great body - but the tail's gotta go

Film, performance, screenplay, art

Technical, Effects, Art direction

Avatar - James Cameron

Avatar sucks: the bambification of an aboriginal narrative. A sentimentalised pastiche of a Native American stereotype. The Na’vi sound like Hollywindians and worship an Earth-mother who looks like a fibre-optic willow tree spiritually reified by tinsellated dandelion-seed-like Christmas tree baubles that slo-mo around looking for some dumb, blue, 9 foot schmuck to intone vapid inanities about them. If this stuff wasn’t so peurile it would be insulting – to its plagiarized source material and its bespectacled watcher victims. 3-D: Dire, Dumb and Daft.

Expenditure bigger than the economy of a medium-sized state and an army of technical wizards marginally less numerous than the population of New Jersey contrive to produce absolutely startling, mind-boggling, sometimes adrenaline-rushing visuals: bereft of resonance, devoid of allusion, mind-numbingly literal. What you see is what you get: technically dazzling; aesthetically dead.

The political and moral tone of this tosh makes the white-hat, black-hat westerns of yore acquire a Chomskyan depth. A caricature Nazi-cool, testosterone-fuelled General of the testicle-grabbing school of hearts-and-minds garnering is of course bent on Na’vi-cide and is shocked that Sigourney Weaver’s wimpy scientists are not awed by his adumbration of the gobsmackingly bleedin’ obvious necessity to destroy this new planet with the same rigorous military/industrial efficiency they achieved on Earth. One down, one to go. Genocide rules OK. “We’ll meet again…don’t know where…don’t know when…..”

The future of movies? Yeah: in the same way as the Burj Dubai building is the future of human scale, low-cost social housing.

Avatar is a slot-machine movie: unpredictable in an utterly predictable way: like a computer game with state of the art graphics and absolutely nothing else. Gaudy and flashy, with a Strictly Come Dancing glitteriness. Any fool can play as well as any other – no skill, no insight, no mental effort required. Breathtaking and banal; thrilling and trivial. Masterfully artless and witless. Guaranteed a butt-full of Oscars.

Filed under: 1 star, Action, Drama, Fantasy, General, Hollywood, Humorous, Sci-Fi | No Comments »

Ladies Pavilion Central Park New York

New York Wedding

Ten perfect days
brilliant sunshine
New York glittering
implacably
in December cold
as dawn’s hope
etches a patina of gold
on giant barkless trees

Who will die today
what new joy is born
my once tiny fragment
of fragile life
is woman now it seems
and leads me
through the magic city
of my imaginary dreams

She is leader now
and should mother be
as her circle turns
and winds away from me
I will follow now
until the coming snow
hides her footsteps
that I will never see

Filed under: Emotions, Family, Loss, Love, Philosophical | No Comments »

breathtaking

Strictly Come Dancing 7 - 16th October 2009

At last – a little bit of magic. Like two proud, elegant birds of prey locked in a mating dance, Vincent and Flavia captivated the eye and lifted the spirit with their Waltz Tango – which is a new one on me.  The apparent contradiction of the dance’s name was perfectly reflected in the intricate entwining steps that turned and spun; with stepping, prancing precision engaged; broke free and re-embraced in complete unison; with for once the right musical accompaniment that echoed with time, folk memory and a Latin passion we cold climate sons can only marvel at.  And envy.

Vincent for me is the most accomplished of the male dancers on Strictly: in his dancing body language he is totally multi-lingual; at home equally in the Old World stiffness of a Viennese Waltz; the nostalgic, jazz-tinged elegance of the Slow Fox Trot; and the Roaring Twenties brash Yankee-ness of the Quick Step. Flavia’s competence is equally wide but her artistry needs a Latin rhythm to let it breathe. Vincent’s Rumba last year with Rachel Stephens was the last little bit of magic to dim the sequins, shade the tawdry glitter and silence the po-faced hyperbole that are Strictly trademarks: and to which we are all drawn for some unfathomable reason.

I know nothing of the history of dance but the moody Latin dances like the Tango and Rumba, especially the former, seem redolent of the Flamenco and the corrida. The eclectic fusion of styles and cultures that the Tango represents – Spanish, Argentinian, even African it seems, is reinforced by the fact that its two most proficient exponents on Strictly were both born in Italy but raised in England.

