Phoebe and Ursula

I'm only used to making love to one person at a time so I was cautious about going to see Leaving. You see I love Kristin Scott Thomas very much, and I love Yvan Attal even more.


Much hay has been made recently about Frenchman Scott Thomas' decision to stop being Brit cinema's fuck buddy and devote herself to making proper movies. Even more scary for her, however, was being increasingly typecast as the "ice queen." This is what's interesting. It is precisely KST's role-history, her typecasting, which makes this particular performance so energised, so scintillating, so (can I say it?) electric.


Scott Thomas as adulteress Marion, looks frightened, looks cracked, looks mad in this movie. Her crisis, in itself a simple Bovary/Chatterly cliche, takes place underneath a wide eyed, alabaster. Underneath a Kristin Scott Thomas. That makes this film good.


Meanwhile: Yvan Attal, whose best performances are as the loveable villains, forgiveable adulterers of Ma femme est une actrice and Ils se marièrent et eurent beaucoup d'enfants, here plays the adulteree, and he doesn't take it well. Attal's David is a monster, a grotesque, sexual oligarch, fixated with the ownership of his wife to the exclusion of every other emotion. Very un-French. Very un-charming. Very unpleasanct.


It seems to me that actors can never really, like seperate themselves from their previous performances. Serious actors; good, believable actors like Kristin Scott Thomas and Yvan Attal, create grand, complicated, faceted characters, as big and broad as a career. This is not bad. BUT, imaginatively cast, these actors can create special performances, special movies. That is what has happened here.


So this film owes everything to intelligent, imaginative casting and in a roundabout way, who we're complimenting here is Catherine Corsini. Thats why her head is at the top of this review. I'd like to have a passionate and dangerous affair with her, although not one with an explosive twist at the denouement.

Grey Tarmac. Cloud of Dust.

Over breakfast we share some witty banter.
“Why do Marxists drink Green Tea?” my friend asks.
“Because Proper-tea is theft!” say I.
We laugh about it, don Mugabe masks, and go to the cinema to watch Claire Denis’ White Material.

We felt that Mugabe should be there. Or perhaps we felt that he was there, along with a murder of ZANUPF crows, big on the front rows, with tall hats on, so that nobody could see the movie.

I’m not mistakenly thinking that the nameless African country of White Material, is modeled on Zimbabwe. It is,
we assume, based on the Cameroon of Denis’ childhood. Besides, “its neither,” and “its not the point” and all of that. But, equally, it is for everybody watching this movie in our country.

The movie in fact is about a woman who has the power to ignore chaos. She glides like Katherine Hepburn (Isabella Huppert is our Katherine Hepburn) into absolute catastrophe.

This is a stunning movie. I should say that now. The cinematography is clean and stylish and stately as a galleon. The narrative builds and builds with grueling inevitability, like Cuckoo’s Nest, or a Just William story. Its that thing were you can see the hurricane on the horizon for the whole drive. You sit in front of the screen half wanting it all to go away, half not being able to tear your eyes from the screen. Huppert is imperious, but that’s hardly worth mentioning by this stage in her career.

Also, this film deserves to be more than a human interest story, New Internationalist tittle-tattle.

I’m not saying that I wish Denis had been less deliberate or precise about the location of her movie. As I say, perhaps Denis genuinely didn’t know what her film was about. But that’s all basically irrelevant. We sat in that little cinema, with forty-seven other people, all thinking that we were watching Animal Farm, all watching Animal Farm, and none of us watching this very ambitious, and wise and elegant movie.

This evening, I’ll cook pasta for my friends. It’s easy to do, but it still feels special. If you’re in the neighbourhood, don’t be a stranger.

Just Add Sugar and Semen

When tall hats are fashionable for a while, people start wearing small hats. When people stop wearing baggy jeans, they wear skinny jeans. There are fat lapels, then thin lapels. Kipper ties? skinny ties!

I think what I'm trying to get at is that, at some point, painfully unfashionable man Luc Besson, was in fact really super fashionable. But in fact thats bollocks. He has always, ALWAYS been the stoopidest director in the world. However, he has made 5 good movies.

