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.
So far this blog has been about cinema (and a little bit of anime), but there’s no reason we should restrict ourselves so completely. We’ve talked about doing some pieces on American telly. I’ll be running an interview with Tom Baker later in the year. And you can expect some posts on video art and (believe it or not) Cracker in the near future. Our ever-reluctant patron, of course, was revered as a theatrical impresario before he became a film director, and I couldn’t possibly finish this sentence without mentioning his stage magic. But it’s his radio work – especially The Mercury Theatre on the Air – that gives me all the excuse I need to bring The True History of Faction Paradox to your attention.
The True History – of which ‘The Judgment of Sutekh’ is the final, sixth, installment, is not cinematic. But I could call it cinematic, for want of a better word (sonic won’t do). It’s an epic science fantasy drama set in the political domains of the embattled and morally eccentric Ancient Egyptian pantheon, spread across six discs, which together form the complete novel (again, this is for want of better – correct me if you think radio doesn’t lack a lexicon).
What I say next will prove offputting, but I haven’t much choice. Stick with me.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s MicMacs marks a return to cinemas after a five-year break following the release of 2004’s A Very Long Engagement. This hiatus was chiefly dedicated to an attempt to bring Yann Martel’s award-winning 2001 novel Life of Pi to the silver screen. However, ballooning costs resulted in the canning of the project, which was a real blow to all of us hoping for a life-affirming treatment from the same mind that brought us the joy-enforcing powerhouse of Amelie. If rumours are to be believed, however, Ang Lee is now on board (geddit?), so there may be hope for the project yet.
Anyway, instead of the story of a boy with a tiger in his boat, Jeunet has opted for the story of a man with a bullet in his head. While the film isn’t deliberately grittier than the rest of his back catalogue, it certainly has a foot more firmly planted in the real world (with the possible exception of …Engagement). The antagonists of MicMacs are a pair of profit-oriented arms manufacturers, who are jointly responsible for two major blows to the life of lead character Bazil; the loss of his parents (to a landmine and bereavement-induced grief) and the round permanently embedded in his skull. Following a chance meeting, he becomes part of a family of eccentrics living in a scrap yard and, with the help of his new friends, sets out to force some karma on the men that destroyed his life.
Tavs should be posting a review of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s MicMacs early next week, but here’s an advance warning: the film’s in French.
Fair enough. Even without the careful excision of dialogue, it’s pretty obvious that this is a French film. Trying to draw attention away from the fact that your movie has subtitles is standard practice, and hardly worth comment. Except, in the case of MicMacs, the voiceover guy has crossed the line dividing friendly exposition from crucifying condescension. It makes the decision to hide the language look a lot like disdain. Is it a marketing commonplace that audiences should to be talked to as if it were a baby? Or is Jeunet a special case?
Unexpectedly, the voiceover actually fits Jeunet’s aesthetic, in a peculiarly auto-fetishistic way. “Now. Thanks to a medical miracle. And a chance meeting. With a makeshift family of misfits.” Just like the voiceover guy, Jeunet demands we are delighted by his staff freaks.
Few directors have managed to marry poetry and narrative film in a wholly satisfactory way – the list of noble attempts is a short one. Maybe the truth is that verse, so often to be found arresting time, exists only in stark contrast to film, where the ticking clock is inexorable. There is also a very practical consideration: filming writers in action is rarely dramatically profitable.
But Jane Campion, directing this biopic of John Keats’s last years in Hampstead Village, is unafraid of poetry’s holy moments. The young Romantic’s compositions in this period (1818-21) included ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ‘Lamia’, the first parts of Hyperion and his six great odes – astonishingly precocious achievements for any writer, never mind a surgeon’s apprentice in his early 20s, racked with tuberculosis and publicly derided in the Quarterly Review. Sensibly, Campion does not try to crush his greatest hits into 120 minutes of epiphanies on the heath and bouts of furious quill-scratching. Bright Star, named after one of Keats’s sonnets, is about as tender a romance as the author of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ deserves. Poetry, discussed throughout, is eventually put into an intractable conflict with love, thanks to the zealous assertions of Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider), Keats’s friend and supporter, who jealously guards his pet genius from the advances of their neighbour, experimental seamstress Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). But poetry is not all of Keats, and Keats is not all of Bright Star. Campion’s film rather takes Brawne as its subject, and it’s through her eyes and ears we contend with Keats’s sensory responsiveness and poetic gift.