There is for me something paradoxical about dances like the Tango that they share with say the Flamenco: there seems to be an extraordinary sense of sexual equality, an uncompromising and thrilling clash of equal but different forms of passion; of the masculine and the feminine; where neither is subservient to the other. The stunning thing about Vincent and Flavia’s Waltz Tango was the constant switching of emphasis: gone was the continuous male leadership of the European Ballroom dances, the Waltz, Fox-Trot etc.  In steps, style, mood and performance this was a fusion of equals with no sub-text of domination and submission.  In this the echoes of the Flamenco are unmistakable. I saw my first authentic Flamenco dancing long before it became a sanitised knees-up for tourists. The visceral thrill of the fusion of music, dance, passion and sexuality bordered on the menacing, the threatening; but thrilling precisely as a result. The paradox is of course that despite having dances which recognize and fuse without compromise, the equal but distinct and different power of masculine and feminine, the Latin cultures in which they have their roots are in most other respects deeply macho-centric. I can’t help but feel there is something deep that has been lost here.

That’s a long way from a show dance on Strictly Come Dancing but unlike the farrago of phoney, manipulated, musically rootless narcissism of The X-Factor, these magic moments on Strictly remind us that for all its glitz and self-importance, ballroom dancing, especially the dances I have mentioned, have their roots in an ancient popular art form. It would have been good to hear Darcey Bussell comment on the Waltz Tango. She could have done it justice. What draws me back to Strictly is that almost despite itself, each series it has moments that simply take your breath away.

More prosaically, less floridly did I hear you say, the bolshy British public again refused to sing from the same hymn sheet as either the programme or the judges. They dumped Joe just when he  finally looked as if he might smoke a bit with his best dance yet; and kept the wimpy Craig who dances like an end-of-the-day, railway buffet lettuce and looks a like stranded goldfish while doing it.  I can only assume that there is a Spanish or Italian beach somewhere offering Autumn sun to Zoe’s Mum, Dad and all friends and relations so that they neglected to vote this week.  How else to explain that one of the best and most promising celeb dancers was dumped into the dance off?  Mind you with our tragically unfair and unconscionable Electoral system we may be becoming the most sophisticated manipulators of voting systems in the world.  The psephological parallels are apt: the Strictly voters, knowing that they are not empowered to directly vote off a particular couple, have learned that if they dump the right pairs into the dance off – the judges will do the dirty business for them.

Brendan’s feud with Craig continues; prematurely dragging his ‘entreprenoor’ crippled faun Jo Wood away from the judges apparently regarding Craig’s ‘bush kangaroo’ jibe as unacceptably rude while Bruno’s hand-mimed ‘grasshopper’ was presumably just good-natured fun.  Anton du Berke showed that there are sometimes dances that even the pros are crap at with a jive where all the criticism heaped on his surprisingly sedate partner Laila applied doubly to his own antics that matched neither the note nor the spirit of the music.  The Berke seems to have learned nothing from last week’s motor-mouth mess, still apparently afflicted with ‘Wossism’ - the mental delusion that leads you to believe that the first witless remark that comes into your head must be unfailingly hilarious.  And Laila’s surprising inability to do anything fast looks likely to be her eventual undoing.

Brian is so infatuated he seems to think Ali already is a professional dancer offering her choreography so fearsomely complicated they will have to call out the fire brigade to disentangle them mid-floor one of these weeks.  Zoe as previously indicated badly missed her Mum Dad and other discriminating voters too busy sunning themselves abroad to recognize a pretty good jive.  Jack-the-lad Chris looked every inch the jiving Ted until he forgot not only all the steps but bewilderingly how to play Air Guitar.  I mean how hard is that to remember?  Vincent’s nicely ironic teaching style continues to flatter Nathalie’s modest gifts into deceiving us into saving her.  I’m happy to relate the heart-warming news that Ricky the Jet this week left Alesha fully satisfied.  If he could possibly introduce the likeable diva to the complexities of the correct person and tense forms of the verb ‘to be’, most of the nation and all the rapidly balding English teachers within it, would be eternally grateful.  And Nathalie could take some genuine satisfaction on being told “you was like a lady”.  Len’s double-entendre blindness continues to afflict him: this week opining that Tuffers apparently needs to “think balls” and then mysteriously for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom, “polish them”. Just so. Go Tufty.

Craig, perhaps nervously fearing a patent leather shoe up the jacksie from Burly Bren, told Ricky Whittle that he was “absolutely magnanimous” which I guess was in a sense a generous remark. Bruno seemed liverish and to be afflicted with a touch of the ‘Craigs’. The usual weekly bunch of flourishes got on Len’s wick.  Not the highest scored, but the most interesting performance of the week by a celeb was a startling Viennese Waltz from Jade and Ian where weirdly the steps and the music didn’t seem to actually connect at any point but still managed to look in synch.  Jade slipped in the intriguing observation that Mum and Dad were together for the first time in years and watching in the audience.  It is a curiously affecting experience each week to watch this powerful and likable long-jumper feel more and more comfortable at being a rather strikingly attractive woman with an elegance and grace to go with her muscular power.  As world-class long-jumping has much more to do with balance, timing, rhythm and grace than you might imagine, this likeable lady looks set to benefit in both spheres from her time on Strictly.  And Mum and Dad are talking again.  Not a bad week’s work.