This might not sound very good because Luc Besson has made like fifty movies. But think about this. Bob Rafaelson made two good films, John Cassavetes made three. David Lynch made three good films and Jim Jarmusch made two. Sidney Furie actually only made one good film and then went on to make like Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York and Superman IV, which puts him in minus numbers. I know all this because I spent a whole summer peeling the anaglypta off my walls so that I could write lists on them.

From Paris with Love is numero sept pour Senor Besson. The winning formula, lies in bringng together the stoopidest, funnest director in the world and the stoopidest, funnest actor in the world. The stoopidest, funnest actor in the world is of course Jon Travolta. In this movie he is more stoopidest and funnest than ever. He shouts and bawls and he has a shaved head and a big gun and that big manic smile and is generally like a Travoltary joy to watch.


All of this is against the fact that the love story is silly and boring, that the wildly inconsistent Jonathan Rhys Meyers looks like he has delivered all of his lines by accident and the fact that the film might have been more accurately titled In Bruges: This Time its not a Funny Film. Also, I've never seen a movie that made Paris look so ugly. Like even worse than An American in Paris. Even worse than Rush Hour 3. The exteriors look like interiors, and the interiors look like the interiors of a guy who died. A guy who died of an overdose of sugared almonds.

Okay, maybe I'm being like a little facetious, or maybe I didn't enjoy it as much as I made out. But that's only because I know so much about art films. It is stoopid and fun though. I'm starting to think that that isn't such an easy film to make.

Hey, you think I should get a top hat? I'd only wear it to see Luc Besson films. Or, that wasn't the point was it. Okay I'll wear it to Lumiere brothers movies. LOL.

(I'll actually just wear it around the house.)

That Kitchen-Sinking Feeling

Some girls are bigger than others, some girls mothers are bigger than other girls mothers, and some nationalisms are bigger than bastards.


I am no champion of British cinema. I think its mainstream is a sewer of cliches and stammers, while its "art" scene is equally trapped in the Hacknicon of "gritty realism." In Italy, it is a different story. Italy is the cradle of cinema, the cradle of imagination and innovation, right? Wrong.


How did it come to this. In the forties, Blasetti, Rosselini, and the great De Sicca kindled the neo-Realist revolution. As the fifties turned into the sixties, the golden generation of Italian film makers created a sort of westward expansion of the imagination. The names speak for themselves, its like fucking Vasari: Visconti, Antonioni, and the greatest film-maker of all time Federico Fellini. The seventies and eighties are seen as a desert of Italian cinema because they only spawned such triumphs of "high" and "low" cinema as, C'era una volta il West; the best films of Bertollucci; the truly special, Albergo degli Zoccoli.


And suddenly you look around and realise that this nation which has proudly looked out to sea for year after year, decade after decade, has become the most introverted cinema industry in the world. Italian film-makers now, make films about Italy. Often they are perfectly enjoyable, commendable movies. Gommora stands out, as does Sorrentino's il Divo. But often, too often, the most profitable of Italian exports are arduous, saccharine portraits of the political turmoil of post-War Italy and its impact on small town Italians. If I'm being a sentimental fogie, its only because I miss Italian cinema, when Italian was a synonym for imaginative.


All this is bringing me round to Giusseppe Tornatore. We all love Nuovo Cinema Paradiso. We really do, and it kills me to do this. His latest offering Baaria is a bad film and a symptom of something worse. It drawls on for two and half hours. This an empty film. One that we've seen a thousand times. One that constitutes a crushing, but by this stage familiar dissapointment.


I may sound hysterical in saying this. This development, I can only see as a twisted Fascism, in classically Italian mode. This is a young nation, turned in on itself. Triumphalist or ciritical, it constitutes a obsessive, nationalist, onanism. Even less forgivable, the movies it puts out are repetitive, masturbatory, dull. It makes me sad.

What if we gave you a dog instead of a guitar?

If I was Ross I wouldn't marry Rachel. I'm like one of those people who doesn't like doing what's expected of me. Perhaps that's why I live such a Rock 'n' Roll lifestyle.

The anxiety of not sticking to the plan is the subject of Noah Baumbach's Greenberg. The movie follows Roger Greenberg on his return to his native LA, released from hospital after a breakdown. Roger Greenberg should have been a rockstar and instead he's a lonely, harassed Ben Stiller character.