Sometimes, just sometimes, a screenplay can be as enjoyable as the film itself (most of the time, it’s either far better or far worse). In The Loop is one such sometime. The screenplay can be read online here.
Northwest Vision and Media – which funded Salvage (2009) along with two other micro-budget feature films, both premiered in 2008 – has asked me to keep a secret. As budget film benefactors are the undisputed angels of the industry, I’ve decided to play nice and not broadcast the mystery of the shipping container whose contents rampage their way through Salvage’s 180 blood-spattered minutes.
Jodie (Linzey Cocker) plays the Dad-doting teen sent to spend Christmas with her career-bent mother (Neve McIntosh) who is found – true to form – bonking a stranger with the door open. Thus, when the horrors-of-which-we-may-not-speak break out of a shipping container washed up on a nearby beach to terrorise the streets of the cul-de-sac, Mum and her friendly fuck are left peeping out at the house across the road, where Jodie has fled in sulky rebellion.
Continuing his perennial exploration of the purposes and causes of terrorism, Austrian director Michael Haneke arrives at a near-identical story to the one he told in his 2005 film Caché, in which middle-class media professionals were haunted by their apparent complicity with France’s colonial past. The return of the repressed in that film was marked first by the sinister postage of videotapes and crayon drawings, later the suicide of an Algerian man orphaned by the Paris massacre of 1961. In The White Ribbon (2009), Haneke’s truths are more oblique: social neuroses manifest as random acts of violence committed in the agricultural community of Eichwald, on the eve of the Great War.
Like Caché, the film’s point of view is held in a position of delicately-balanced uncertainty. “I don’t know if the story I’m about to tell you is entirely true…” begins the narrator, an elderly incarnation of the tender and troutlike schoolteacher who gingerly plays amateur detective in the final stages of the film. But it is far too late for him to collapse The White Ribbon’s superpositions into a single solution. He could not have been privy to the vast majority of the film’s many vignettes, which follow the Baron, the Pastor, the doctor, the village’s unfathomable children and sundry other villagers as they socialise with suspicion and barely-sublimated hostility. The dramatic irony is on a world-historical scale: not only do we know Europe will be imminently plunged into four years of industrial ruination, but the narrator’s audible senescence asks us to view Eichwald’s trauma with the rest of German history in mind: the rise of fascism and 1945’s partition included.
There’s something unsettling about the idea of an ‘ordinary’ serial killer and unsettling the viewer is something that Tony does very well, primarily because of its ability to convince you of the sheer normalcy of Peter Ferdinando’s methodically studied murderer. This makes the horrible stuff all the more distressing when it comes. A murder committed in the warm light of a late summer’s afternoon in the familiar surroundings of a London suburb really sticks with you, for some reason.
David Lynch wants his curtains back
Luckily, the movie doesn’t take itself too seriously, which prevents it from tipping the balance too far into the realm of the disturbing. There’s a deep vein of black humour throughout, much of it arising from the awkward behaviour of the eponymous Dalston dweller – “What can you do for five pounds?” Tony asks of a supremely nonplussed prostitute. It helps to relieve some of the tension built up during scenes of butchery, but also adds a bit of a sneering quality at times. It’s not nice to laugh at people with mental illnesses. Even (especially?) if they’re going to chop you up in the bath later.
Quietly dispensing with Dickens’s interest in the widespread poverty wreaked by the industrial revolution, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past transplants the plot of A Christmas Carol to the scene of a wedding in Newport, where rakish hedonist Connor Mead (Matthew McConaughey) is busy disrupting his younger brother’s nuptials with a misogynist’s philosophy inherited from his late Uncle Wayne (Michael Douglas), “a visionary” who taught the teenage Connor that, “The power in a relationship lies with whoever cares less.” And, “Love leaves you weak, dependent and fat.”
McConaughey is reasonable casting as the Ebenezer of love, and the film’s most impressive feat is making his passage from miser to Cupid vaguely plausible. But there is give and take – his transformation is only plausible because the women in his life are needy and shrewish emotional wrecks.
That’s half of the problem. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is in theory a romantic comedy, but there’s an obtrusive, er, ‘mirth gap’. Early on, Connor dumps three girlfriends by conference call. Later, all the condoms he ever used rain down on his head. It’s a bit of a plodder and chronically unsurprising, a chick flick that hates chicks.
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