My American Uncle is a metaphor for the happiness we all hope comes out of no where for no reason that we as human creatures for some strange reason think we deserve. There is a wonderful moment in the film when Janine (Nicole Garcia) is speaking with Zambeaux (Pierre Arditi) and she describes an assumption she’d always had that she would be happy in her life – that happiness would arrive, like a gift from an Uncle in America.  Zambeaux replies:  “America doesn’t exist. I know.  I’ve been there.”

The idea of the American Uncle sending a gift out of the blue for no reason is one expressed by each of the three main characters in this film at different times. The film is built around the ideas of French physician, writer and philosopher Henri Laborit, who plays himself in the film. It uses the stories of three people to illustrate Laborit’s theories on evolutionary psychology regarding the relationship of self and society. René (Gérard Depardieu) leaves the family farm to become an executive at a French textile firm. Janine leaves her proletarian family behind to become an actress who becomes involved with Jean (Roger Pierre), a well-educated bourgeois writer/politician. All three characters face difficult choices in life-changing situations that are designed to illuminate Laborit’s ideas.

Polish Film poster for the film.

The ideas expressed and the film itself, may seem a little dated now.  Laborit will sit as if being interviewed and explain his theories, which are then followed up by experiments with rats that act as supporting evidence for the theories and then the film will jump to key events in the lives of the three individuals, meant to further back up Laborit’s theories. The theories are based on the ideas of the three components of the psyche.  It show the unconscious, Resnais takes the (extremely interesting and quite subversive step) of having each characters subconscious represented by a film star they watch, admire and the inference is, emulate subconsciously. For René it is Jean Gabin, for Janine it is Jean Marais and for Jean it is Danielle Darrieux. To use film stars as the subconscious that Laboriot will tell us is the driving force behind all our behaviors, is subversive because of the glib and arbitrary nature of the choice of influence.  It is also an interesting commentary on the endless problem of our relationship with cinema (sinema) and its ability to affect the viewer because of their passive receptive attitude to the medium.

What is very interesting about the film is that despite Henri Laborit having co-written the script, and his appearing in the film, we are not at all certain that Resnais agrees with him. Shots chosen to represent human versions of the behavior that Laborit wants to illustrate often do not match his point. For example, an image of a warthog revealing its “base drive” by foraging for food will be intercut with a group of hunters who are going to shoot the animal. However, the hunting party are not shooting for food, but for sport. Resnais could easily go for the cliché of the family meal at such moments – the kinds of shots we expect from those promoting the ideas of evolutionary psychology. At first glance it is almost like Resnais is deliberately confusing the point.  But if course he is not. He is asking us to question, within the film medium, the way the film (life) affects us and the way our subconscious is driving us. In this way the film is very intense and complicated. It weaves in and out of itself using devices like plot and characterization to lift the viewer out of the film’s power as well as draw us back in.

In this way, the film is an important statement by a master film maker on the nature of film and its role / counter role in our lives. And this is far more Resnais point than promoting Laborit’s theories on evolutionary psychology. And yet, by taking this round-about route (a very common esnais trait) he does in fact promote Laborit’s theories, but in a fr more complex and sophisticated manner than Laborit is doing himself. Embedded in the film are questions about the role of the external influence – the big other as Lacan would call it – as people allow politics, marriage (as an institution and the enemy of love) and religion to guide their lives. At first glance it appears that adherence to these structures is convenience, or a point of rebellion. The scientific approach taken by Laborit overrides the decisions made by the protagonists. However, the film images that control the subconscious of the individuals override Laborits examples, and here Resnais is suggesting an artistic and philosophical dominance in the way the subconscious makes its choices. Laborit seems to argue the base drives are at the heart of our subconscious and in this Resnais does not agree. This argument is carried out within the subtleties of the film itself – never overtly – so that one gets the feeling it is a battle being waged in and for our subconscious.

Resnais likes to play with our viewing in this way. He is a director (who started out as an editor) extremely conscious of the power of film to influence, and he is not at ease with this problem. In films like Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima Mon Amour and Night and Fog he questions the role of memory and consciousness in our lives. In My American Uncle he is playing with the mind and our ability (or inability) to give up the childish longings of ‘rescue’ from life’s harsh realities and the adult willingness to take responsibility, within the framework of the possibility that this is never fully possible.

One final thing I will add.  Another very interesting aspect of the film is the impossible-to-miss influence this film must have had on Wes Anderson, particularly in his earlier films. Sections of the first half of My American Uncle reminded me very much of Rushmore and The Royal Tannenbaums (I haven’t seen Bottle Rocket to date) and although I can’t see Wes Anderson citing Resnais as an influence, I found it impossible to miss. My American Uncle starts almost as an off-beat comedy and it continues in that fashion till about three-quarters of the film. If you are a Wes Anderson fan, you’ll see the connection I’m sure.

How does one speak about a project that both Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais called ‘impossible’? I’ve been thinking for days how to talk about Hiroshima Mon Amour and I still can’t think about what to say. It was intended originally as another documentary like Night and Fog, only this time about the horrors of the bombing of Hiroshima.  Resnais only wanted to do the film if Chris Marker would be involved, as he’d been so valuable in Night and Fog.  After ten days Marker would leave the project, however, and Resnais decides to meet with Duras about taking it over. Once she is signed on, there is no possibility of a documentary. As a Duras fan this film has everything about her written into its fabric and in many ways it’s a film about the work of Duras as it is a film about Hiroshima, love or memory.

Similar to Last Year at Marienbad, which will be made the next year and come out in 1961, Hiroshima mon Amour deals with memory and forgetting.  As it turns out, so does much of Duras’ work.  It’s no surprise Resnais thought of Marguerite Duras – at least to me it is no surprise.  I would assume from his films he was a great fan of hers already.  What did surprise me when I saw the film was how much of it is true to the Duras aesthetic. She is such a complicated writer and in so many ways, a still incomprehensible writer that I am amazed by the power of Resnais to see her as a script writer.  Moderato Cantabile was only published two years before this and that is the start of her experimental period that she would then refine and perfect for the rest of her life. For me, an adoring but admittedly modest Duras reader, I see her as very abstract in Hiroshima Mon Amour. I’m flawed by the faith these two great artists place in each other, and the confidence each has that this film can be made at all. Perhaps there is something in the admitting that it is impossible that gave them access to the possible?

Roughly, the film is “about” an unnamed American actress (Emanuele Riva – who is up for an academy award this year for best actress) and an unnamed Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) who begin a love affair in Hiroshima while she is there working on a film about “peace”. Weather the affair actually takes place or not is never made clear and as the film winds its way through its complex motions what does become clear is that you can’t take anything at face value. The opening shots are beautiful images of a couple making love while ash falls over them, the male and female voice overs gently debating the truth of what they might see, though don’t imagine this dialogue takes place among any straight forward text;  “You’re destroying me; you’re good for me” is more the way this journey begins. The images of the bodies are done in such extreme closeup that they are almost indistinguishable. And of course the falling Ash implies burnt and charred bodies falling all over them.

As the film progresses and we discover the lovers are adulterous, characterization comes to the fore particularly in the case of the female who begins to relate her tale of a public humiliation when she was younger at having been discovered in an affair with a young German soldier at the end of the war. He was shot on the last day as he was waiting for her so they could run away together. She lay weeping by his dead body, until her parents publicly shame her by shaving her head and locking her in  a cellar. This treatment was common and the psychological effects on the women staggering. It is a mistake to think here that Resnais and Duras are comparing the humility of the female with that of Hiroshima, rather their point is one of relating the personal to the universal. The message the viewer is to get from this film is that these events are so enormous and so impossible to fathom, that the small incremental pain of the human individual is sometimes the best access to the reality – as long as you are always aware you will not find the reality.  Swimming in the midst of this, is the hope and un-hope of forgetting and remembering.

When I watched Last Year at Marienbad and in subsequent viewings of that film, I find myself completely immersed.  Hiroshima Mon Amour isn’t the same.  At times it drags, and even seems dull. Considering the subject matter and the writer, I can only assume this is a feeling planted in me by Resnais and Duras, and I make that judgement placing the faith in each of these great artists that I noted they must have placed in each other when they approached the subject.  Where the circular style of Marienbad is gripping, in Hiroshima it gets laboured and where the elusive dialogue is filled with the universe in Duras’ novellas, the shifting sands of the personal and the universal in the dialogue seem a little burdensome and endless in Hiroshima. I was amused to read in several reviews, the film described as “boring film students for years.” IN a lot of ways it runs like an abstract essay, its points being made conclusively, but comprehensively so that he journey to the essence is at times a little too thorough. Perhaps Resnais and Duras want us to have a sledge-hammer of repetition in our experience. This hardly seems an adequate explanation given the delicacy the pair usually apply to their work – although it can be argued that each is entirely robust in their own way. Perhaps each is hoping for a semi-surreal response in our minds so we fade in and out of that consciousness that film is so good at by-passing?

Whatever we decide about how well we like our experience of watching Hiroshima Mon Amour, one thing is sure: its place in cinema history as one of the most important and influential films ever made is assured and well deserved.

I was rather shocked to find, as I was researching this film, that the story of Anna Karenina has been made into a film twenty-five times. It was considered by Dostoyevsky – a favorite writer of mine – to be the greatest novel ever written, and Dostoyevsky is not alone in that opinion. Having seen many films and many adaptations of many books through the years, I could tell we weren’t getting the meat of Anna Karenina the novel, even though I haven’t read the novel myself. The major themes of lust, jealousy and Anna’s famous destructive downward spiral are somewhat sacrificed in Joe Wright’s adaptation for other elements, which I will go into, but which leave the viewer wondering why a director would apply all of this to a novel that virtually can’t be adapted properly.

That is not in any way a criticism of Tom Stoppard who does a fine task in adapting the novel. It speaks simply to the size of the novel.  Tolstoy’s novel is almost one thousand pages long, and every single word is essential. A screen adaptation cannot possibly hope to capture the power and the nuances that go into placing such complex subject matter into our grasp. Because of this, Wrights adaptation seems to be one for the passionate lover of the novel, a person who is familiar with it, and has read it several times. It is perhaps only this viewer that might be able to grasp the full implications of the interpretation that Wright and Stoppard have offered us. I haven’t seen Wright’s Pride and Prejudice, but I have seen Atonement.  There are similarities in Wright’s interpretations – most notably how fast paced and “gap-defying” each film is.

It is the staging in Anna Karenina, however, that hints at a depth Wright is trying to reach that I sensed in Atonement also, that I might carefully suggest he has not found yet, despite the films fifty million dollar budget. The film is “set” on a stage  – and off a stage – the person sitting next to me commented “Oh, How Baz Luhrmann” when the film started, and I do agree with that comment. The Vaudevillian component here seems more Luhrmann and Lehman than Bergman and Brecht. There are times when this works to absolute perfection.  Jude Law as Karenin (who is really good and still sexy when monastic) sits in a field of daisies on the stage that spills over into the audience space which has been stripped of its seating and its audience and watches Anna’s children play in the wake of her death.  This is a stunning moment, beautifully portrayed. Then the horse race where Anna (Keira Knightly is a lovely Anna, and definitely moving away from the rapid-fire voice technique that so hampers her) reveals her love for Vronsky in public when performed on stage looks stupid and clumsy and weirdly detracts from one of the most powerful and important moments in the book.  Aaron Taylor-Johnson, is a cute but foppish Vronsky, and unfortunately no real match for Jude Law.  The women in my audience spent a lot of time asking why would she leave him for him?