It is an uncomfortable film. Which is an achievement in itself. There are lots of really nice touches: the loneliness of being carless in LA, being swimless in a swimming pool and being middle aged at a teenagers party. There is also a heady and depressing love story, a reprise of those classic stories where misery and middle age gets a boner for youth and hope, with not so hilarious consequences.

In the end though, the warnings are in the same tepid gulf stream of Hollywood claptrap. This is a movie about not following your dreams. That's the first thing. This is still a deeply American (shorthand for lots of mean things that people say about cinema) movie. If Disney supplies the carrot, this kind of stuff is the stick which drives the American dream.
If you don't go to the ball, if you don't collect the golden ticket, you might end up being a social spastic, housesitting for your successful brother and fucking his dog-walker.

BUT:

This is a sad film, but I'm not sure this is really a legitimate thing to make people sad about.

The second thing is that I just don't know if this Ben Stiller thing is really a reliable or conscientious portrait of a breakdown. He's like a bit miserable, a bit sociopathic, a bit sarcastic. In fact, this image of crushing depression, in another context, might be described as being English. Not long before watching this movie I watched Cassavetes' masterpiece, A Woman Under the Influence. C'est very wunderbar. Films like that make me think about the real danger and anger and nightmare of a nervous breakdown. I just don't know about Roger Greenberg.

I don't know if you've noticed, that I've started doing that thing were I tell you a better movie to watch than this one. Maybe that's what I'll do from now on.

The upshot of all thiis that Roger Greenberg is just a twat. I know that Baumbachs big trick is to present you with nightmare human beings and make you feel sorry for them. It works so well in the Squid and the Whale, but in this there isn't really that many moments were pity and twattishness couch up together. Its a bit more sloppy maybe?

Also, you can't help feeling that if this was a Michael Haneke film, there'd be a bit more motherfuck. Roger Greenberg might get a bit of punishment, like a knife in the face or something. That would be more satisfying.

In my reviews, do I talk about Haneke too much? Did that question make me sound like a Ben Stiller character?

Film Directors vs. Guns

Yesterday a Palestinian man showed me his feces. It didn't matter that the man was Elia Sulieman, and his feces were a movie called The Time that Remains, it was just as scary as any other time a Palestinian man showed me feces.

I'm not being mean because I actually really enjoyed the movie. In fact, the first 30 minutes were pretty flawless and well exciting. Thats the bits when he talks about the active role that his dad took as a Palestinian nationalist in the early days of the State of Israel. Stirring stuff. But then it all gets a bit off the boil. Bits of it are boring. Bits of it are well over-stylised. But the real problem for me, (or if not a problem, a time bomb), was just how personal this movie is.

About half this movie is shots of Elia Sulieman playing himself but doing an impression of Buster Keaton, and staring at his mother and father and their maid, as they go around their daily chores.

In a way the film is sustained by the setting of it or whatever, because it genuinely is interesting to hear from someone who lives in that area. There's lots of pretty cool visual gags about the dark absurdity of living in Palestine: An Israeli soldier parks outside an Arabic nightclub and bobs his head to the beat while calling curfew. Stuff like that. But that in itself makes you feel even more that this film is immensely solopsistic, as in "How can this guy be banging on about how he feels about his mum and dad when he's in the middle of a fucking warzone."

Which is totally unfair I guess. But you can't help thinking that when you watch the movie. That's all I'm saying.

I've heard people say that there's only so much longer Sulieman can keep doing this Nazarene Buster Keaton schtick. I think the bigger thing is how long cinema, or art cinema anyway, can go on like this. How long can we be so besotted with our directors.

Because this is the most mastubatory piece of cinema ever produced. I'm convinced of that. This is the apex. The man plays himself, in a film about his own life, set in the actual house where he grew up. Its like CCTV footage of his soul. But its the apex of something which started I guess with the Nouvelle Vague and the auteur manifesto. Suddenly directors were allowed to talk about themselves and how they feel the same way that painters had been for years and years. Then really intersting things started happening like the Antoine Doinel series. You watch those movies and you're like "Man this is scary. Truffaut is sitting next to me and shouting about his marital problems."

There are definetly nice things like that in Time that Remains. Like there's this one bit were a guy comes to his door and is like "I got you this Tabbouleh with raisins just how you like it," and we're all like "Woah that really is how he likes it!"

I'm rambling, but the point is maybe that personality and subjectivity, which you probably thought would always be necessarily original and challenging is now itself getting hackneyed. You do watch this movie and think I don't care pal, I don't care.

