ‘86 surmounts this. It bullies and bombards its point across.

One other thing that marks ’86 out from the soaps is the fact that you can seriously enjoy the company of these characters. There is a sequence in which the gang invade their neighbours house and have a party involving top hats, Special Brew and a Jacuzzi. It is one of the most joyful pieces of television I have ever seen.

An unlikely love story is emerging. I don’t want to give the game away but it is one that has broken my little heart a bit. It provides the show with a closing image of unbelievable beauty. It is so happy, but so sad.

OK, I’m sorry about last week. I know I’ve left it til now. I think its fair to say that the first episode was a bit ploddier, a bit too much exposition. This week though. Oh my! I love them so, I don’t want them to get hurt. I don’t want them to hurt each other. Get up Woody! Get up Milky! We love you!

Forehead Mowing: Part 1

You know that bit in Hook were one of the little kids puts his hand on Robin Williams face and says, like, 'Peter! You're old!' Well it was something like that when we watched This is England '86 the other night. Me and a few other boys.

Woody, Shaun, Smell, Banjo, Meggy, Gadget and the rest are back after a few years, and they are a few years older for it.

It frankly made me sad myself, an inside sadness to see Shaun all grown up. Even though it’s a biological impossibility that I could be his father, I felt like I was. I felt like I was his father, readying myself to say 'I know we haven't spoken for some time.'

Maybe that’s a strength, but it’s difficult to watch. Woody, your second fave, grew up too. He changed out of being a 4-Skin and changed into being Noel Gallagher. Even Banjo softened up. He still looks like a Nazi, but in the movie, you'll remember, he looked like the whole Khmer Rouge. He gets kissed on the head in the movie, while he's carrying a machete.

Along with the characters, the performances seem to have lost their edge a tad also. All of the actors, Andrew Ellis’s Gadget in particular, seem to have lost a little bit of that careless, shrugged, accidencyof delivery that gave the movie so much of its charm. They all seem a bit more tutored, a bit more actorly.

And it’s all a bit glossy, a bit more grown up. The colours and camerawork feel more classy, more Channel Four Dramary. It felt like This is England had put on weight. This is England learned to play sax.

And it all just feels a bit softer, a bit duller.

But it’s important to say that this might all change on Tueaday. Rumour has it that Combo comes back on Tuesday. His appearance in the movie was, remember, the thing that started all the bother.

And it’s also important to say that, by most standards, this is well good TV.

Also, some of the new things are the best things about it. Perry Fitzpatrick as the bully, Flip, for instance, has all the hysterical, whinnying, malevolence of Morrell, Paddy Considine's terrifying villain from Romeo Brass. His sequence, a calamitous Wodehousean rigmarole with an ill-fated plan to “win fair-lady”, is the best thing in it actually.

Maybe I sound like one of those twats who backed Rufio. I swear I’m not. I still love This is England. I'm just a bit suspicious that he might be turning into Robin Williams. We'll see.