And yet, Wright really has his finger on the perfect pulse in staging emotional scenes. I was quite swept away by the dance where Anna and Vronsky first realize they have genuine feelings for each other, and scenes of Karenin noticing her flirtations with Vronsky and the impact these are having on society and their name are also done very well. These are emotionally charged and speak to the potent whirlwind of emotions that have the power to sweep people away from reason and in most cases, their true love. However, Anna’s jealousy, so important and the natural flip side to her initial passions, are played down more, and the parallel between the two is lost. This is one of Tolstoy’s key themes in the novel and its an enormous shame that someone who can film a feeling so well misses out on the opportunity to draw this line for us.

I don’t know much about Joe Wright, except for the Kira Knightly trilogy, and because sections of this film are so good (and reminded me very strongly of Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander – Bergman has to be an influence on Wright) in places I’m left with a strong feeling of hope for what might come in the future. Even if he might not be able to re-create his vision entirely he is experimental and interesting enough for me to feel excited that he is on a path that has the potential to realize great works of cinema.

Richard LaGravenese seems to be an odd choice as the director for the first of the series post-Twilight fantasy series Beautiful Creatures, mostly because he’s a screen writer and not a director. Yet, in a way this odd twist has worked out well for the film because it has a fantastic script based on the novel written by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl and adapted by LaGravenese himself. In many ways this is a writers film – or at least a screen writers film. I found the most pleasure I took away with me came from the witty and wily word play, one liners, and worded-based running themes.  Not to mention a passionate love of libraries, which works for me also, and I suspect, many parents who would be shelling out the dosh for this preteen, tween, early-teen set of books.

As far as films go its another of these nicely-but-not-perfectly made teen romance / paranormal series. Twilight is the obvious precursor, but I do remember being thrilled the Twilight film was made so well  – no matter how many people carry on about how bad it is today. It was refreshing to see a series of “girly” romance books being treated properly on the screen – real cast, real crew;  if you cast your mind back, teen romance series for girls were not treated this well on the big screen before hand. On TV maybe (maybe) but not on the big screen. Beautiful Creatures is a little more sci-fi and the connection to the Tim Burton influence that has been referenced repeatedly is warranted, but love remains the primary theme along side that familiar plot line of the mortal working out how to live with the supernatural. There are some nice twists: The girl is the powerful supernatural one rather than the boy as in Twilight or equal as in The Hunger Games; Family is the battle field for good versus evil; Libraries still hold all the worlds important information, even in the age of iPhones.  And there are some old cliches: Church / ignorance v’s Witches / enlightenment; spooky house looks like its been decorated by Ms Havisham on the outside, stunning and beautiful on the inside; pretty mean popular school girl v’s emoh kind unpopular schoolgirl – well you get my drift.

There are some plot holes, and I’m not sure if they come from the book or the film.  The relationship between Macon Ravenwood (fabulous name much better played by Jeremy Irons than the reviews are saying – his eyes twinkle, its lovely) and Ethan Wait’s mother is patchy and odd and it never really makes sense that Macon rejects the boy so strongly and then effectively gives him everything. However plot holes are off-set by lovely cultural tie-in’s to the geographical area (something Twlight and The Hunger Games missed) via civil war reenactments and a town that lives by its traditions – even if it is an age-old battle with witches.  I guess you have to be a die-hard fan to understand what’s going on there, but as I said above the witty word play and memorable lines (“people in this town are one of two things: too dumb to leave or too stuck to move”) said in that gorgeous southern American drawl are apparent from the very start of the film, and I have a memory of being quite struck – that large wide-eyed smile on my face – five minutes into the film.

LaGravenese recently adapted Like Water For Elephants and chronicles of Narnia, and in the past he is credited with films like The Horse Whisperer, The Mirror has two faces and was nominated for a writing Oscar for The Fisher King.  He likes love and he likes fantasy.  I’m not sure that he likes to direct, nor am I sure if he is signed up for Book two of this series, Beautiful Darkness, but I guess we shall see. For my part, I am enjoying this new seriousness applied to film adaptations of teen girly love stories and the “chick” in me is enjoying seeing them on the big screen. Beautiful Creatures is receiving the same treatment Twilight did from critics, and predictably is enjoyed far more by the public. It cost sixty million to make (!) and has so far made seventeen million back. I for one, am hoping the return lives up to its investment and that the rest of the series will be made soon.

And if Richard LaGravenese doesn’t direct, I do hope he adapts. 

František Vláčil is surely one of the greatest directors to have ever lived. For what it’s worth, he is certainly one of my favorites. I’m not alone in thinking highly of him, his film Marketa Lazarová was voted to be the greatest Czech film ever made (high praise indeed) and he was honored with a life time achievement award at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival the same year. My review of Marketa Lazarová can be read by clicking on that link and I also reviewed here Valley of the Bees.  Both these films are among the greatest you will ever see, not matter who you are. These films were made in 1967 and the next František Vláčil would made is Adelheid in 1969.

František Vláčil was not a film maker from the famed Czech new Wave even though he made his most brilliant films at the end of the 1960′s. he is not a product of the Prague film school, as instead he was studying art history and aesthetics and making documentaries for the Army film unit. His films stand apart from the collection of brilliant films of this era as not being social commentary on the current social issues – or at lest not directly confronting the social issues that rose out of the Prague Spring. They are often included in the list of films generated from the Prague Spring because of their beauty and their socially confronting nature.The White Dove (Vláčil’s first film) was selected by the European Federation of Cinematographers in 2003 as one of 100 films representing “the art of cinematography at its best.”

Adelheid is a case in point as it is primarily about the treatment of German nationals at the close of the second world war by the Czech nationals inside Czechoslovakia. The screenplay is again adapted from a novel written in 1967 by Vladimír Körner, who wrote Valley of the Bees. The film is set in the aftermath of world war two in the Sudetenland in northern Moravia. Adelheid is the story of Viktor Chotovický (Petr Cepek) a Czech airman who has returned from service in the Royal Air Force, who is given the management of an enormous German estate.  Adelheid Heidenmannová (Emma Cerná) is the daughter of the former owner who is imprisoned for his crimes. She is assigned to be the servant to Viktor, living in a camp for German women who usually have to go and work the fields. The Germans wear armbands to identify them.  The estate was owned by Czech Jews prior to the war, and was commandeered by Adelheid’s father during the war.  In dealing with the Czech mistreatment and expulsion of the German community and the appropriation of property, Vláčil touched on a previously taboo subject that has only come to the fore again in recent years.

The complexity of racial history and its impact on the individual is played out between the two main characters of Viktor and Adelheid in a way that only Vláčil can make visible. They don’t speak each others language – at least Viktor has very little German and Adelheid seems to be pretending she can’t understand any Czech. Therefore much of the film is tied up in the subtle interactions between Viktor and Adelheid  that we view from Viktor’s perspective.We know almost nothing about the two main characters.  In Viktors case we only know the little he reveals to others, and he is obviously hiding a great deal, and in Adelheid’s case we only know what others deem interesting or important enough to say about her. There is both opposition and attraction between Viktor and Adelheid. Initially Viktor is attracted to her physically, but over time this develops into an intense connection. We are never sure for Adelheid, because she is a servant, and therefore is bereft of free will. This is left deliberately ambiguous and open to interpretation.

It is a male narrative. Adelheid is painted as the mystery to be solved, the gift to be unwrapped. She is also the embodiment of hope and unity.  It is Adelheid’s presence that makes Viktor’s subjectivity appear as if under a microscope (all done without words remember) and appear incomplete when it is revealed. According to my reading of the wonderful essay in the Second Run edition by Peter Hames, the ways in which power and domination are displayed between the couple are rare for their time. Viktor has the characteristics of a non-hero (not and anti-hero or a hero) and Adelheid’s role and all her actions are always provisional. The two spend a great deal of time alone in the great house, and while they are alone, the social demands tend to slip away. They are only enforced when outsiders come in and impose these on the pair.  The ‘outside world’ is always conveyed through words and actions and tends to be one-dimensional and reactionary. Contrast this with the ‘internal’ world of the two central characters is revealed through the ordinary day-to-day actions of doing up the looted house. Viktor and Adelheid observe each other, initially as voyeur and object, but gradually this gaze moves to far more complex levels. It is mostly in the gaze that the changing relationship is revealed, although it also shows up in the transformation of the house around them. As Viktor develops feelings for Adelheid he exhibits kindness that is often met with a defiance from Adelheid that still exudes warmth for the vulnerable Viktor.

As Viktor puts the house back together, he discovers secrets, such as hidden cognac behind the library shelves, in tact, and beautiful paintings used by Czech officials for target practice. And yet, as he uncovers and reveals the mysteries of the house, he also discovers Adelheid who is the always already presence as the true owner of the home. He is trespassing really, and she has been made to be his servant in her own home.

Despite Vladimír Körner beautiful book and screenplay, Hames suggests the fact that the narrative is contained in the silent visuals reflects Vláčil’s desire to reach an international audience. Like many other major directors there was a six year gap in his feature filmography following 1969. With a few others, he helped to keep Czech cinema alive in the barren years of ‘normalization’ that prevailed until 1989. At a time when films were heavily censured, his love of the poetic subject and his passion for oblique referencing allowed him a way through the system.

Of course there is so much more to be said about Adelheid. A lot of what I have referenced here – especially in the Czech history comes from Hames essay and you can read an excerpt of that essay here. It is one of those films that calls forth silence (she says after writing over a thousand words), so strong is the visual imagery and so beautifully subtle the relationship between the two protagonists.  If there is one director, out of all my carry-on here that you pursue, I highly recommend it be František Vláčil.  Adelheid may not be a historical drama like his previous two films, but it has its own gentle quiet power and will still remain with you for a long time after you’ve finished watching.

I’ve said on this blog before that I don’t review works I don’t like, but The Paperboy is such a mess, that to review it feels like a necessary act of catharsis. It’s an enormous shame, because in the hands of a director with more experience I think it had the makings of a truly great film. Something absolutely tragic has happened with the writing of this film. The direction is very film school 101, but even that is forgivable, given the fantastic plot line Daniels and original novel writer Pete Dexter had to work with. But it is worth noting, that this film has been ruined by the poor writing, and for those of us who like to pick a film apart and see the whole greater than the sum of the parts, I felt it was worth saying something about this film even if it unfortunately has to be negative.

Lets start with the positives.  The acting in this film is great, so Daniels can direct actors.  True he has a great cast to work with, but all of them are in fine form.  Shout outs go to Nicole Kidman for her great performance as Charlotte Bless, and yes it is a courageous effort and yes she does piss on Zac Efron and it is true that even that is not the most raunchy scene in the film. Charlotte Bless is a wonderful character that a great actress can work to the hilt, and Nicole Kidman does a good job with it. I also happen to think Matthew McConaughey is great. Oh and so is John Cusack.  Macy Gray does an excellent job with by far the absolutely worst written role of all, and David Oyelowo does a good job with the second worst written character in the film.

The next positive I’d like to highlight is the wonderful plot. The subtext of the racism and savage violence of the Florida swamps affecting relations between the human creatures that live there is fascinating and the sado masochistic subtext juxtaposed against the overt racism is a brilliant idea. Every relationship is problematic in this film primarily because racism is treated as a force tearing at the fabric of human connection and relationship.

So what went wrong here?