Or I did. I don't want to tell you how to think. And who cares how I feel about this stuff anyway. I don't even know if you're allowed to call Palestinians douche-bags

Why Mummy is fatter than Daddy.

Just because I spend my time trying on my favourite dresses doesn't mean that I don't hate cry babies. Like, one time I was in the cinema when I got this thick cokey, nosebleed. I looked down and my white shirt was a red shirt. Then this hulk next to me picked me out of my seat, carried me out of the theatre, and dialled an ambulance. I assured him I was fine and walked straight back into the theatre. He made me miss the trailers. I like the trailers because I like to see what's coming soon.

Other crybabies include: Them people who don't eat veal, and the people who get upset about Michael Winterbottom movies.

I went to see that film the Killer Inside Me and I honestly didn't know what all the fuss was about. I mean it is definetly a gruesome film, but this is not like, Gaspar Noe, its not even Tarantino really. There is a scene were Jessica Alba gets her eyes plucked out. Its pretty bad, but I mean just don't go and see the movie you know? The thing that really pissed people off was that the women in the movie seem to enjoy gettin' a rapin'.

Hence the same outcry in the press, that greets every second offering from MW. Bare people walked out of a press screening in Berlin, and apparently some douche bag stood up at the screening at Sundance and shouted "How dare you Sundance."

Which is all fine, apart from the fact that you get the impression that MW loves it. Every time his mid-life crisis flutters into existence, some hack comes out and pens this nonsense melodrama which casts MW as a tartan, Fuckaneer, jamming both barrels into the gob of a Gilbert and Sullivan Appreciation Society treasurer. I mean he must love that you know?

The second thing that comes out of all of this, is that MW gets right on the blower to Newsnight Review or Southbank or something and gets them to give him an interview were he explains to the dumbfound proles that the violence of his movies is loaded with irony or some subtlety which they obviously missed. He gets off scott-free and makes his critics look pretty dim.

So he went on Radio 4 the other day and was like "This film is completely like, unreliable narratory. Ergo, anyone who thinks that the women actually enjoyed the violence or whatever, have totally got the wrong end of the stick. Psyche."

There's two reasons why this is bollocks. One is because, if this is the point of the movie, he's fucked it up. The second is that its a well old idea, and one that didn't need to be done again, because its been done loads by well cleverer people than MW.

The driving thing of the whole film was the schizophrenic behaviour of Lou Ford (the main character played by Casey Affleck) prone to personality shifts (from loveable bumpkin to rapacious nutjob). So MW's point is that we see the rape of the girls purely through his eyes or whatever. But its pretty haphazardly done. The whole thing is riddled with Freudian nudgewinkery and flashbacks. Occasionally there's these real hamfisted bits of fourth wall breaking, when MW asks an otherwise admirable Affleck to mum and gurn at the camera. Its really balls all that side of it actually.

But the point is, its not as interesting or pioneering as MW wants you to think. I just came out of that cinema and wanted to put posters up everywhere telling people to see Detour, Edgar Ulmer's 1945 movie. That's how to do unreliable narrator so that its snappy, and subtle, and absorbing and really, really creepy.

It always feels a bit shit when you hear directors making excuses for their movies. Its especially bad when the movie itself is such a shabby, shit little number.

Joe

My partner is upstairs banging on the floor. He likes to copy David Byrne's dance moves from the live performance of "Once in a lifetime," at Wembley in '82. I go upstairs and promise to do the dances with him as long as he comes with me to watch a triple bill of Weerasethakul Apichatpong movies at our local arty cinema. He agrees. Off we go.

You might say a triple-bill is a big thing to give to a gay, Thai, part-time architect of tender years. But you're forgetting that he just won the Palme D'Or silly. This is our cinema's way of giving him a party. After seeing those films I'd want to give him lots of parties.

I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it. I've never been so struck by the sound of the movies. Each film, Blissfully Yours, Syndromes and a Century and Tropical Malady, each has this background hum of insects right across the whole soundtrack. It feels like you're in a bath. At least that's how I remember it. Meanwhile the the shyly smiling voices of the shy protagonists, hardly creep above the sound of the cricketing. Very quietly they tell each other that they love each other.