Filed under: 4 stars, Television | No Comments »

Night out at the Queen Vic darlin'?

Strictly Game Dancing 6 - BBC Oct 11th 2009

Tired: me or the format? Not sure. A week to rest more on the pleasure in the company of those you watch it with than the show itself. Chris minced; Jo/Joe escaped again; Craig got lucky; Tuffers wriggled out of post-operative DVT; Laila forgave; Rugged Ricky disappointed Alesha – perhaps one of life’s rarer emotional events; Unrugged Ricky lost his neck; Nats recovered her nerve; Jade’s Ian wimped long jump; Ali kept Brian on the straight and narrow; and Lynda simply and effectively Fox Walked into the Pink Pantheon of Strictly’s sequinned Hall of quasi-celebrity. The only suspense this week was whether judging by the progressive minimalism in Ola’s dresses she and Chris will next week debut a stark naked Paso Doble. That could be fun: Len would faint; Craig would cringe; Alesha would say “well done”; Bruno would finally spontaneously combust; and Craig would phone his mum to bring in his Y-fronts.

Toughest dance of the week in training was the semantic tap dance. The Beeb knew all the steps – but couldn’t get them in the right order; Brucie messed up a classic racial u-turn forgetting that when a mate is digging himself a hole helping him out of it does not entail grabbing a shovel, jumping in and double digging. Even this week’s controversy seemed a bit tired: the usual philosophical fallacy about language brought out the great, the not-so-great, the ineffably pompous and much well-meaning muddle. As that nifty little Viennese Waltzer Ludwig Wittgenstein once put it: ‘meaning is use” i.e the meaning of a term is found in the use to which it is put. The use of language is an action; action is intentional; and an intention is the product of a guiding mind – though in the case of Anton du Berke we must make an exception.

One only has to look at the vast expance of Berkie’s Brucie-clone face to exonerate him from anything as purposeful as racism. Indeed one looks in vain for any sign of life, intelligent or otherwise, behind that vapid visage. Whether the Berke’s infamous remark was the crassest, stupidest effort at a bad joke since the American people elected George W Bush President, I don’t know but the cynic in me wondered how this private idiocy ended up on the national news. This year’s cleverly contrived cross-marketing from the BBC perhaps: from Strictly to News 24 with a seamlessly accomplished whisk turn. Howda like them apples X-Factor?

Truth be told I’m not sure that the problem with this year’s Strictly isn’t that the celebs are all nice but dull. Why it’s beginning to look at times almost as if it is just a dance programme.

Filed under: Television | No Comments »

Letter - Published London Times - Tuesday October 6th 2009

Electoral Reform Vote

It is hard to see in the Party Conferences so far any evidence that Party Politicians have remotely registered the depth of contempt and anger generated by their cynical, wholesale abuse of their expenses. After much hand-wringing and a few pathetic ‘sorrys’, it seems it’s business as usual – trust us, listen to our grandiose personal visions for the future, and judge us on our intentions and promises – not on outcomes, on delivery. The complacent effrontery of this attitude borders on contempt.

The next Election must constitute a re-assertion of the implied social contract between politicians and the people. We need a fundamental change in a system of conferring power to govern which has been discredited beyond repair by those privileged to benefit from it hitherto. And ‘promises’ of a referendum won’t do – they have been reneged upon before.

We need a change for which the present system offers us no means to vote. And those empowered under our present system will not change it. Turkey’s don’t vote for Christmas. Every ballot paper in the next election should include a binding referendum vote – “do you want an immediate referendum on electoral reform, with options to be defined by the Electoral Reform Society?”

Zettel

Filed under: music | No Comments »

skip the light fandango - seasick across the floor

Strictly Come Dancing 5 - BBC 3rd October

Strictly and the Wizard of Woz. Alesha Dixon to Joe Calzhage: “I’m impressed by how strong you woz for Kris”. There is no way an intelligent, accomplished, successful woman, and Alesha is all three, speaks so badly and lazily on national TV because she doesn’t know any better. Does it matter? Yes: well at least as much as how many pointless points she awards a professional boxer in a sequinned Lonsdale Belt self-mockingly plodding his way through an excruciatingly bad Paso Doble. This patronising nonsense isn’t street cred; it’s taking the p*ss out of the very people who admire you enough to make you rich.