The fundamental problem is poor writing.  Lee Daniels is no writer, and Pete Dexter who wrote the book, also made a bit of a mess of the other film based on one of his books that he adapted, Paris Trout. Paris Trout actually has a lot in common with The Paperboy – again fine performances. Its one of Denis Hoppers best and most shocking roles, but the writing lets the film down overall with motivation being a key problem. That is an issue with The Paperboy. What we know about these characters is narrated by Anita, the maid played by Macy Gray.  She describes, in detail, scenes she could never have witnessed as a character in the narrative, so at the core there is a fundamental unbelievability in the way the story has been told. In fact, the narration should have been left out all together. It is clumsily written, and as I said, Anita describes in detail scenes between characters she never met interacting with people she meets later and never shares a conversational moment with. Because of this, the little we know about motivation is lost in an unreliable narrative that make Anita at times seem like she is a cartoon character.

Because of the poor direction, scenes that are meant to be serious end up being funny and scenes that are meant to be funny end up looking ridiculous. Exciting opportunities, mostly to do with characterization, are lost, ignored or so briefly glossed over they end up making no sense. Ward and Yardley are some of the most interesting characters I have ever seen in an American film, and both are so poorly treated that two of the most important scenes in the film are lightly glossed over. A brutal sadomasochistic rape is all but ignored as soon as the blood has dried. There is almost no aftermath, no change in relationship between brothers, not even a close face shot to eek out some emotive change in the victim. The entire scene is described in one sentence only:  “I gave him the taste for black cock and now he hates himself for it.” Really?  Is he deliberately or subconsciously allowing himself to be brutalized?  And if either of those is the case, why has he chosen now to out himself to his family? Why has he done that on the eve of an enormous journalistic success he is about to celebrate? Or does he miss Yardley? Who knows?

Don’t ask because you certainly will not be told.

Charlotte Bless is a woman who is attracted to bad men.  A fantastic opportunity for a writer and a director to get to the heart of a very disturbing and fascinating social issue. They don’t have to give us any answers as to what motivates women attracted to dangerous men, but surely they could have given us more than the one line:  “Hillary aint so bad and I aint so good. I have a dark side.” That is it. That is the start and finish of the delving into a very complex and interesting woman. Outside of that line there is no exploration into her character or behavior, motivators, triggers or longings. And she certainly seems to lose that dark side as soon as Hillary is freed from jail. Why? All we have aside from this is the testimony of Anita, a woman who barely knows her, who informs us Charlotte likes bad men, something we have every reason to doubt because there is no possible way Anita could know anything about Charlotte’s past. No one does, because they never think to show any interest in it. As with every other character in the film, we are left to the clichés to fill in the enormous plot gaps.

Why does Hillary Van Wetter sabotage each visit by his paperboys for a public simulated masturbation scene with his fiance? Don’t ask!  Why is it that they can’t get his attention – the men he has seduced Charlotte to get for him – when they are trying to get him off death row? We’re not going to tell you!  And if the answer to that is because he is psychologically unwell, why don’t the men witnessing these scenes have any intellectual response to these ludicrous scenes at all? Who knows?

Much has been made of the overt sexuality, and when it doesn’t descend into outright hysterical camp, it is really good. We need a couple less scenes of Zac Efron buffed (“did you get all that from just swimming boy?” Obviously he didn’t, but don’t think these writers are going to tell you anything about THAT) and strolling around in his chunky Y fronts. The only sexual scene that is well directed is the pissing scene.  It carries the muddied velvet heat of the sweaty sultry summer and the southern sexuality that is such an important part of the stories structure, but except for clumsy titillation is all but ignored.  The audience I sat among laughed out loud at almost every sex scene. One man toward the back groaned out loud at one point of violence toward the end and cried out “God! What is this movie?” because none of us could tell why the perpetrator, who had found a woman to help him, got her to find newspaper men to expose his corrupt trial would then commit gruesome murders only to (surprise surprise) end up back in jail.

Fortunately for Lee Daniels, the stars he chose save the day.  Precious was overrated in my opinion, and it looks like he will get away with a crappy film again, because he has good actors doing a great deal with an indifferent (in the case of Precious) or disastrous (in the case of The Paperboy) script. He certainly can extract an excellent performance, and with a decent writer, he might make a really exciting film, because he also has a talent for choosing great source material. He must promise us, however, on whatever thing most important to him, that he will never ever write again.

When Martin Scorcese’s Hugo came out at the end of 2011, we were all re-entranced with the Lumier brothers again, and the birth of cinema. The interest sparked a kind of revival of sorts, with the rocket in the eye of the moon motif suddenly being found all over the place.  However Wim Wenders charming film made with film students in 1995 reminds us that great inventions never happen in a vacuum and often it is the competition going on around them – the race to be first – that provides the momentum for the act of creation.  Two famous examples of this are: The united states  moon landing of Apollo 11 that was part of the space race against Soviet Russia and another good illustration is the Manhattan project, where atomic bombs were “invented” in an unprecedented four years because of the desire to win the war and access to almost unlimited support and funding were made available. Equally as dramatic (in my humble opinion) is the race between the Lumiere brothers in France and the Skladanowsky brothers in Germany to produce the first film projector, and therefore (virtually) invent the concept of cinema.

Fortunately for me, Wim Wenders also thinks this race is important for us to remember and so we have this lovely little docu-drama, beautifully made, about the Skladanowsky brothers and their rush to produce the Bioskop, which ended up being inferior to the Lumiers Projector. The Lumiers and the Skladanowsky’s were very aware of each other, and each knew they were working on something very important.  It was the competition in the latter part of 1895 between the two sets of brothers that pushed the Lumiers to hurry to produce their projector, which was available for early screenings in December 28. However the Skladanowsky’s, desperate to beat them after they’d seen an earlier, informal showing a few months before, made their first public showing of their bioskop in November.

Wenders is well aware he’s making a bit of a something out of nothing here, so he never takes himself, the Skladanowsky’s, or the film too seriously.  However he does have great respect for the work and for the competition that pushed this important medium to an early start. Therefore the film is made with a light playful reverential note.  even the interviews with the Lucie Skladanowsky including the images of an enthralled Wenders and his student crew listening to her stories and smiling at each other are enhanced with actors playing ghosts of the past wandering around as Lucie goes through her pieces of history laid out across her dining room table.

The historical components – the story itself – is filmed by actors, with Udo Kier NOT being a terrifying mutant or horrific villain, but the older and the most productive of the Skladanowsky’s, Max. The rest of the cast is Nadine Büttner, Christoph Merg , Otto Kuhnle with Lucie Hürtgent-Skladanowsky playing herself in an extended interview. The blurb on the Trick of the Light website says this:

This film by Wim Wenders and students of the Munich Film Academy deals with the birth of cinema in Berlin, where the brothers Skladanowsky built a projector, the “Bioskop,” at the same time as the Lumiere Brothers in France and Edison in America, and thereby co-invented “moving pictures” in their very own poetic, poor, endearing and rather “un-German” way.

The film starts a hundred years ago and it ends in present day 1996 with Max Skladanowsky’s daughter Lucie who still remembers her dad and those early days of cinema very well.

The film was shot mostly on an old hand-cranker from the twenties, silent, in the best slapstick tradition.

I’ll end this short review with a nice little addition from The Digital Fix, who give a lovely little write up of this film I can’t really beat:

This story is dramatically re-enacted as a black-and-white silent movie. Brilliantly achieved by Wenders – although evidently inspired by Guy Maddin – with a great sense of authenticity and no small amount of charm, the film is both instructive and entertaining, capturing the undoubted thrill of seeing moving images projected onto a screen for the first time. More than that however, the film is intercut with colour interview footage of Lucie Hürtgen-Skladanowsky – 93 years old at the making of the film – who guides the assembled film crew through the old photo albums, memorabilia and artefacts that she has preserved. The two sections are linked by dramatis personae from the fictional enactment interacting with the documentary filmmaking – coming to life as it were through the reminiscences. It’s a nice poetic touch, connecting the past with the present and thereby testifying to the power of cinema to breathe life and personality into the past, but showing how those memories are part of what we are today, something perhaps alluded to in a magical carriage ride at the end of the film through the on-going reconstruction of the post-Wall Berlin.

A Trick Of The Light is a short film that doesn’t outstay its welcome, unless you are intent on watching it through to the end of the extended credits. The film itself is 60 minutes long, stretched to 71 minutes with additional footage inserted in the end credits, extended further to 76 minutes with a loop of simulated bioscope imagery.

When Jacques Audiard and Thomas Bidegain decided to make a film based on Craig Davidson’s book of short stories Rust and Bone, it wasn’t for the plot, or even the characters. It was for the intensity of lives blown out of proportion by drama and accident. There was a complex relationship between hard lives and the physical body, a connection between poverty and violence that made them want to use the stories. Important aspects like a whale trainer, a motherless child, a boxing father and struggling in poor conditions came from the book, but there was no love story and no primary female character.

Please note – this review contains spoilers.

This positive use of melodrama fascinated me.  It lies at the heart of what makes Rust and Bone an exceptional film. There is a relationship between the melodrama we create to authenticate our lives and the melodrama we see authenticating fiction on the big screen.  Following on from this idea, Audiard uses a pared down script, a simple plot line and minimalist acting as framework for the cinematography that takes responsibility for carrying the messages of melodrama. It’s a style of filming Audiard and Bidegain have called “expressionist”. In this way a pared down natural realism is posited against its opposite, amplified melodrama, surreal imagery and heightened experience. Take the moment where Stephanie (Marian Cotillard) is in an accident that will cost her legs. The accident is over very quickly. There are flashes of a giant whale landing wrong, sets and props breaking, the horror on a woman’s face, and then and underwater shot staring up at chunks of the set crashing into the water and a floating body with blood pouring from it. The shots are surreal – just a string of images we make of what we can, in many ways as beautiful as they are tragic. Yet in the next shot, Stephanie laying in the hospital bed still sleeping, we see where the undercover bump of her legs stops and we realize she has lost both of her legs. At this point, we know the story is about to begin.

Director Sidney Lumet said in a discussion of his 2007 film Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, “In a well-written drama, the story comes out of the characters. The characters in a well-written melodrama come out of the story.” In other words, it is the circumstances that shape and form the person. Since the rise of Soap Operas which really ‘came to power’ in a commercial sense in the 1970′s, melodrama has come to be identified with a trite cliché and on the whole poorly developed characters and scripts. Audiard uses the cliché here but pares down the reality so much that the contrast saves the melodrama from the obvious problems. Characters didn’t have to ‘speak’ their pain and their difficulties. Even the love story that is at the center of the plot is so pared down we almost never see love outside of a kind of dependent passion. It is intensely erotic, but the frustration in Stephanie as she tries to give voice and words to what is going on between them (a brilliant scene) is something we all feel as we watch these people. We know from the power of the filming that the pair are in love. We have no confidence that they will gather up the resources within themselves to ground that love into something real. This is the essence of the tension at the heart of the romantic conflict.

“As soon as you put a man or a woman in front of a lens, it becomes a sensual experience. In a way we can say the history of movies is the history of the eroticisation of faces. The epitome of masculinity can be defined by Gary Cooper in City Streets, while there is nothing more beautiful or sexual than the face of Miriam Hopkins in Rouben Mamoulian’s version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” Jacques Audiard

The above holds another key to the success of Rust and Bone that on the surface appears to be an anomaly: that is we love these characters even though they are horrible people. Particularly in the case of Ali (Matthias Schoenbaerts) a character who behaves in an abusive fashion toward everyone.  Life is tough, so you better be tough seems to be his mantra. Because he cares so deeply we care deeply for him, despite his often appalling behaviour. Interestingly, all the characters in the film – including his young son – feel the same way. Part of the affection we have permission to feel for Ali comes from his willingness to allow his circumstances to shape him, but it also comes (again) from Audiard’s way of revealing Ali to us. Audiard will shape Ali for us by event, rather than the actor talking or acting his way into our hearts. We are sitting on the edge of our seats by the end of the film as Ali faces his final, climactic tragedy, because we sense he is near breaking point and he can still go either way. Audiard seems to say, sometimes life’s problems happen, not because there has been too many tragedies, but because there have been too few.

