It’s been quiet around here, what?

• Adam Roberts on Iron Man.
• Jonathan McCalmont on Soi Cowboy and  The Brothers Bloom.
• Robert Briggs’s ‘Culture & Pedagogy’.
• Lady Gaga’s ‘Alejandro’
• Jim Emerson on the reaction to Film Socialisme.
• Nicolas Cage in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
• The Expendables (choose trailer 1).
• Rakash Ranjan Kumar’s Dear Friend Hitler.

Philip French loves writing on cinema, but it’s been a long time since he actually said anything. Once you realise that his reviews in The Observer are mostly a dogged refusal to include anything outside of a chunk of trivia, followed by a description of the plot, you can potentially squeeze some enjoyment out of him—it must, presumably, take effort to say nothing at all. His remembrance of Breathless is another puzzling example. It makes me think that French’s true home is not the film review, but rather the introduction. Or perhaps the press release.

For nearly 40 years I’ve been convinced that whenever a Godard movie is shown at Cannes, everybody in the world interested in seeing it is present at the Palais du Festival, elbowing other critics aside as they struggle to get into the early-morning press show. Nowadays, I only see a new film by the aloof, hectoring, didactic Godard when wild horses turn up at my front gate to drag me to a London press screening.

What?

It’s interesting that French has seen fit to write a hapless ‘where did it go wrong?’ piece about the septuagenarian Godard, who for some reason turned beyond the critic’s ken to “low-budget pictures, most of them on video”, implicitly suggesting that very little beyond the ’60s is worth writing about (although this could be unintentional—French doesn’t write about anything). This is both demonstrably untrue—Godard returned to the mainstream, on his own terms, in the ’80s—and (this is mean) an act of displacement.

Why was I thrilled when Truffaut, as the director in his La Nuit américaine, eagerly tears open a parcel of books on the cinema, one of which is a symposium on Godard containing my 1965 essay on Une Femme mariée?

French can’t really say that Godard’s powers have diminished, because that would involve more than trivia, but he has, I suggest, picked the ‘where did it go wrong?’ mode for a reason.

• Steven Shaviro on Slow Cinema Vs Fast Films.
• Friend of Orson Kerry Bradshaw (who runs a secret cinema in Bath/Bristol) has just finished making her five-months-in-the-making short documentary about young asylum seekers for Rasp. Go and watch it; it’s free!
• Two excellent podcasts: The Business and Creative Screenwriting Magazine.
• Apichatpong ‘call me Joe’ Weerasethakul has taken the 2010 Palme d’Or for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Orson hasn’t seen the film yet, of course, but it’s bloody brilliant that Weerasethakul has gained this kind of exposure. If you haven’t seen it, drop everything and find a copy of Syndromes and a Century, a Lynchian, science fictional, quietist, meditative fantasia that is one of those films critics can’t find the right words for, as I have just demonstrated.
• Strange casting? Stranger casting.

• Iron Man 2 is (I attest!) better than Iron Man – because it doesn’t have to bother with all the laborious character-formation that distracts from the utterly, unambiguously Randian superheroics we pay our money for (what are they waiting for?). Poet Ron Silliman thinks otherwise.
• Attend to David Milch and you will be rewarded – in this life!
• A reminder about one of the best French films I’ve seen in recent years, Heartbeat Detector. Like the comments say, it isn’t quite a masterpiece, but it is driven by ideas, and argues its case rather than junking it all in during the last act, which is rarer than it should be.
• “A very private internal implosion.” Casey Affleck tries desperately (I assume) to keep the cat in the bag.
• This is nothing to do with film, but I link to this recent Oxfordian v. Stratfordian Shakespeare authorship debate because (a) it’s quite comprehensive if you’ve read little previously about the topic, and (b) Orson Welles found J. Thomas Looney, who first suggested the Earl of Oxford was the true author of Shakespeare’s works, very persuasive indeed.
• Speaking of Shakespeare, Michael Sheen is taking on Hamlet. Just as exciting is the news that Ian Rickson is directing.