If Strictly gets any longer they’ll have to introduce an interval so we can get some food and Brucie can take on some oxygen. That said there were much to admire and most of the dancers woz great.

The ‘rise’ on (gentle)mens’ trousers is the distance from crotch to waistband: or to put it anatomically - from wobbly bits to waist. The BBC’s costume department seem to have redefined the inside-leg measurement that defines this parameter as they persist in dressing the guys in trousers that appear to be looped around the ears rather than draped around the waist. Not since Simon Cowell’s Mum failed to show him where to fix a belt have so many guys looked so ill at ease and nerdy on TV: like boys in the not so distant past who entered secondary school resplendent in their first ever pair of long trousers that mums’ in their wisdom bought three sizes too large to allow for ‘growth’. Don’t even think about it – those were innocent, if cruel days.

The other mystery is the colour conundrum. In an unguarded moment I asked my two home-grown Art teacher specialists, colour co-ordinators and Colour-Wheel consultants why Brucie’s jacket and Tess’s dress could both look black while the guys’ tails looked the colour of polished horse manure. Like carefully constructing a question in my faltering French to a Parisian, the condescension in the reply was palpable and incomprehensible: something about non-reflective material and picking out the red parts of the spectrum.

Tess’s dress posed other dilemmas: looking like a coal scuttle converted into a plant-holder she wriggled her way through the show as if she’d done a ‘Lynda’ and stuck both legs through one side of her knickers. But then a garment you can hardly walk, talk or sit down in poses challenges of anatomical hydrodynamics best left on Planet Woman. For a short while I wondered whether they’d put poor ‘Take-1′ in the same dress twice. Liked the hair though.

Come on admit it: like us you are all sitting there now making observations like – “that shoulder’s too low”, “her core’s too loose”, “it’s all in the hold”, “no, no – lead with your heel not your toe - dummy.” We’re all judges now – guessing what paddle Craig and Co will hold up. Try it as a drinking game: pick a judge and if you don’t guess their vote correctly – down in one. If you aren’t much good at this, you’ll have the benefit of thinking the choice of the great British public on who should be in the dance-off makes some kind of rational sense. Or maybe that is the sense: all the viewers are legless by the time they vote. I have yet to meet anyone who actually admits that they vote. This year’s fun Christmas present should be the Strictly Come Dancing judge’s kit – a pack of recycled beach bats or remaindered canoe paddles, a few sequinned bin bags (cut your own holes to fit), a bag of self-adhesive mixed sequins, a couple of wire coat-hangers to be turned into earrings and a Primary school grammar book.

High spot of this week for me was when Craig, having complimented Joe on a performance so improved as to be marginally this side of well – dead; looked genuinely ready to leg it as Momma Calzhage got out of her chair apparently bent on demonstrating where baby Joe got his killer right hook from. Craigie’s smile a tad forced I thought: a bit like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a runaway beer truck. Guinness not Miller Light.

The patronising of both ‘Jo(e)’s’ continues apace and obviously works, as the implacably sentimental British public keeps saving both and refusing to participate in the same programme as Lenny-G and Co. Tuffers by the same logic, after heroic knee surgery this week, will be free to moon the audience, fall over as often as he likes and leave his core on a hook in his dressing room next week – no one will vote him off.

The battle of the Ricky’s develops with the Jet’s talent being upstaged by the welcome if unexpected growth in tricky Ricky’s showmanship. Lenny G’s thrill at something “right up my Ali” is I’m sure encouraging for her though does make one wonder whether Len thinks a double-entendre is a tricky manoeuvre in the Slow Fox Trot. We may not really know much more about the art of dancing but we are getting pretty knowledgeable about the Judges’ prejudices: Len for example hates capes in the Paso, sex and passion anywhere but the bedroom, and finger clicks anywhere at all. Craig remains however the king of the mystifying metaphor and snidey simile: Lynda apparently needing more movement having looked like a “stunned mullet” - whether fish or hair-cut he didn’t clarify: and tricky Ricky having hands like “ice-cream scoops”. Meanwhile Bruno should immediately be signed for BBC Radio 4’s Just A Minute for too long now missing the late Kenneth Williams. Talking of Kenneth Williams is it only me or does Lynda Bellingham look like him when she does her astonished open-mouth thing? Great ‘John Sargent drag’ in her Paso this week I thought but she and Nathalie really have to tip the BBC hairdressers or they’ll keep taking the Mick. I’m also getting a bit distracted by Chris Hollins looking like Ernie Wise and Jo Wood having a Wallace, of Grommit fame, smile.