“I know that with male characters on the big screen, there’s something fascinating that happens in the mind of an audience,” says Audiard.

Audiard works well with male characters, and he deliberately wanted a woman at the center of this narrative, even though (again) he was initially attracted to a story that did not contain a female, let alone a female protagonist. Audiard works with the entire creature when he is faced with an actor. Stephanie is not just Stephanie the woman:  She is also Marion Cotillard playing Stephanie. Audiard wanted an enormously famous actress, so we can have a deeper experience of her as an amputee. Removing the legs of Stephanie is powerful because we all know Marion Cotillard – we have seen her many times, and we have an internal image of her. We know her with legs. When her legs are removed, Audiard is taking advantage of our internal image of this woman. It gives us a deeper experiential shock to the images of a naked female amputee.

Key to this part of the process is Audiard’s scriptwriter, Thomas Bidegain, who worked on A Prophet and also acts as the director’s unofficial translator.  “The way we work is to talk about what the film should be, the kind of film we want to do. We were coming out of A Prophet – a jail movie – no women, no space, no light, no love. So the idea we had was to do a love story.”

And there is a great deal of space and light in this film, with the focus being very much on the sea and the sun. I have watched so many films recently that deal with melodrama – Fassbinder particularly – but it was very interesting to see a competent director handle the subject in today’s culture.

The quotes in this piece are taken directly from two interviews. One in the Guardian, and the other in Interview magazine.

I wanted to make a film about human nature and its innate reaction against repression and laws which are imposed on it.

Jerzy kawalerowicz

In the history of films about demonic possession, probably the three most important are The Exorcist, The Devils and Mother Joan of the Angels.  Interestingly, both The Devils and Mother Joan of the Angels are based on the same true story Adauls Huxley entitled The Devils of Loudan documented in a non fiction account in 1952. Of course Mother Joan of the Angels is a Polish film, and therefore far less widely known – though it has still managed to achieve some notoriety and is one of the most popular Polish films of the 1960′s in circulation.

Mother Joan of the Angels is made in 1961,and from my reading it is unlikely that Kawalerowicz had read Huxley’s book. More likely the theories Huxley related in his text were gaining momentum as a universal anyway.  The story of the Loudun Possessions of France in 1634, was a well known one.  Ken Russells work, The Devils that was to come out in 1971 is, however closely adapted from Huxley’s work, and makes this point well known.

The two more recent films, familiar to most film watches, The Exorcist and The Devils are visceral shocking films that use the theme of sexual repression and demon possession in garish and unsubtle ways. Mother Joan of the Angels is nothing like this however, and in the films early release days, one of the complaints about the film was that the viewer “misses all the good bits.” The most interesting and dramatic aspect of the Loudun Possessions is the time period portrayed in The Devils, when the highly libidinous Priest Urbain Grandier is named as the bringer of demons to the Convent at Loudun where the nuns have become possessed and are acting out in overt sexual behavior  Grandier is burnt at the stake for his crimes and a few months later, an exorcist  Father Jean-Joseph Suryn arrives at the convent hoping to free the Nuns from their possession that did not leave with the death of Grandier.

The Devils focuses very heavily on the perverse and sexual aspect of the relationship between the Mother Joan and Father Grandier.  Interestingly, Kawalerowicz focuses on the relationship between Mother Joan and Father Suryn. Kawalerowicz film is made a decade earlier, however in keeping the focus on Suryn (with the charred stake where Grandier was burnt constantly in the landscape shots) the central character remains Mother Joan.  The Exorcist, a film that asks the same questions about religious faith and the claims of demon possession, but is not about the Nuns at Loudun, focuses on the character of the Priest who tries to save Regan – although as we all know the imagery of Regan’s possession have become some of the most iconic in the history of film.  A common problem shared by The Devils and The Exorcist is that of intense visuals stealing from the deeper nuances of the story and the examined subtext. Clearly Kawalerowicz wants to avoid this, and so he keeps the extreme actions of the possession off camera, or subtle, minimalist or revealed through metaphor.

As a result, Mother Joan of the Angels is a visually stunning film that has a seriousness that both the other films lack. It still has the problem of “making real” the wide wild eyes of the possessed, but with Mother Joan of the Angels there are so few “antics” that the possession remains a thing for us, the audience (who are inadvertently taken on the role of the Priest in this way) to make judgments about. Is Mother Joan really possessed?  Has she really infected the other Nun’s in the convent  Is Demon possession real, or is it an antidote to anonymity, mediocrity and the condemnation of life inside a convent that holds no pleasures or notoriety at all?

These questions are heightened with the aid of periphery characters that pose important questions that interfere with the straight narrative of demon possession that occurs in the other films. Kawalerowicz includes the Rabbi (played by the same actor Mieczyslaw Voit) and in this way externalizes the questions Suryn should be asking of himself.

“Maybe the problem is not demons but the absence of angels.  Mother Joan’s angel has gone ans now she’s left alone with herself. Maybe its only human Nature.” The Rabbi asks.

The Rabbi then asks the heretical question, “what if Satan created the world… For if the Lord created it, why is there so mch evil in it?”  The Rabbi will complicated matters further by suggesting the demons might be a human issue rather than a supernatural one. He tells Suryn if he wants to know about Demons he should let them inhabit him – or rather – he should get in touch with the demons that haunt his own soul. Suryn answers with a curt “My demons are my business and my soul is my own.”  And yet toward the tragic end of the film, it is this very advice that he will transform to something literal.  The climactic end is not part of the true historical narrative. In the real story Mother Joan is “miraculously” cured and Father Suryn leaves the area and both the humans live long religious lives.

Another running metaphor is the erotic nature of the relationship between Mother Joan and the Priest Suryn. Mother Joan had a similar relationship with the deceased Father Grandier.  The Devils focuses very heavily on the sexual nature of this relationship. Mother Joan of the Angels externalizes the relationship in a visual representation of the repression Kawalerowicz clearly believes is at the heart of the “problem” of Mother Joan and Her Nuns. This occurs in the sexual fall of the young Nun, Sister Malogorzata  who escapes the convent to have an affair with a travelling Squire who cruelly abandons her after she has given herself. Rather than dwell on the erotic between the protagonists, it is deflected to a side character, again to emphasize the point of the film  rather than use crass imagery to hammer one point home at the expense of all the others.

All of this written context gives Kawalerowicz permission to make a very beautiful film.  The scenes of the Nuns in their habits are never static.  They are complex costumes, far to brilliant in their white to be real.  Mother Joan (played by Lucyna Winnicka) is too beautiful to describe and her habit off sets this beauty in a way that seems perpetually unholy. Even if the woman were to stand still and look straight ahead, that face and that outfit give off such an erotic vibe that she would certainly be accused of demon possession even if she didn’t claim it.

The film opens with an image of Father Suryn prostrate on the ground, arms outstretched as if he were imitating Jesus on the cross, which he is doing. Only the camera shoots him from above and upside down, evoking the death of Peter and also a symbol of Satan  The film is rife with these sorts of images, that usually take the breath away with their patient beauty. The texture of a wall comes to symbolize the mental destruction of a Priest. Habits on the washing line, the fragile separation between Priests and Nuns as men and women.

This beautiful film is a must see for all cinema fans. A stunning edition is now out through Second Run DVD.

And steamy it is.

This is one of Ozon’s sexiest films with its ambiguous sexuality and its themes of submission and domination. Water Drops on Burning Rocks is a Fassbinder play, written when he was as nineteen years old as Franz (a pseudonym Fassbinder used many times throughout his career) is in the Ozon film. In many ways, Water drops on burning Rocks is an ode to Fassbinder but instead of a sycophantic admiration we have a cheeky adoration from Ozon. This film encompasses a sexuality Fassbinder was never quiet able to grasp – possibly because in terms of open mindedness about sex, there was less to battle in the year 2000 (when Ozon made this film) than when it was written in 1963 by Fassbinder. Ozon is free from a certain kind of politics, and therefore his take on the Fassbinder narrative is decidedly freer.

Ozon takes some liberties and some chances, that all work out for him in this wonderful film. He devotedly recreates a 1970′s style bachelor pad, making the set look very much like  hyper-realised Fassbinder film. He changes the ending to match In a year of thirteen moons and he restricts his shots of faces and heads so they are almost always framed as if Fassbinder shot it himself – most notably by window frames and the cracks of door ways. As an ode to Fassbinder greatest film influence, Godard, Ozon adds the “straight chorus” (don’t laugh) dancing to Tanze Samba Mit Mir is a lovely circular nod to Godard (A Bande Apart) via the Fassbinder lens.  And of course the smart little Ozon touches of Franz wearing his lederhosen around the house and dressing like a housewife to show his submission.

This leads to one of the differences between Ozon and Fassbinder that is revealed in the film. Where Fassbinder will use a character to make a political point, Ozon will delve into the character to find the political point. It means that Fassbinder’s characters under the heavy influence of Ozon,  take on a multidimensional depth that Fassbinder deliberately removes.  It provides a striking reference point for the usual examination of Fassbinder’s films. This is a very interesting film to watch if you keep in mind Fassbinder never wanted to produce it as it was too personal and autobiographical. The overt sexuality – and it is an incredibly sexy film – almost feels like an Ozon seduction of Fassbinder, and a hope / promise / fear that this is what the relationship between the two of them might have become if they were ever allowed to play it out.

Bernard Giraudeau is a very sexy “older man” and to me looked disturbingly like Karlheinz Böhm who worked several times with Fassbinder, particularly as the sadistic dominant husband of Marta, Helmut. He acts in a very similar way, his methods of extracting dependance mimic Helmut’s. Leopold is a similar character, explaining to his submissives that they need him more than he needs them, when the opposite is clearly the case. Like so many of Fassbinders characters, all of them here easily offer themselves up for destruction. Anna Levine, wonderfully made up as a transgendered woman, is dressed up (including wig) to look like  Hanna Schygulla. Other cute little in-jokes appear such as the paperback Franz is reading, Heinz Konsalik’s Liebe ist starker als der Tod, “love is stronger than death,” brings to mind the playfully morbid title of Fassbinder’s first film, Liebe ist kälter als der Tod (“love is colder than death”). Strikingly close to a Fassbinder effect, Ozon has Franz (Malik Zidi) straighten his very curly hair when he adopts the classic housewife role – its almost as if he has become ‘straight’ through domestication.

Where the original play is about love, obsession, power and gender roles, Ozon brings an irony with the time movement forty years later. It’s still a tragic play, but it hints at comedy and the characters are all imbued with a stereotype that their own actions betray at certain points. Despite the overflowing sadness, there is a dark brooding hysteria underneath it all, as well as a peculiar quirky playfulness that makes us feel there will never be a real tragedy, no matter how dark it gets. And true to Fassbinder, the end is very dark indeed.

In 2001 when Michael Haneke decided to adapt Elfriede Jelinek’s amazing novel The Piano Teacher, Elfriede Jelinek had not yet won the Nobel Prize for her work, and Haneke had not yet made The White Ribbon.  The Piano Teacher is a direct (and one of many regular) criticism of Austrian society by Elfriede Jelinek.  She wants to highlight the deep roots of Nazism that still affect and damage the society.  Haneke rarely likes to reserve his criticism for one particular nation, preferring instead to shine a spotlight on all cinema viewers when he aims his critique, however he does state plainly (something Haneke never likes to do) in The White Ribbon that what he is showing is the direct root of terrorism.