David Thomson’s back-of-an-envelope biography.

With such a political chain-yank for a title, Paul Thomas’s and Matt Harlock’s new documentary sets a certain standard for itself. But American: The Bill Hicks Story, besides scene-setting references to “Lyndon Johnson’s great society” and the war in Vietnam, makes no attempt to solder the American experience to a bio of the late American comic. It is a personal history, an effort of oceanic devotion. It threatens to drown its subject.

The form and content of the film are familial. While Hicks’s loved ones tell, in chronological order, the story of his life, we watch reels of photographs from the family album, animated to make every moment improbably and attractively iconic. Hicks, like any publicity-conscious stand-up, was much-snapped. Even as a 16-year-old, he hired a friend, David Johndrow, as his official photographer. Diagnosed with cancer toward the end of the film, he arranges “one last photo shoot”. And in a peculiar anecdote delivered by his mother (one of the film’s ten narrators) Hicks invokes posterity and appears to prophesy the very film you’re watching.

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I caught Ridley Scott’s latest wrong-righting epic history as early as I possibly could, i.e. today, and I’m sad to report the green hoods are kept to a minimum while Crowe slaughters Frenchmen and promotes Magna Carta in a Midlands dell. Robin of Sherwood remains the superior screen-Hood, but this new guy is authoritative in exactly the way you expect, the myth gaining infinite seriousness from Blanchett’s and Crowe’s creeping middle age – at least for an hour or so, before it gets silly and the care with which Scott develops an intriguing (only partly fantasised) political and geographical scenario is shoved rudely to one side.

What’s a bit interesting is that while repudiating the Christmas camp that made Prince of Thieves so joyous, Scott’s Hood builds directly on that film’s mock-nationalism. Again, Robin is a crusader; again he has a direct and measurable effect on the English body politic – at the conspicuous expense, it has to be said, of much traditional banditry.

I don’t expect Scott to make a sequel, so I have to ask: why an origin story? Like almost every superhero franchise (and this includes The Matrix), part two is where everything comes together. Origins are rubbish. Everyone knows who Spider-Man, Batman, Robin Hood et al are, so why bother leading us there so gingerly? It’s epic rule number one; hit the ground running.

Iron Man 2, by the way, proves this point nicely – again.

• M.I.A. – ‘Born Free‘
• Boing Boing on Kenyan short film ‘Pumzi’ (albeit mostly just pointing out the existence of ‘Pumzi’).
• Chris Hemsworth is Thor!
• Matt Smith is Christopher Isherwood!
• Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is to be released – finally complete! – in September. (Infinitely exciting because probably no one in the world saw Lang’s original version between its 1927 premiere and the footage turning up in a Buenos Aires film vault a couple of years ago.)
• 3-D Ang Lee.

A quick plug. Over at SF “Let’s Talk Sci-fi” X, I’ve been reviewing Stacey Abbott’s not-very-good The Cult TV Book. My other contributions to this hallowed organ of science fiction, however, are reserved for the print edition – the next issue of which is guest edited by one Terry Pratchett.

Jonny reviewed The Kreutzer Sonata down the Well a while ago, but even if his, er, controlled praise encouraged you to see it, the film’s limited theatrical release would have severely reduced your chances. The film may have reached further than Motherhood, but only a little.

I’ve now got hold of the DVD, so it’s my turn to take a look at the film, although you should read Jonny’s review first because I’m going to skip describing the plot. The film improved with my second look, perhaps because the genre – out-and-out melodrama, or oaoma! – didn’t come as so much of a surprise. The last scene certainly takes a hairpin turn into human extremities that have little to do with realism on film – which is to say that horror/action movies have a monopoly on bloody violence, posing a problem to directors like Bernard Rose who want to do something different while still bulk-buying sacks of fake blood. But knowing what’s coming in The Kreutzer Sonata helps you appreciate the careful, playful way Rose rigs the tragedy of it from the beginning. The second time around, you pay more attention to the style, which can, I think, be named. It’s impressionism.

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