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.

The Guy who Shot Stalin

Last summer, while you and I were sleeping, Werner Herzog went to America and made a David Lynch film. Those are the salient facts of the matter. When he finished the film, he decided to call it My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? which for my money is one of the best movie titles of all time.

The film looks and smells like a David Lynch film. It follows the story of Brad who, killing his mother, hides out in her flamingo pink bungalow, while, behind him, his history is unfolded by his sexy fiancee and his acting coach. Something is rotten in middle America.

Now, the grinches and night-creatures will say that a faded Herzog is trying to cling to the fading tails of David Lynch’s faded tailcoat. They are incorrect. This is what Herzog has done his whole career. My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done? is not pastiche David Lynch, it is a movie about David Lynch, about David Lynch movies. That’s what makes this rather high-pitched melodrama so fascinating to watch, so crazy on so many levels.

This is a movie about the madness of Lynch. It functions in the same way that Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo function as movies about the chaos of Klaus Kinski’s personality, or Grizzly Man is about the madness of Timothy Treadwell, or Nosferatu is a movie about the vaudevillian craze of F.W. Murnau movies. Certainly Aguirre, and Fitzcarraldo, and My Son, My Son are movies about madness, but they function more effectively, more interestingly, as movies about movies about madness.

“It’s Crazy! Crazy on so many levels!” That’s what you’re sposed to say after watching a Herzog movie.

When the New German Cinema started, the Cahiers de Cinema boffins swiftly identified this trend and ascribed it to a German reaction against the auterism of the previous, and French, generation. They saw the chaotic centerpieces of the Herzog enterprise as the contrary of the auterist position. These are movies in which the director relinquishes control and consciously dissapears into the sprawl and lunacy of their own creations.

Thats all very well. But the thing which undercuts all of this is that Herzog himself is mad. I mean of course he’s fucking mad! How could any sane person seek out the company of Klaus Kinski and Lynch and Treadwell, just to watch them, to be abused by them? Even in taking a bit part in Mister Lonely, you get the idea that he just wanted an opportunity to watch comedy smackhead Harmony Korine. In other words, as much as the Amazon movies are about Kinski, or My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? is about Lynch, they are all movies about Werner Herzog.

You might think that Herzog is too aware of madness to be mad. In making autobiographical movies like Was ich bin, sind meine filme, and Mein Liebster Fiend, Herzog refers to the chaos of his own existence. He talks at length about his own facination with madness.

But this doesn’t prove a thing. It is precisely this which makes, in particular, Kinski and Herzog’s relationship so satisfying. It is the Laurel and Hardy dynamic. Stan is stupid. Ollie tells Stan he is stupid. Ollie is stupid. It makes Herzog’s madness all the more complex, all the more fascinating. It reminds you of sickly, little Robert Stevenson, putting on funny hats and changing his name to Louis. He was good enough at pirates anyway!

You know those movies where a Rod Taylor/Charlton Heston character finds himself in like another world and, surrounded by blank-faced, automaton villains and he panics and shrieks something like “You’re all crazy! I’m the only sane man here!!” I’d love to see Werner Herzog do a remake of one of those. Man, that movie would be crazy on so many levels!

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