In Apichatpong movies, people love each other very quietly, and very much. And the sex scenes are so honest so tender, that its difficult not to think of them as anything but wholesome, sort of hopeful. Tropical Malady makes you forget that people ever thought homosexuality was bad, that people ever could. The heartbreaks are quiet and polite. In Syndromes and a Century, Mr. Chai explains to Dr. Prasarn that he is in love with her, but listens patiently as she recounts the moment she fell in love with another man. Even the conflicts (like the doctor patient conflicts that begin each film) are brushed away with tact and smile.

And they smile. People smile in Apichatpong movies. And little bad things happen. Cows die and people get rashes. But I don't think any big bad things could really happen.

The visual composition is the same: Soft and unassuming and green and meek and quietly moving. The characters gaze at the treetops and at the scorching Thai sky, and you gaze with them. You look at peoples faces for minutes, but it doesn't feel fair that you can't touch them, comfort them. And its all like pea green, pea green, pea green.

This is the overriding affect. You know the way you feel that exciting, voyeuristic ripple when you watch a Haneke film, the feeling that you shouldn't really be seeing all of this? The opposite affect comes from Apichatpong movies. There is this quiet, naive honesty to them, like standing next to a very shy, very lovely person, who is quietly explaining to someone that they are in love.

On the way out of the cinema my partner makes jokes about the unpronounceability of his name (is it "Achtung Ouijaboard?") I'm just excited to see this latest one. I mean its supposed to be his best film yet. Its sure to be lovely. Just lovely.

On watching the queue for Godard's "Socialism" at the Cannes Palais

Berlin is like the coolest place in the world these days, and London still has the coolness of the nineties, but Paris will always be cool as long as people still watch Bout de Souffle. I dig that, I just don’t get why people are so serious about those movies.

For instance for the people standing in line at the Cannes Palais on the Boulevard de la Croisette, waiting to see Godard’s latest (last?) offering Socialism, JLG is the man with the supersonic penis. He hunts the big ideas, gets them in range and blows them to bits with his penis. His penis is the strongest thing in the wimpy world of art cinema, and, these people say:

“We need Godard to kick the shit out of the ignorant West. We need him to blow King Kong, and consumerism and Keanu Reeves through a brick wall.”

I want to say again that it would be churlish and sort of adolescently iconoclastic to say that Godard’s movies weren’t exciting and cool and great when I watched them, and Jesus they must have been exciting in the 60s can you imagine? Big broken-nosed Belmondo loping alongside the sexiest Seberg of all time. And all of it frenetically cut together, like by a lunatic, with big pictures of Bogie. Wowzer. What I’m trying to say is just this:

Shot some big game once, doesn’t make him a sharpshooter.

Take a practical example. With Bande a Part and Breathless, Godard chopped his films up like no-one had ever seen it before. Its crazy to watch, but it also makes you think about Godard himself, hunched over on a stool somewhere with a pair of scissors, smashing up his own dailies. Nowdays, funky editing styles just make you think of MTV. Besides, in the technology of cinema there was just more to smash up in the sixties. They weren't proper hunters, but more like cider sodden aussies crashing along b-roads in oafish four by fours in search of roos to fender-marmalise.

The main point is this though. Those early new wave efforts were designed, as Susan Sontag said, to destroy the cinema de papa. With its cigarettes and its bollocksed noir, Breathless waseven more than a parody, its was a conscious reduction of everything that cinema had been before, a reduction down to "a gun and a girl." This is were the Cannes Palais crowd underestimate Godard. He wasn't just a gunslinger. He was Shiva. But once you've destroyed everything, you're done.

So I just don’t know if Godard should still be making movies. The great destroyer doesn't have anything to destroy and besides, he doesn't even know whats already been destroyed. The upshot is that he does a bit of a Columbine.

I aint seen it but apparently this Socialism film is going to be impossible to watch. Godard himself basically demanded that non-Francophones who wanted to watch it should "learn French." The idea that a great 60s revolutionary should be making films so brashly undemocratic is a complete capitulation to the criticisms that he always put him self at risk of.

I don’t even know if this is a judgement on his movies, I’m just saying, I don’t understand why I should go and see them. He’s not like a great story teller or anything, he's an iconoclast, and there's nothing more butters than an athritic middle finger. I don’t know, maybe I just don’t get these old guys.