Haneke had to have been attracted to The Piano Teacher for its world within worlds narrative. Jelinek (in my opinion) is by far the superior when it comes to that inner destructive narrative that we all have and all have to be accountable for – but that’s not entirely fair because Jelinek gets to use novels while Haneke only has film. Rather than speak to Haneke’s traditions, The Piano Teacher represents a turn toward something new that he will repeat in future films. The Piano Teacher has the sublime critique of the puffed up European culture and its associated snobbery – a theme he will revisit in Cache. The Piano Teacher displays a complex relationship between culture, country and writhing repression that will burst itself open on the bodies of its individual citizens – a theme Haneke will revisit in The White Ribbon. The Piano Teacher is also about a talented great piano teacher who suffers from an aliment that will come between her and her students – a theme Haneke will revisit in Amour.

I’ve been reading a great deal of Elfrede Jelinek lately.  I seem to come back to her every few years – and I probably re-read one of her novels at least every year. She is easily my favorite writer, and I am kind of stuck with only a translation of her work, even though I understand Joachim Neugroschel’s translation to be excellent. The devotion Haneke has given to his adaptation of her novel tells me he is a great fan of his fellow Austrian as well. Believe it or not, the novel is more vicious and more devastating than Haneke’s interpretation.  He also brings something quite different. The novel is more frenzied, but Haneke is always holding his still camera, watching the space, waiting for action. His washed out images add a strange sort of sterility to the already disturbing and complicated story of Erika Kohut.

Like The White Ribbon, Haneke draws parallels between relationships in order to explain certain kinds of behavior. On the surface Erika’s pathologies seem to defy explanation, and yet when examined through the relationship with her domineering mother, we begin to wonder that Erika (Isabelle Huppert) is as sane as she is. Sex and the erotic is something that has always been denied her, the implication being that she is a professional musician of the highest order and therefore above the basic desires of the body. In the novel, Erika is described as her mothers possession.  Her mother sees the control and domination of her daughter as a gift to her daughter, and something for which her child is in her debt. Erika was destined to become a great pianist. It was her mothers will.  Erika is not only to be dominated but she must also be grateful for this domination.

From a purely feminist perspective (and Jelinek is a feminist writer) this book and film are one of the best you will ever see that give you a strong indication of the difference between erotic domination, and the vicious cruel domination so often exhibited within relationships – stereotypically between men and women. One of Freud’s great questions was why women are so ‘naturally’ masochistic and why they ‘solicit’ the mistreatment of men. This question remains relevant with the popularity of 50 Shades of Grey bringing the question of female subjugation to the fore again. Do women want to be dominated?  Well, say Haneke and Jelinek – that all depends on what you think domination is.

When Erika starts up her relationship with the handsome, sexually magnetic Walter Klemmer ( Benoît Magimel) she has made the terrible error almost every woman before her (and after her) has made at some point in their life. She mistakes his boyish charm, intelligence and charisma for confidence, and she will  place her vulnerable self in the hands of a seventeen year old boy-man. Klemmer never, at any stage, has the maturity to handle Erika; even if she was a healthy woman who wanted to play “domination games” he was way out of his depth.  He attacks her for being ugly and sick when she opens up and reveals herself to him. He then refuses to see her, only to come back and beat her and rape her when he can’t get her exciting suggestions out of his head and feels she has infected him with her ugliness. The domination that Walter will inflict on Erika is nothing even remotely close to what she asked for, even though he will claim she asked for it. Indeed the line drawn is so unbearably thin, Erika can’t quite tell if she asked for it or not – or to put that another way, if she is to blame for her own abuse.  But as the novel clearly states, it is the desperate sexual need in Walter revealing the love he feels is really hatred. When he claims to “give her what she asked for” the reader (and audience) is completely aware Erika never asked for what Walter dishes out.

Interestingly, what Walter dishes out is more like a masculinized version of what the mother dishes out – and that, coupled with the strict routine music has placed on Erika’s life that completes her domination, is what has made Erika include extreme BDSM play in her sexual desire. What happened to Erika – what many women desire – is for love to convert hate.  Erika wants what many women want. She wants a loving man to erotically abuse her, turning all the abuse she has received in life into an act of sexual love. What she does not want, is to have that request turned against her, and used as an excuse to abuse her even further. This is the factor that lies at the heart of the female desire for domination. The truth of all properly followed BDSM play is that the bottom is in control, and it is they that dictate the terms to the top. The dominant is never allowed to do anything against the submissives wishes.  Their role is to push the submissive into a place that has been mutually agreed upon earlier. The relationship between Erika and Walter starts in precisely this way. She tells hm what they will do and where and then she writes it all down in a letter.  It is only when he decides he hates her and chooses to abuse her out of anger, that Erika loses all her power and becomes a pathetic sniveling woman.

Jelinek’s voice is a clear feminist one, and many writers have suggested Haneke has removed this feminist voice, leaving the interpretation wide open. Of course, he does leave it wide open (he won’t be explaining further until The White Ribbon) but he has retained all the primary feminist issues from the Jelinek novel and with an actress of the caliber and strength of Isabelle Huppert in the role of Erika (a role for which she won best actress at Cannes) he again emphasizes the power of the narrative point. His and Magimel’s Walter may be a little toned down, but he is still seen for who he really is – a boy filled with anger completely pout of his depth who confused love for the desire to control, own and dominate.

The Piano Teacher remains my favorite Haneke film and one of my favorite novels.  I saw this film three times in two days on the big screen when it first came to Sydney and immediately went out and bought the book, and so was introduced to my favorite writer. For this reason and many others, it remains one of the most complicated, extreme and fulfilling moments of cinema I have ever had.

So I finally took a leap out of my comfort zone and did the whole “The Hangover, Bridesmaids and Bachelorette” films in one go. There seems to be some sort of contemporary theme around wedding fuckups in popcorn films.  This whole ‘who does more damage’ idea, the gals or the guys. It is refreshing to see an answer (of sorts) to the blokey mature-age teen-romp crap we endured for so many decades, but it seems the battle of the sexes is being played out in the ‘before’ parties and the dare as to who will go the furthest without crossing the line is the place the battle lines are drawn.

In terms of critics response Bridesmaids is the hands down winner, and in terms of box office gross The Hangover part two is the clear winning money-maker, which means far more long-suffering women were made to sit through a ‘boy’ film than their boyfriends were. The Hangover Part 1 was made first – 2009, followed in 2011 by Bridesmaids and then The Hangover two and then finally Bachelorette in 2012. All the films are equally (un) funny (yes – they are, don’t argue) and the later two are darker versions of the earlier cutsey-poo versions. In terms of the films I liked the most, I would have to say I laughed equally at The Hangover 1 and Bridesmaids but on the whole I enjoyed the darkness of Bachelorette the most – and that is my own demon I have to live with.

Bridesmaids and The Hangover are almost identical in the way they play to contemporary versions of age-old stereotypes. I would go as far to say, that seen through a socio-cultural perspective they are almost exactly the same film. Each panders to a perspective of female or male that fits with a contemporary comfortable feel-good version of “there-but-for-the-grace-of-god-go-I”, each seeks to offer bland comfort to the sex it is appealing to, each is reasonably written and very funny and each is supported by great acting, particularly bridesmaids who have the great Kristen Wiig.  Outside of her, each members of the cast of both films are generic, but well-played. Wiig of course has the advantage over the cast of  The Hangover in that her style of film is a little more ‘new’.

Once we get to The Hangover Part 2 it’s literally more of the same, with virtually the same script being used. I can’t remember the last time I saw a formula so faithfully adhered to – except perhaps in romance novels. Bachelorette is the same themes as Bridesmaids, but it gets darker and has a black comedy thing going that The Hangover is just too peachy-keen to ever be able to reach.  Unfortunately, because we’ve seen it so many times, boys behaving badly is nowhere near as interesting as girls behaving badly – especially when we saw all this played out in the first film.

However, all my sarcastic-bitch-please-think-of-it-as-hipster-irony aside, I really enjoyed each of the four films. Despite what one of my favorite film blogs (Antagony and Ecstasy) says, The Hangover films are not well written  - but they are competent, and they are funny.  Bridesmaids is better, in terms of the writing, but Bridesmaids has the advantage of stronger character development – something we culturally deem to be a “chick” thing. As I said above, my favorite of the four was Bachelorette, but I’m not even going to try to defend the indefensible except to say “Lizzy Caplan” upon whom I have a major girl crush.

The question I was more interested in, and it is one that extends to the whole ‘lose it before you have to use it’ pre-wedding screw party ethic, is what is the whole deal with these films at the moment? It’s been a long time since I was a bride in a wedding, but I thought these parties were ‘out’ now. Or perhaps I just haven’t been invited to any? I mean aren’t they terrifically dated?  In the decades where divorce is no longer a dirty word, aren’t we over the ‘ball and chain’ or ‘barefoot and pregnant’ attitudes toward marriage  And if marriage is so bad that we need these monster fuck fests before we commit, why are we so against condemning homosexuals to the curse?  Both The Hangover and Bridesmaids have their token married person who complains about being married. What is the deal with that? Don’t people believe in freedom of choice anymore?

Perhaps this sort of thing goes with the institution itself – something I confess I also expected to go out of fashion and it really hasn’t. There seems to be a subterranean comfort in the idea that we are trapped by marriage  as if it is a giant safety net that will lead us kicking and screaming into lives where external forces ensure we never get into any sort of trouble again and keep us from the demons within. We love to hate it, in the same way we love to hate our job – that thing we bitch and moan about and fight tooth and nail to keep. Marriage does represent a combination of God and State and we didn’t want it to be anything other than that, because god knows what we will do if we genuinely embrace the idea of free choice.  If my wife is not there to tell me not to fuck strippers – maybe I would do it all the time (just like you had the chance to do and never did before you got married) and if my husband were not there reminding me to be a good mother and not do coke with the girls on the weekend – maybe I would do it all the time (just like I stopped doing when I decided to date him anyway).

Part of wanting marriage to ‘control an unwilling me’ is the desire to never let go of the idea that I am really a rebel who doesn’t conform. If I am happily married, what does that say about my vitality, my youth, and my virility?  What does it say about my ability to pick up and my ability to put down?  The bachelor party and the bachelorette party are the other side of the same coin as marriage   They are the same conformity, the same hope for an external control, the same desire to never let go of a fantasy that I was once rebellious. Without exception they are tedious and without exception the best part of these events is the excitement before they start.  That is the ‘hope’ that they contain that (of course) they can never fulfill. In this way they are identical to that other great suburban fantasy – the lottery ticket.

The sad truth is, there is nothing rebellious or wild about these gatherings. The bachelor party and its girly double, the bachelorette party are routine, socially sanctioned acts of pseudo-rebellion that confirm attendees as obedient to societies expectations. Unfortunately this fact gets more accurate directly proportionate to the amount of strippers and lines of coke available.

We call these films guilty pleasures, when really they are more like comfort films. I guess my question is, why do they make us so comfortable?

I knew as soon as I saw the trailer, I was going to love Spring Breakers.

Spring Breakers is biting social satire. Those who regularly attend the real spring break would be hugely offended if they understood or even recognized subtle (or not so subtle) irony, but fortunately (as Harmony Korine seems to think) those people don’t exist. The film is deliberately ironic but also feeds of the spring break iconic nature.  In a lot of ways the film looks like sweets – like lollies (candy in American English) – sugar as its fed to children.

