A bit of of a back-slap, this, but I think it’ll be interest to anyone who happens across this blog looking for our late sponsor.
I’ve just edited a book, available now from Amberley Publishing, in which the estimable and gentlemanly Alan Gallop tells the full story of the big man’s notorious Halloween ‘38 broadcast of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. It’s great fun – I’ve rattled through it a few times, obviously – and paints a believable picture of New Deal New York, and all those bold theatrical folk (incl. John Houseman and Marc Blitzstein) making experimental (& often Government-subsidised) drama for a mass audience.
Alexander Jacoby reviews Tino Balio’s The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens 1946–1973 in the TLS, 18/02/11:
One distinguished British import of the early post-war era was released with the tag line “A horrifying spectre stalks the great stone battlements of the ancient castle. Its one command is … kill … kill … KILL!” The film in question was Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet.
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.
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.
I’ve now seen Grizzly Man more times than Timothy Treadwell got a semi over bear poop, and every time it’s struck me as a thoroughly, exquisitely, wrong-hearted movie. So much so that it’s quite hard to know where to begin in describing its wrong-heartedness.
Indulge a reminiscence, then. It’s 2005, or thereabouts. Tavs and I are sitting in my university room, all studenty and impressionable. We’ve had a few smokes, and now we’re watching Grizzly Man for the first time. We’ve been watching it for, say, 30 minutes, and I think it’s fake. Well, maybe not fake – I don’t doubt its existence, I don’t doubt this is a Werner Herzog film (really, you couldn’t) – but I do think it’s false, faux, a made-up documentary, a fictive non-fiction. Now the film’s ended and I still think it’s a clever little unreal. I’m damn impressed, and, as one does, I head straight to IMDB. Bam! Boosh! Boom! It’s real. The whole thing’s real. It’s really real. I think I’m stoned Tavs. That was really… Read more »
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