Lots of hints and innuendo about extra-terpsichorean activity this week. There is such an undertow of sexual ambiguity about the whole show that it becomes a matter of delicate sensibility and good manners to refrain from wondering who does or would want to do what with whom and when or where. Perhaps, like most of the committed members of the Labour party after this week, I will have to deny myself the opportunity to keep up with this side-bar of probably carefully manufactured scandal. Mind you with the BBC’s increasing passion for self-advertisement and cross marketing, the most salacious stuff will no doubt find its way on to News 24.

So poor old Rav carries his orang-utan arms (Craig - the description not the arms) off into the sunset: a victim at least as much of Alioli’s daftly inappropriate, selfish choreography as his own pretty transparent limitations. Lynda, Nathalie, Jo-Joe and Craig look like the escapees of the week. Down to 13 next week: still my racing heart.

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Only connect

The Soloist - Joe Wright

Why do we go to the movies? I guess for as many different reasons as there are different kinds of films: to be entertained, informed, moved; to be made to laugh or cry, or exceptionally, both at the same time; or more rarely to be challenged, stimulated, provoked into thought. Some films do one thing well: and that is good; whichever of the above interests and wishes is satisfied. I guess this is a key characteristic of a genre movie though a good artist may use a genre as a form within which to explore wider, non-generic, non-conventional ideas and experiences. A good recent example of this was Director Christopher Nolan in The Dark Knight, where he used the definitively generic form of comic book, sci-fi context, to explore ancient ideas of myth in a contemporary setting while adding ambiguity and depth to the simplistic moral certitudes characteristic of the comic book literary and cinematic genre. A bit like the superb John le Carre’s deep exploration over decades, of issues of human truth, loyalty and betrayal in the spy-story literary genre.

Joe Wright’s film does many of these things: it is entertaining, touching and affecting as one might expect of a narrative based upon the true story of the chance meeting and eventual friendship of LA Times journalist Steve Lopez with musical prodigy Nathaniel Ayers whose innate musical brilliance has never fully escaped the constant distraction and frequent destruction, of his equally innate schizophrenia. If Ayer’s story is the recognisable narrative thread of Wright’s movie, it’s generic element if you will, it is what Wright both successfully does, and with only partial but honourable success tries, to do with this story that is as rare in commercial cinema as it is stimulating and thought-provoking.

Film is more poetry than science; more Art than Mathematics: complex ideas are not its natural domain which is more sensual than cerebral; more instinctive than analytic; show and affect, not tell and explain. And yet for over 2 millennia some of the deepest and most profound ideas in Western European culture from the Greeks onwards, have found their initial way into our consciousness through Art: through poetry, drama and literature however much those ideas have been shaped and structured through the analytic disciplines of science, mathematics and philosophy, to serve our practical needs and purposes. What all these forms of human exploration of ourselves and our world have in common is the mediation of language with its irresistible dualism of words and meaning, mind and body, the ‘I’ and the non-‘I’. The one art form that most successfully retains a sense of ‘one-ness’ and unity – immediacy, is music. Of course by the nature of our culture we can and do, treat music analytically and scientifically: yet there is an unmediated connection between certain kinds of sound and patterns of sounds, despite almost infinite variations, that seem simply as a matter of given fact, to touch and move human beings – of all cultures, in all lands, irrespective of an almost unlimited variety of spoken language forms.

The Soloist is about connection: each of us to the other, to an other; and to others in groups whether defined by social class, occupation, shared interests etc. Divorced journalist Steve Lopez (Downey Jnr) has ex-wife Annie (Catherine Keener) as an editor as they try to survive the implacable subversion by free, on-line news of the financial structure of high cost, print-based media. They love what they do, and each other, and their son who we do not see: but they can’t see a way past the market inevitability of the decline of the newspaper. With its commoditisation in recent years, News has become a capitalist paradox: something everybody wants but are no longer willing to pay for.

The decline of print media, especially books and newspapers, is a profound cultural revolution of which we are all part, deeply affected by, and yet largely oblivious of and worse, apparently indifferent to. We should be more troubled than we are at this process: for having first commoditised, then marketed news to create the maximum number of buyers for it, under the capitalist imperative of making a profit; we are now democratising truth. Truth becomes what most people perceive and therefore believe it to be. What I guess we might call Wiki-fact, Wiki-truth. This is parallel perhaps to ‘Reality’ TV shows like Big Brother and even the X-Factor where we see a parallel democratisation of talent.

