Don’t Labour have better things to do than make Doctor Who fan fiction? Watch this.
That’s David Tennant doing the voiceover at the end. Technically, he isSean Pertwee’s father, regenerated. There’s no way this wasn’t contrived by a Who fan. In fact, it could easily be inserted into the last act of ‘The End of Time Part Two’ – the New Year’s Day episode – when Tennant makes his farewells. A last piece of advice for his Labour-supporting son.
Either someone in the government is gambling on the entire country joining the dots and appreciating this abnormal spiritual intervention, or there’s a spotty herbert in the ad department who’s hoping no one will notice. It’s a misuse of resources I can easily forgive, anyway.
And as electioneering goes, there’s been much worse than this, of course. It’s lovely, sylvan. I’d live in it.
Shank tries to be a dystopian film that presents a vision of London, circa 2015. Rag, tag and bobtail gangs run the city. So far has the world fallen, they peddle not stolen stereos and drugs but “munchies” – food, in other words (an apple costs £350; a pizza, intriguingly, £85.50). We’re not really told how this came about, and in so short a time too, but no matter: As The Road has shown, people enjoy not being presented with a cause when confronted with apocalyptic effect.
Shank also tries to cross gritty cinema with music video stylistics. Imagine Children of Men and then intersperse it with the credit sequence from The IT Crowd. That’s how Shank watches. For 90 minutes. One minute it’s in fit-like shakycam mode, bouncing through alleyways in chase of hoodlums, the next it’s become a mock-crap computer cartoon of a kid jumping over tower blocks. Quite what that’s supposed to do to you as viewer is anyone’s guess, but it doesn’t matter because… Read more »
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.
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.
Neo-classical avant-gardist Peter Greenaway returns to indie cinemas near you with Nightwatching, a boisterous and beguiling film straight out of cinema’s academic leftfield. Cut from the same canvas as The Draughtsman Contract, Nightwatching sees Greenaway again throw himself into artsy period restoration, this time in chase of answers to the legend that is Rembrandt. The themes of painter as outsider and of cinema as artifice are never far from the camera’s lens, and while onscreen events fail to reprise the full pomp of Greenaway’s yore, Nightwatching certainly proves an edifying spectacle in the current atmosphere of Avatars and Wolfmen.
The film’s beating heart is Rembrandt himself, a painter as technically brilliant as he is historically elusive. For all the acclaim this famed Dutch Master continues to receive in art schools, little is known about his life. Of the three women he took during his lifetime, for example, where the second two came from is anybody’s guess. And then there’s his finances. Rembrandt famously died destitute having once lived handsomely, though just where all the money went remains a mystery. Read more »
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.
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.
It’s always nice to come across a film that actually delivers on its promises. Kicks sets out to take a look into the dangers of celebrity obsession, focusing particularly on British society’s WAG obsession, and achieves its aims with refreshing intelligence.
Set in Liverpool, the film follows Nicole, a latchkey kid who’s obsessed with the Reds’ star striker, Lee Cassidy. She is befriended by the more affluent Jasmine, who has aspirations of landing a player of her own. A close bond develops between the two, but upon discovering that the object of their affections is to depart for sunnier climes, they enact a drastic bid to prevent his defection. Ultimately, it becomes clear that, far from being worthy of Nicole’s idolisation, Lee isn’t all she thought he was cracked up to be.
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