The trick to this film is in the repetition   The endless cycle of attempts to have reality meet desire and the endless crowding in of reality upon desire. Harmony Korine shows us in Spring Breakers even bare breasts can get dull and monotonous. James Franco’s haunting voice whispering “sprrraaaaaannnnngggg braaayyyyyykkk” in your ear, the psychedelic colors, the failure of each character to meet its own fantasmic high, or even the bad-ass view they have of themselves. Everything is wrapped up in an endless repetition that exposes the desire for what it is: Bikinis (they even wear their bikinis in court), dialogue repeated in a cyclical fashion, Ali’s ridiculous collection of weaponry; even Scarface (is there anything as suburban / pedestrian as imagining you are a film gangster?) is on an endless loop in Ali’s home. The cycle of breasts and booty, drugs and rap music.

Cleverly, Korine focuses the film on the women so it is their story we are experiencing   The first part of the film centers around their desire to be where the action is and their attempts to see themselves as “wild.” The inference  to you-know-what is immediate and deliberate. The correlation between the Girls Gone Wild franchise and Spring Breakers is brought to the fore with unmissable connections. Because the film is from the female perspective, the endless images of topless women and is seen from the female perspective.  Even when the camera pans to the breasts, it is usually to reveal the male gaze from a female perspective. The camera will focus on the upper torso and head of the topless woman, and then lower to focus on her breasts and then rise again to include her face. This shot is repeated to the point of tedium, and cleverly gives us a little insight into the monotony of breast watching from the perspective behind the breasts. Korine channels the priggishness perfectly. It is no accident that the young women meet Ali (James Franco) in court. Joe Francis, the founder of the Girls Gone Wild franchise practically lived in court while he was making all the Girls Gone Wild films.

One of the court cases Francis lost – and this point speaks to the cleverness of Korine – was the accusations of his filming underage girls. By using Disney stars for his parody of Girls Gone Wild, Korine brings the underage theme to the fore. The women are not underage (they’re not even teenagers) but immediately upon announcing them as staring in the film, the world “went wild” over their desire to continue to see these women as childish innocents. But in a delicious double play, Korine reveals all the spring breakers to be prudish, childish innocents; The girls gone wild films were always the ultimate in prudish, self-conscious awkwardness. Like many of the women who gave their consent in the films under the influence, and later took Francis (unsuccessfully) to court, they all have their breaking point when they will go home to “mother.” Interestingly Francis was accused at one point by three women he’d had together in his home.  In one of the films most chilling scenes, Ali tries to talk Faith (Selena Gomesz) into staying with him rather than going home. Its one of the films rare “real” scenes that accurately portray the young woman’s dilemma – do I stay with my friends to look after them even though I know I am in serious danger? It also reveals the fine line between the man who will hurt and the man who will not. Ali sweet talks Faith in a way that forces you to scream “go home” from your seat – and yet none of it was a rouse. Ali genuinely didn’t mean Faith any harm. But, how can you tell?

This is the difficultly for young women accurately portrayed on the screen.  Trying to work out which guy is a bad one. One of Ali’s more interesting lines: “you’re making it so easy for me.”

Much is made in the film of the desire to be “seen” and to be on television or the big screen. In an absolutely hilarious scene, Ali plays Brittany Spear’s “every time” on the piano while the girls dance around him with guns. It’s no accident that every times opening line is “notice me”, just as it is no accident that Spear’s  - the girl gone wild of pop – offers up two songs at crucial moments in the film. At the start of the film when the women decide to rob a diner in order to raise the funds to make it to spring break, the lines repeated are “just act like you’re in a video game or in a film” and indeed when the robbery takes place, the point of view is taken entirely from Cotty’s (Rachael Corrine) perspective in the getaway car, framing the event in the windows of the building as if it were on a television screen or a cinema screen.

The four women in the film are all swept away by “the moment” just as the women on Girls Gone Wild are swept away by the moment. When they each reach their breaking point, they phone their mothers and they promise to be good and they go home. Korine shows the girls on their journey’s home, serious faced, crying, reaching through glass for some sort of loss promise. There is no loss of innocence, because each feels they haven’t been in reality. There will be no consequences, because “they promise to be good” from now on. That is” the secret of happiness”, as one girl will say to her mother on the phone. Korine perfectly captures the complicated relationship raging within the young woman between responsibility and living in fear. The girls don’t want “reality”.  In reality, they have to be careful of every man they meet. In reality they might get pregnant. In reality cocaine-fucked strangers at a party might rape them. In reality they could get called a slut for showing their tits and being “bad girls”.  They want to leave reality behind and with that, consequences of actions. They want to be wild, without having to deal with the film they made the next day. Wild is only attractive when it has no risk. Or rather, when one escapes the risk.

The films question is, where does reality seep in?  Where do consequences start? When is it time to take responsibility, and did you really make a choice when you tried to escape that? Are the women vulnerable or not?

These are just some of the many layers of ideas Harmony Korine has knitted into this fascinating, clever and funny film. Benoît Debie, Gasper Noe’s cinematographer and one of the visionaries behind Enter the Void comes in to give his touch on the film, and it elevates Spring Breakers well into art house status – but with pop appeal. This combined with a kick ass sound track and that psych colour infusion makes for one of the best films I’ve seen this year.

This is a film review of Blancanieves, which is showing at the Sydney Film Festival.  Get Tickets here.

It’s shocking I know, but I haven’t seen The Artist.  It has everything I love, including being apologetically French, and I am ashamed to say I suspect it was its popularity that turned me off.  This is silly, because I do get disappointed that films I think are important don’t get the audiences I think they deserve.  It’s an indefensible position, and one I will rectify.  I’ll see The Artist as soon as I can organize it.

A year after The Artist and hot on the heels of the re-imagined fairytale craze, we have Blancanieves, another black and white silent film intended to be a devotional to silent cinema of old. It succeeds in this ambition by creating a cinematic world alive only in the silent film style – I guess these days you’d call genre. I’m not very familiar with many silent films. I have a lovely Dreyer box set that I adore, and I can see a lot of Dreyer-devotion in Blancanieves, but other than that and the odd other, I’m pretty hopeless when it comes to the silent film period. One of the advantages of silent films is the universality via the by-pass of language barriers. Blancanieves is Spanish, but in a silent film, who cares?

What struck me with Blancanieves and leads me to the decision to see more silent films, is the classical drama of the presentation. While I love understated cinema (Isabelle Huppert is my favorite actress after all) I’d never fully understood the importance of the intensity of message conveyed through the silent film context. It’s not simply because it’s “fashionable” at the moment to make silent films that I describe it as a genre. It’s also because silent films bring something important to the cinematic experience that is lost when you add sound. Silent film is an erroneous description really, because the image is forced to speak.  Where language operates in multiple layers of symbols, the visual image seems less convoluted and therefore more able to carry a direct interpretation. Blancanieves brings this phenomena to the fore through a combination of two very dramatic and simple forms of communication: The nursery rhyme and the bull fighter.

By using these essences a potency is developed within the viewer’s experience of the film, which takes us to the very complication of film narrative, that of immersion. With all the digitally enhanced film making techniques these days, it takes a well written story (even within a silent film) and a director who knows what they are doing, to give us the sense of complete immersion that is so specific to film as art form. Despite the lack of dialogue (there is no voice play here as there was in the Artist, because Blancanieves point is a different one) narrative is played with.  For example, the wicked step mother is a dominatrix, and Snow White is not a passive vessel in terms of her emancipation.  She will follow in her fathers footsteps and become a bull fighter – a female bull fighter, another act of narrative play. While removing speech, Pablo Berger has spoken a new twist into old tales that suffer under the weight of their antiquated prejudices. These tales and their deconstruction become fascinating all while retaining the soft-spoken simply beauty of fairy tales and the glamorous weight and traditional power of bull fighting.

In this way, Berger’s black and white is more about timelessness and the small pedantic details in cultural narrative that become quaint (Snow Whites passivity and Bull Fighting’s cruelty) can easily be done away, without our losing precious babies in that bath water. His message is clear: refashion what was beautiful to us once – don’t eliminate it just because we know more now, for there is still something to be gleaned. Aesthetics are a complicated sea to navigate and Berger shows us that timeless beauty is genuinely timeless, even if we weren’t aware of what we had at the time. If anything, his commentary encourages us to look past the cultural surface and into a deeper rhythm of what makes us uniquely human.

This loveliness is wrapped up in fine performances, evocative music and remarkable attention to detail in costume and set design. Pablo Berger’s PHD in film at New York University seems to have done him a huge service, distilling a thrill for detail and a passion for cinema that has turned out to be of great advantage to the film viewing public. It will be very exciting to see what he does next.

This is a review of The Perverts Guide to Ideology which is showing at the Sydney Film Festival. Grab your tickets here.

I already am eating from the trash can all of the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating.  It’s not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament when we are within ideology is that when we think that we escape it into our dreams at that point we are within ideology.

( Slavoj Žižek)

They’re back!

Sophie Feiness and Slavoj Žižek who gave us the popular and successful The Perverts guide to cinema are back with another (little over) 2 hours of Lacanian film analysis and far left socialist common sense. For those of you who were enthralled by The Perverts Guide to Cinema, The Perverts Guide to Ideology will not disappoint.  Just as before Žižek will don the costumes and mysteriously infiltrate the sets of some of our most beloved cinematic moments, gleefully and fearlessly stealing our innocent enjoyment of films like The Sound of Music, West Side Story, Jaws, I am Legend, Titanic, Full Metal Jacket, MASH and Brazil.

According to our rational view, ideology is something that we see as interrupting our clear view. We see it as something imposed from outside.  We see it as a pair of glasses that we are forced to wear, that when we remove we see things clearly.  This is inaccurate. Ideology is our spontaneous relationship to our social world and the way that we perceive meaning. we, in a way, enjoy our ideology. To leave your ideological impulses is painful.  it hurts us. spontaneously we live in a lie. The truth can be very painful.  You must be forced to be free.

The film starts with a brief explanation of how ideology affects us under capitalism. As subjects, we are encouraged to enjoy – enjoyment being the most important component of our desires. We are shown that enjoyment is not the same as simple pleasure.  Enjoyment is connected to our desires, the root of which is the promise of fulfillment, never fulfillment itself. Therefore the pursuit of enjoyment is an endless one, where the product never quite matches up to its promise – so we reach to buy another. We are always encouraged  to go out and enjoy. Žižek uses The Sound of Music to explain the subversive aspect of Catholicism that offers absolution for your sins, not exemption as is the common understanding.

Psychoanalysis tries to get us to distinguish between enjoyment and simple pleasures. They are not the same.  Enjoyment is precisely, enjoyment in disturbed pleasure. If you want to properly understand the attraction to Catholicism, it is not in the prohibitions, it is in the absolution’s. Rather than offering a series of restrictions, Catholicism claims to offer absolution’s. You are covered – go and enjoy.

Jaws is then pitted against Triumph of the Will and Cabaret to reveal the way propaganda works. When Fidel Castro first saw Jaws, he argued that the shark represented the endless consumerist monster of capitalism. However, Žižek reveals just as the Nazis were able to channel all the German fears into one word – JEW – so Spielberg was able to channel all our fears into one word – JAWS! It’s a lovely little piece of philosophical tap dancing that will have to reaching for your 1001 Movies You Must See Before you Die, to try to work out which films are a vehicle for government implantation and which might be exempt. It is never implied that film makers are setting out to make films steeped in ideological message delivery, but that is Žižek’s opening point. Ideology has to be accepted and then noticed. If you aren’t looking for it, you’re giving it permission to control you.