The soul of a journalist is fed not by truth but narrative. Journalists are not by instinct truth-tellers – they are story-tellers. There is merit in this; and justification: for story-telling has been the unmediated, instinctive response of human beings of all cultures, to the world around them ever since we acquired the miracle of language. At the heart of this trust in the story, in its purest form, lies the concept of artistic truth. But stories, just like language itself, can be used to illuminate the truth - or to obscure it and lie. Herein lays the soul of journalistic ethics. And its distinguishing mark is humility. Not perhaps a quality we instinctively associate with journalists but one which we will always detect in the very best, especially the great ones.

Steve Lopez is a good journalist. Yes he must find a story to tell, one that will fill his column; and to a deadline. Every week. Yes he wants people to be attracted to it, want to read it, be affected by it. But he wants to get his story ‘right’ – to do it justice; to be truthful, whether literally true or not. So when he hears in the midst of the constant, harrying noise of the city, a calming thread of music, he seeks it out and finds Nathaniel Ayers, teasing out the best melody he can from a violin with only 2 strings. Nathaniel is rapt, lost in his music, apparently oblivious to the clamouring din of the world around him. When Steve tries to speak to him Nathaniel pours out a stream of erratically connected phrases and sentences. It is clear that Nathaniel displays the characteristics of someone we describe as mentally disturbed: as if the sorting, prioritising, relevance-determining parts of our brains that connect us through our use of language and memory, cannot in his case cope or simply don’t work. Nathaniel speaks as if the endless rush of ideas and feelings through his mind simply drive his speech giving it a child-like quality: as if the selection process, the decision-making, the co-ordinating will that makes us the person we are, only works intermittently – or not at all. Nathaniel lives in a nagging, noisy, perpetual present from which the sanity of the continuity of self, of structuring memory, appears absent or at best intermittent. Nathaniel’s ‘I’ is elusive, transient - contingent upon circumstance.

As Lopez tries to reach Nathaniel through the haze of disjointed words and ideas, we discover that probably schizophrenic or at least bi-polar, he is almost constantly beset by ‘inner’ voices that assault and fragment his sense of self. Blessed even from childhood with an instinctive talent for music, we find that music is his solace: like a tinnitus sufferer who finds respite from the constant debilitating, meaningless sounds in his ears, by blocking them out with a dominant, intentional, satisfying sound. And the more absorbed, engaged, transported he is with the music, the more successful is its therapeutic effect: it becomes for a time, the only thing he hears. His private space. His peace. But true I believe to the experience of sufferers from these kinds of mental disability, through sheer exhaustion at the immense effort required to hold his voices, his demons, at bay, Nathaniel cannot control them or expunge them altogether. And in the cruellest of dilemmas faced by bi-polar sufferers, the medications, especially Lithium that can control the voices rob him of the capacity to play music and the delight he derives from it. His illness was the reason Nathaniel dropped out of Juilliard, America’s premier Musical academy.

When Lopez meets him Nathaniel is homeless and lives amongst the indigent human flotsam and jetsam of Los Angeles. The head of a support agency LAMP tellingly rejects the conventional comforting logic of diagnosis and cure, for people whose complex cocktail of symptoms and problems defy categorisation and distinction between affliction and infliction. Addiction, self-harm, mental illness and instability, every kind of personal and social dysfunction; are all exacerbated by either the hostility or indifference of the ‘normal’ population. No wonder the leader of the LAMP support group concentrates on predicating support upon immediate physical need rather than the illusion of diagnosis and cure.

I always feel queasy at the thought of film-makers using non-actors in this context. Of course director Joe Wright’s insistence on employing 500 homeless LA drop-outs was a real, if temporary benefit to them. And they do him proud, conveying a sense of authenticity this kind of film must have. But one still wonders if this is not only cheap but cheapening. On the other hand his filming and aesthetic use of the reality of their experience treats them with dignity and there is truth in his portrayal of their plight.

In an ad hoc, slightly chaotic way, Lopez tries to mediate a recovery of Nathaniel’s unique gifts: but an unwise planned concert ends in a debacle not helped by the platitudinous religiosity of Tom Hollander’s Cello teacher, Graham Claydon engaged by Lopez to teach Nathaniel. With the implacably smug faith characteristic of a certain kind of ardent Christian, Claydon assumes an instinctive understanding of Nathaniel’s pain that he palpably lacks. This just makes things much worse. You don’t have to be schizophrenic to find a guy like Claydon a pain in the a*se.

Nathaniel plays and much of the time lives, under a freeway amongst the under-resourced, under-recognised, underclass of the other America. Wright makes powerful use of the juxtaposition of the noisy, hectic, driven, world flashing past above this rag bag of hurting and struggling humanity below: as if they fell off the road and simply never found their way back. Wright conveys this sense of detached dislocation with aerial shots of the geometric lattices of the roads and residences of LA’s conventional, visible population. This thread of visual detachment, alienation, with which Wright infuses The Soloist, together with Robert Downey Junior’s slightly dislocated, subtle playing of Lopez, traces uncomfortable but apposite parallels between Nathaniel’s fragmented, un-centred private mental life and the driven but detached and disconnected lives of modern big city America. The social and community downside of the constant change that feeds markets and sustains modern economies.

Jamie Foxx does well with a difficult role though it takes us as it takes Lopez, a little while to tune in to his wavelength. I hated Joe Wright’s absurdly over-praised Atonement with its tricksy, transparently technical manipulative pursuit of effect. But while The Soloist does not deal oin depth with many of the issues above, it provokes thought about them and does so with a subtlety and unobtrusiveness one would not have expected from the Director of Atonement. Wright is also to be congratulated for his aspiration in The Soloist in taking it into areas aesthetic and social that would almost certainly have been resisted by the studio.

A work of genuine aspiration, if a bit uneven, and well worth a look in my view.

The credits indicate that Nathaniel Ayers still plays cello and half a dozen or so other instruments in the streets of Los Angeles. That is what counts as success, even triumph in this kind of context.

Filed under: 4 stars, Drama, Extended essay, Hollywood, Joe Wright, Philosophical | No Comments »

Sorry Mr. Kappor we only leant on it

Strictly Come Dancing 3/4:  25th-26th September

A weekend of small pleasures on Strictly: Alesha’s unpompous likeability proceeds neck and neck with the bland inanity of her judicial comments such as - “I like the way you move across the floor”; “you really tried, I commend you for trying hard”; “that really was a beautiful choice of song”, and her contribution to the patronising choral treacle being poured over Marianne Faithful look-alike Jo Wood “you’re so sweet, so adorable, you have a great attitude”. At times one wonders whether Alesha might be a David Coleman love-child. For those of you not chronologically talented like me, Coleman was the sports commentator of his generation given to Dixonian tautologies like “If he could only have swum a little faster – he might have won.” Come to think of it the spirit of Coleman haunts Strictly with many of ‘prudy’ goody-goody Lenny G’s (it’s the dancin’ bro’ innit?) unintentionally filthy innuendoes recalling the Coleman classic on unbeatable Cuban quarter-miler Aberto Juanterena in an Olympic race: “so Juanterena opens up his legs and shows us his class.” Ah me: sports commentaries, like ‘fings, ain’t what they used to be.

I’ll spare Alesha any personal opprobrium for “Ricky you look great” with eyes flashing like a tigress in heat, as this sentiment took on the logical status of a feminine necessary truth along with the universal adorability of the XY chromosomally endowed Mr. Johnny Depp to the XX members of the cosmos. Bruno definitively topped this: obviously overcome with what a friend of mind used to euphemistically call a ‘disturbance’ in the bat-on-lap area of his anatomy, following a steamy rumba from Ricky ‘Jet’ Whittle and much enamoured, and I mean enamoured, partner Natalie Lowe, Bruno “felt something growing.” This kind of comment, given the title of the programme, could drive Strictly way past the 9 o’clock watershed when only we over 20-year-old children could watch. Who said “and the rest?”

If what one judge called the chemistry between Ricky and Nats continues to precipitate at the current rate I have a feeling a show dance to and with ‘Lowe is in the Air’ looms. And Strictly fan Cilla Black will be shopping for hats again.

The Jo Wood phenomenon is intriguing. Not since Mrs Phil Collins reportedly got dumped by fax, have the fair-play British people coagulated so totally at their ‘there, there’ best behind the only ‘entrepreneur’ Strictly has ever acknowledged. This outpouring of sentiment is also definitively British. An exceptionally rich, apparently not especially talented but still attractive, once beautiful woman, has been dumped by her rock-faced rock hubby for a newer rock-chick model. Situation normal – among the rocking rich. I can’t help feeling that the real reason this has attracted so much attention, generated so much oleaginous sympathy among the Strictly crew is that Ronnie’s new bit of fluff is so young. Nothing we Brits like better than a bit of prurient, slightly jealous, outrage.

Seems to me Jo, who appears to be likeable in a slightly spaced out, trippy kind of way, is doing ok. To be a lively woman who has escaped the demands of being married to a guy about as animated as a Mount Rushmore President; who never has to work again; has a great extended family all around totally supporting her, a group now swollen by about 5 million Strictly viewers, doesn’t really need the cotton-woolling everyone on the Strictly gang is lumbering her with. And if as I suspect, there’s a strong dose of ‘own-back’ in her appearance on the show – good for you girl, right-on Jo. But can we please stop treating this I suspect pretty feisty, no pushover, mature woman like Bambi on the ice after his Mum got shot? Even when Cruella-da-Revel claims she dances like Bambi…on ice.