Of course, no discussion about capitalism is complete without an examination of waste, excess and the dumping of our consumerist baggage in the environment. Žižek argues that being confronted with this waste allows us to experience our selves as historical creatures with a past (that is not just in history books) as well as a problematic future. He calls this immovable waste the “inertia of the real” and goes on to show how this is depicted in films such as I am Legend.  He will extend this idea and loop back to the original with the concept of “petrified enjoyment” and link all this with the film Titanic. What is Titanic’s secret message?  Well, you’ll just have to see the film to find out, because I’ve given away enough spoilers.

The film will go on to describe how we are all crushed under the weight of these perpetual messages from MASH, through Batman and his battle with The Joker arriving at Milos Forman and Loves of a Blonde. These are not tenuous connections, they carry the weight of cheeky authority that Žižek conveys so powerfully through his obvious knowledge and through Sophie Fiennes patient film making.  There is a way out of this permanent billboard of an existence. But again, you’ll have to see the film to find out what Žižek claims it is.

The shoot took ten days in all, with Žižek complaining about having to do things over again, but for the most part keeping his phenomenal sense of humor – the style of which you can see as he stands in his priestly robes on the set of The Sound of Music and then seamlessly dons Travis Bickles fatigues and lies on the taxi drivers bed. Pre filming, Post production and editing was the hard work. Fiennes meticulously combs Žižek’s books for these films and offers him a script. He adds new ideas and re arranges old ideas, then they film, and then the bulk of that ends up on the cutting room floor.  Its collaborative in that it celebrates who Žižek is, but it is a labor of great love for Fiennes. Ethel Sheperd is our long-suffering editor, but the list of team members is a long and detailed one, not the least of which is Lucy Von Lonkhuy who painstakingly recreates all the sets.

If you didn’t get enough of this wonderful documentary the first time round, then enjoy the second one as much as I did.

This Is The End is about to hit Australian shores and already it has doubled it’s budget in juicy financial returns for writers, directors and producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. The film is very much a “two-man show” with Rogen not only writing himself the nicest part of anyone, but also filling the film with what appears to be jokes his mates told him while they were all high. Somehow the pair have managed to get everyone else to play fairly unpleasant versions of themselves, particularly one Michael Cera who is such a good sport he virtually steals the show away from the actual stars. But as usual Seth Rogen gets away with a blatant vanity project, because he really does seem to be a nice guy, and he’s phenomenally likeable – a trait that is sort of made fun of in the film. This Is The End is very much like the Hangover series, if it had a brain and was made by Canadians:  that is it pays out Hollywood, religion, faux relationships, elitism and horror films in between the drug and dick jokes.

The best thing about This is The End is that it is much better than you think it is and the worst thing about it is it could have been so much better than it actually is. The film relies heavily on parody and while we all know that’s what “dudes” talk about when they’re “high”, the whole Judd Apatow thing is getting really repetitive. I happen to fall into the category that likes their films (and I have a ‘thing’ for James Franco that I can’t possibly justify) but even as I was watching This Is The End I could see the end of this all being funny. It’s a great comedy, and I laughed all the way through, but Monty Python or Flying High it aint;   Which is a bit of a shame because you really get the feeling if the guys stopped getting stoned and concentrated more when they wrote the script, they might have been able to add some timelessness in there,  especially when the film really needs a good solid edit as it stands.  I know their mates think everything they do is hilarious, but another, slightly different kind of comedy head on that script was badly needed.

Having said that, it’s highly unlikely that Rogen and Goldberg give a shit about longevity – and given they’ve doubled their money in the first two weeks, I can totally get that. This is definitely quick fix comedy: blink and it won’t be witty anymore. But as it stands it’s really funny.  I sat next to a male in his early thirties and he laughed – I kid you not – non stop. I thought I was going to have to make a chemist run for ventolin at one point his giggle induced asthma got so bad. But then, to be fair, I laughed almost all the way through also, and found myself giggling at things I would have said could never make me laugh – like horror comedy for example.

The basic premise is Jay Baruchel is visiting his mate  Seth Rogen in Hollywood, whose he always stays in when he comes to Hollywood, which he despises for being so phony.  He has made Seth promise it will just be the two of them and plenty of drugs, and initially it appears Seth has complied until he tells his friend they have been invited to a party at James Franco’s house. Jay’s pissed because he doesn’t like Franco.  He also doesn’t like any of the gang Seth hangs with now, Craig Robinson, Danny McBride and particularly Jonah Hill who he claims pretends to be nice to him when secretly the hatred between them is mutual. The fighting over mates and general bitchiness turns out to be one of the primary themes of the film and is wonderfully expressed when “The Apocalypse” happens and a huge hole opens up in Franco’s front yard. The extremely funny moments where some people fall, others are left to fall and others are pushed into the gaping hole actually endeared Jonah Hill to me who is really funny in this film. He also gets to play one of the best roles – of course not a nice role, because only Seth is nice.

The initial party scene is one of the best moments with all those many cameos of stars acting like themselves and generally making fun of their “star persona”. It does all get a tad self referential at times, and the audience can feel as though they are trying to keep up with all the in jokes, which don’t always make you feel bad for being left out. The films middle gets a little draggy and this is where the edits would have been useful and perhaps some better writing, but the laughs are strong and everyone in this film is naturally funny and left to do funny their way, and that works. As I said above, Michael Cera is everyone’s favorite because he’s such a good sport but Jonah Hill is really funny and was my favorite in the film – after James Franco of course.

This is the End opens in Sydney on the 18th of July 2013. Have fun!

It must have been a terrible blow to misogynistic mythology to find that the greatest sexual revolution that transformed the world forever came not from men being “free” to do what comes “naturally”, but rather the assurance that a woman does not have to have a baby.  It wasn’t until women were promised, unequivocally that they would not fall pregnant, that women started to enjoy sex on mass and in such a way that it changed the world forever. This poses serious questions to any theory that posits ‘women want babies and men want lots of women’. Seen in this light, its miraculous that the pill ever got made. What is less surprising is that male misogynistic mythology, seeing as the “sexual revolution” implied women wanted it as much as the virile male, responded aggressively with pornography.  And yet it still seems odd – as soon as wives and girlfriends and even random girls in bars wanted to have sex, men turned on mass to the magazine, the film and the computer.

I have always said the problem with pornography is there are not enough women behind the camera.  If the amount of pornography that is now freely available has taught us one thing, it is that men make terrible porn.  It’s boring and repetitive, and absolutely no surprise that the decline of the porn industry is not likely to come from legislation or feminism, but rather from amateur females, their fears and inhibitions removed by the safety of their bedroom acting out in front of a camera simply because they are sexual. This is despite the labels of ‘skank’ or ‘whore’ and despite websites that seen to vilify amateurs who want to engage in this.  Apparently when women want to play sexually, as long as they feel they are not going to get beaten, raped or pregnant, there’s no stopping them.

That’s why it’s a little surprising Michael Winterbottom has come up with such a familiarly dull story when given the chance to talk about one of the great characters of porn, Paul Raymond. Even the most interesting aspect of Raymond’s life has been ignored – that of him becoming a recluse after his daughter’s death. Winterbottom never leaves the familiar and safe territory of “Men, I know you want this, but look at the cost.” We’re left with a screen filled with bare breasts and the sort of soft porn that Raymond was initially famous for, which is such a waste of a great opportunity.

Let me be clear here, I have no problem with naked breasts. I fed from my mother just like everyone else, so they hold the same fascination for me that they do for everyone. It’s just that The Look of Love becomes quite “preachy” in it’s  conservative approach to the subject matter.

The most interesting line in The Look of Love is at the very beginning when Raymond (nicely played by Steve Coogan whose given very little to work with) explains his father was absent from his upbringing and he was raised surrounded by women. That the man spent the rest of his life struggling to connect with women and was one of the founders of an aggressively anti-female industry is a wonderful opportunity to look at something fresh and interesting here, but Winterbottom skips it. He also side-swipes one of the most interesting aspects of main stream porn – the public persona. I find it fascinating that porn needs the Paul Raymond’s, the Larry Flint’s and the Hugh Heffner’s to be face of the “dream” lifestyle.  It’s almost like, men don’t naturally want this, so we need a permanent advertisement of how cool and fun it is to remind them they need it. Who ever imagined that men needed to be persuaded to engage in pornography? Surely The Look of Love was one of the best opportunities to examine how essential that persona is to the projection of a certain mythology.  But no – this is also skipped.

Another issue I have with the film is that fifty percent of it is missing. Winterbottom gives us insights into all the men around Paul Raymond, but the women are relegated to a jealous wife or, in an absolute travesty in the case of Fiona Richmond, woman who wants to settle down and can’t take the lifestyle. It never seemed to occur to writer Matt Greenhalgh that the women were bored stiff by Paul Raymond because the man was stuck on repeat for sixty years, and considering their story has been pressed down to stereotypes, it seems he never thought to communicate with them while writing the film either. What we’ve got is the boring repetitious mythology of women wanting to ‘settle down’ – something that can only be accurate if women appear at their thinnest veneer. Fiona Richmond never settled down.  She just got sick of Paul Raymond.

As if all of this isn’t frustrating enough, Winterbottom and Greenhalgh virtually ignore the historical context also.  At least The People Versus Larry Flint dealt with the very interesting and important issue of censorship. The 1970′s was such an interesting decade for pornography, its weird that we can’t make a good film about it, particularly given how large a part pornography plays in our life now and that porn is mostly on film. How fascinating it would have been to understand what constituted loyalty in Paul and Jean Raymond’s open marriage?  How interesting it would have been to see something of the potent intimacy between Paul Raymond and Fiona Richmond, rather than the constant painting of her as financially opportunistic until she wanted to ‘settle down’. But instead of a film that treats alternate relationship experimentation with respect, we have a glaringly old-fashioned film that makes the mistake of thinking porn is only for and about men and comes at a great price. (You can almost hear the “tutt-tutt” and see the wagging finger)

Its disappointing from Winterbottom who is  so keen on Thomas Hardy to be this disinterested in the full scope of Paul Raymond’s psyche. In the end a director I had such great hopes for makes a feel good film for misogynistic males. What a yawn.

There is a wonderful scene in Team America where almost all of Paris (including the Louvre and all it contains) is blown to smithereens in the name of catching a bad guy. At the end of the scene the French, who are staring mouths agape at the ruins around them, are told not to worry, Team America have  stopped the terrorists.

I have to confess, this scene was playing over and over in my mind as I was watching Pacific Rim. I loved Jordan Hoffman’s comment in his review when he suggests Guillermo del Toro has inhabited the psyche of a fourteen year old boy. Two bad-ass huge monsters smashing everything their path in honor of their bad-ass huge fight. The entire film feels like a fourteen year old boy wrote it (and a large part of the time stars in it) and I think that is the best way to look at Pacific Rim. It’s an homage to a certain kind of viewing that is very important to a certain demographic and they (like everyone else) deserve to have a high quality film made especially for them. However unlike a fourteen year old boy, Pacific Rim does not take itself too seriously, and never pretends it is doing anything other than playing dress-ups. This gives the film permission to be what it is – ludicrous – without having to justify itself. And this distinction creates a welcome separation for film lovers from a Michael Bay film or even an early Spielberg. You get the horrible feeling with a Michael Bay film that he thinks he is making something award deserving whether its Transformers or Pearl Harbor.  And we all know how disgruntled Steven Spielberg was in his early years when he wasn’t considered a serious film maker.

Guillermo del Toro has stated that his primary intention with Pacific Rim was to turn a new generation of kids onto kaiju and mecha genres. He wanted to make a light film with big bright sophisticated visuals. In other words, this is the modern-day version of an Obe-Wan style nerd speaking to a room filled with first timers at a sci-fi convention. Given the role I maintain a critic has as commentator on film and its impact on our lives, I would suggest Pacific Rim is thoughtful and successful. The acting is hammy to be sure, but its the stuff of dreams for the age bracket it’s appealing to. Pacific Rim even raises its ideal audiences standards with a slightly more complex plot and the themes of working together through familial ties and relationships. It is true to the genres it represents, right down to the kaiju being puppets for a less physically powerful but more dangerous master, and the mecha being machines separate to the body (unlike, say Iron Man, who could not be classed as a mecha because he wears a suit) built primarily as a defense weapon. All the nuances and the spirit of the genres are respected by a director who clearly has a passionate love for this stage of his own viewing development.

What is missing from Pacific Rim, and again this is in line with del Toro’s intention, is the clever, witty connection with its influences. There is one moment where a young boy unearths an old 1950′s style robot with a metal detector and slumps his shoulders claiming they never find anything good – take note boys, robots are fun!  But outside of that, the film lacks homage footage, like a cinema moment with  Gamera, Mothra or the sea monster that fights Godzilla, or fight footage recreated from the much-loved originals. The bulk of Pacific Rim is set in Hong Kong, but it would have been a lot of fun to see a clever mind like del Toro’s come up with some hidden references.  Instead we have a clear message to young kids.  Like the visuals kids?  Well guess what?  Old black and white monster films can be fun!

A striking development in Pacific Rim, and again this speaks to the intention of an intelligent film maker, is the clarity in the CGI. This is the clearest I’ve seen large-scale computer generated fight sequences, there are very few moments when you don’t know what’s going on. There are still tips and tricks used to enhance belief, such as every fight scene being in a rain storm (must be a global monsoon) and the occasional super speed movement that acts as much as a blinder as action, but for the most part the technology is rapidly improving, and I do think this is exciting for film making. Del Toro makes films beautiful, he can’t help himself, and in a much maligned genre he brings an air of respectability. It’s amazing really, that this hasn’t been done so many times before – it seems so obvious now, but large animals combined with ‘real’ mecha hasn’t shown up on our screens as much as each of these genres on their own. Transformers and Godzilla are the obvious connections, but where these films feel like they are appropriating the Japanese originals, somehow Pacific Rim feels more homage, particularly because the genres are spliced together.

I can’t say Pacific Rim is an enduring or important film, but it is a good film, and it performs the much-needed task of lifting the blockbusters standard while maintaining connection with its audience. I couldn’t help have a little inward smile, as I thought of a young Guillermo del Toro watching his black and white monster films and his Mecha as perhaps some sage older ‘cool dude’ was trying to get him interested in Westerns. He is now trying to turn the younger kids on to his favorite childhood film images, and it made me consider what films we will be seeing in twenty-five years time when today’s fourteen year old kids create their homage films. There is something interesting in this desire to ‘legitimize’ early teen passions with grand scale epic films (Quentin Tarantino is the obvious name to slot in here) once access to adult funding is granted.

Something very interesting indeed.

The fear behind colonization and appropriation is the most destructive force on the planet today – and probably has always been.  The desire to claim something for oneself, and negate any other interpretation is a force so pervasive we usually do not know that we have adopted it as our own. I’m going to assume this is Steven Soderbergh’s problem, because it can’t possibly be true that someone with a decent film history could decide to end their career on two such unapologetically homophobic films as Behind The Candelabra and Side Effects. Despite the severity of these comments, I actually really like Steven Soderbergh, and I think his traversing of indie and mainstream films is interesting, even if I don’t think he’s made a truly great film for years.

But there is something deeply wrong with these last two films. Side Effects I have already commented on. It is so homophobic that for me it makes a mockery of the censorship board because a film that paints lesbians as man hating sinister predators bent on the destruction of the heterosexual white male should have been laughed out of any production company worth its salt. The only excuse for using that lez-spliotation story line outside of the 1970′s is in parody, and Side Effects is not a parody. It is doubly shocking when you realize at almost the same time, he was painting one of societies most high-profile closet-gays as a predatory old man who chases and ruins young men without ever addressing the horrible fear he must have lived with that no doubt affected that behavior. What Soderbergh has done here is appropriate homosexuality to fit in with the heterosexual fear-based gaze. Instead of asking why Liberace might have been so fearful of coming out, and why he thought (justifiably) that it would ruin his career, he makes a film that implies ‘lock up your experimenting young man, because the dirty old man who will convert him to “gay” and ruin  his life is just around the corner’. And he has money!

As if all of this isn’t bad enough, in a day and age when the fight for equal rights in marriage is one of the hottest political footballs, and the GBLTQ community has come the closest it ever has to being taken seriously as deserving the rights of marital status, Soderbergh comes along with two high-profile films that depict homosexual relationships as damaged, destructive, and fundamentally lacking in substance. I can’t get my mind around why the left leaning media have embraced these films – except that they both play to a symbol of “gay-ness” that offers relief from the subterranean terror we all harbor that “these people” might actually get the rights they are fighting for. Soderbergh’s films tell us, in not so subtle terms, “gay’s” are “allowed” to marry, even if their relationships are a short-lived and based on a sexually predatory attitude; and lesbianism is really all about straight males, and always has been.

And isn’t this who Liberace was?  He was a ‘Uncle Tom gay’. He played to the aspects of homosexuality that has always been socially sanctioned by the heterosexual community – the campiness and the promise to keep ‘gay’ in the closet. Liberace was well aware his entire career hinged on the very delicate balance between hamming the camp and actually imposing camp as a right.  He was the exception that proves the rule and he played his entire life out as if he were a damaged soul, never being able to make a distinction between what he ‘was’ and what society expected him to be. In many ways, he is the perfect heterosexual gay man.  It was always easy to point at him and say “see?  Gay isn’t real. It’s fucked up.”

And now, at this crucial juncture in political history, Soderbergh brings him back to life, without using our progressive political knowledge to examine anything about Liberace that might re-contextualize his behavior.The entire film is book-ended by Liberace’s predatory attitudes. The fate of Scott Thorson as toy-boy is never in doubt, we know from the first time he meets Liberace what will become of him over the six years of their relationship.  Soderbergh even tosses in the lovely Midwestern home life that might have helped the bi-boy turn straight, if the predatory Liberace hadn’t gotten his hooks into him and stolen his appropriate career along with his chance at an appropriate sexuality. I’m not claiming the facts here are wrong, I’m claiming they have been painted in a light that gives comfort to a prevailing heterosexual ethic. Liberace coldly gets Scott hooked on drugs and then uses that as the excuse to toss him out of his perverse love nest when he “wants new cock” to take a direct quote from the film. We are never led to believe that the desire in Liberace to adopt Scott and make his face into his own might be an attempt at togetherness when marriage is refused. I imagine these kinds of adoptions were common in the gay community – they are a clever way to use heterosexually biased law against itself, bestowing many of the rights and privileges accorded marriage on a couple. Instead, while the depictions of Liberace are warm and friendly, they are condescending, never allowing him to appear as anything other than a fucked up dude who churned his way through lovers as only someone who is fundamentally fucked up can. If Liberace and Thorson were straight, after six years there would be marriage counseling and the support of family and friends. Infidelity and drug abuse are horrors that affect heterosexual couples also, but Thorson’s cry that this ruined their love for each other, is swept under the carpet by a giggling aesthetic Soderbergh imposes that says “Yes, yes… but come on!  That relationship was never real!”

Despite my political opinions, the film is funny and Rob Lowe is an inspired plastic surgeon and one of the fun moments of the film.

What is no surprise to me is that Michael Douglass is the star of this film.  I see Michael Douglass as a sort of Charlton Heston on the 1980′s.  He was the pretty face for many anti-liberal pro-conservative films such as the overrated Falling Down and  some of the more famous feminist backlash films such as Basic Instinct which – surprise surprise carries the subplot of evil lesbians trying to hurt good white straight men – and Fatal Attraction – career girls trying to hurt good white straight men. In his early days Douglass was in some great films, but Behind the Candelabra sees him dead on track as a subterranean politically conservative poster boy. He does manage to bring some heart to Liberace, but it is the condensation that appalls. Douglass is too self congratulatory in this role.  You can see he is thinking far more about which award he will win rather than Liberace. Matt Damon is the stand out performance, though again, his forty-two years are never convincing as a seventeen year old. This is no aesthetic slip by the films makers. It speaks to their fear that the audience will react with horror if they see a sixty year old Liberace pursuing a seventeen year old boy and the fear of being accused of being anti-gay. It is more of the same, the heterosexual appropriation of GBLTQ lifestyle and image, and it also points to the abject refusal to examine this troubled, famous man through any eyes other than the heterosexual gaze.

I’m not sure what Steven Soderbergh is up to with this film, but I am very glad he’s called it a day.  I’m going to remember him for Sex, Lies and Videotape and Erin Brockovitch and hope to high heaven that he means it when he says he’s not making any more films.

Warren Ellis wrote RED (Retired-Extremly-Dangerous) in 2003 and 2004 and except for the coming-out-of-retirement plot line, pretty much the rest of the film(s) based on the comic strip have steered away from the original. Ellis was quoted as saying the comic and film had to be different because the film needed far more content than the comic did, and that makes sense. However RED can’t help looking like a baby-boomer get back at their favorite generation to criticize – every one except their own. The popcorn film world seems to have been inundated with these “we-might-be-old-but-we’re-still-better-than-you” films, with all these baby-boomer action heroes coming out to kick ass.

Like many people, I was late to RED, and saw it on my home screen. Like many people, I was pleasantly surprised, amused and charmed by the cheeky lines, the quirky Mary-Louise Parker still able to carry cute off in her late forties, John Malkovich being John Malkovich and Helen Mirren kicking serious ass and looking scorching the whole time. There was something about RED that separated it from films like The Expendables; it didn’t just have a heart, it seemed to have a brain.

Well, if I wasn’t sure of my “Baby-Boomer-Theories” with the first RED, along comes RED 2 to cement my intuitive response in stone. The first RED cleverly didn’t’ take itself too seriously, joyously dipping in and out of silliness. Given the director is Dean Parisot of Northern Exposure fame, I would have thought quirky might have risen above bad-ass. But RED 2 really does seem to be saying “See? We can do it too!” using overt cinematic violence in spades, car chases, assorted weaponry, and sixty-something muscle that beats anything under forty any day. Its just one long take of old people beating up young people over and over again. Helen Mirren still kicks ass, but in RED 2 she tends to look more like she’s about to take out Angelina Jolie rather than the fresh creation she was in the first RED.

There are baby boomer cameos, with Anthony Hopkins bringing-badie-back (actually I think he’s technically a “war baby” not a boomer) and the very great David Thewlis as a missing link on the track to searching out Hopkins. There are 40-somethings a plenty with a battle for Willis breaking out between Mary-Louise Parker and Catherine Zetta Jones made up to look older than she is, but not at all in that Benjamin Button sort of way. In between all these little bits and bobs are a lot of gunfire and a lot of violence. Oh – and of course the moment when Willis bursts in on an insane Anthony Hopkins who tells him he looks old, and then challenges him to a fist fight. Old Bull kicks young bulls ass.  Again.

Bruce WIllis looks like he fell asleep at the end of the first RED and never woke up and John Malkowich is pretty much the same except there seems to be a little less of him, which may be so given how many others they have to fit in. Its still a shame though, I like watching him in this. Where RED was quirky, fun and a total sleeper success, RED 2 takes its place as “just” another action film with all the accoutrements we’ve come to expect.

However, with all that aside, Helen Mirren really is fantastic.