Jo has been taken to the people’s hearts. She may find like many before her, not least John Sargent, that it can be a pretty uncomfortable place to be. The tap of British sentimentality can often be switched off as fast and as brutally as any errant rock husband can manage. That said: Brendan was right – Craig’s remark was rude. But that’s a bit like being surprised that a Baboon’s bum is pink.

Elsewhere on Planet Strictly: Richard, definitely not ‘Dicky’, Dunwoody has galloped off in to the sunset; far too normal and straightforwardly likable ever to have felt at home on the pink planet even if he didn’t have strabismic (dictionary test) feet. If Richard leaves can Craig be far behind? Probably not. Especially as he appears to have been afflicted with this year’s Strictly epidemic: ‘Rickyitts’ (Groves not Whittle) – the involuntary opening and closing of the mouth during strenuous, especially passionate moments in dances. This new disease appears to be spreading even into the professional dancers. I sincerely hope it does not take on the pandemic awfulness of tennis ‘gruntitis’ which now makes it impossible for me to watch most women and even some men tennis players. It would be better for tennis if a release of internal pressure is absolutely essential, they could contrive to expel it at the other end – then shocked television networks would have to edit out the offending sound.

If the ‘Jet’ “cool boy – stay cool boy” Whittle is the one to beat,  Zoe Lucker shows a lot of promise and Bruno’s love that dares speak its name for Laila is not misplaced – she also looks the part.  Jo can do ‘raunchy’ and this along with her public sympathy might just overcome Len’s spinsterish horror at the idea that passion and sexuality expressed in a dance might even on occasion be a precursor to actual sex and passion. ‘Tuffers’, the very nickname tells you both why he won’t win and will never bring off Latin dances, still flatters to deceive; while if Anton can stop trying to upstage his dad Brucie and bring out the untapped best in Laila, we might have some competition for the hunk from Hollyoaks.

The circus rolls on to what looks like a marathon next week. Try to manage your addiction dear reader - don’t OD on Winky Winkleman in the meantime.  And I do hope I haven’t left you with an image of fragrant, delightful, if a tad muscular, lady tennis-players that you could have done without.

Till the next time we say – would you like to dance?

Z

Filed under: Television | No Comments »

The life and times of an Essex girl

Fish Tank - Andrea Arnold

I’m bemused, bewildered and to be honest, bloody angry. What is the widespread acclaim and exaggerated praise for this movie all about? OK, I’m sorry that feisty, attractive 15 year-old Mia’s mother is a dysfunctional, feckless waste of space. I understand that makes Mia conflicted and angry enough to pick a fight and without any physical provocation break the nose of the leader of an equally unlovely bunch of teenage girls on the grounds that their futile aspiration to be dancers is even more detached from reality than is her own. Just. I just don’t buy into the idea that shouting ‘f***’ and ‘f***ing’ a lot and calling anyone she’s pissed off with including her pre-pubescent sister a c***, is incontrovertible proof of either feistiness or hidden strength of character.

When for the love of God or whatever you hold most dear, is someone going to find something interesting, dramatic or worthwhile about the lives of all the non-dysfunctional decent, genuinely strong individuals and families on council estates struggling to bring up kids and pay bills other than for the TV or the booze and fags? I can’t believe I’m saying this because I know what it makes me sound like. But it is true. This film for me almost whinges off the screen. It constantly begs us to blame everything wrong with Mia’s life on her environment, her mum, her mum’s boyfriend, by implication the school, the social worker or some irresistible deterministic combination of them all. Her only response to her mum’s inadequacy is take it out on everyone else, shout and swear a lot and petulantly reject any and very effort to help her other than to indulge her unjustified X-Factor belief that she can dance. In the real world, any 15 year-old girl with the looks, the courage and the strength of character that the superb Katie Jarvis’s performance suggests Mia possesses would have gratefully grabbed the help offered by a dedicated teacher, a committed social worker, or simply a concerned adult and got a grip on what she needed to do to escape repeating her mother’s passively self-defeating personal path to self-pitying misery. Mia’s ‘triumph’ over the shittiness of her life is to bugger off on spec to Wales with a likeable but rootless bloke because he “has a mate there.”

I was raised on a council estate albeit a rural not an urban one: and at a time when journalists - print and broadcast - were not permanently camped out ready to provide the pictures and ‘stories’ to reinforce the preconceived attitudes of their editors at the Sun or the Mail or even the occasional Panorama special. Every community of people has their ‘problem’ families, council estates perhaps more than most, but the idea that the people who shout loudest, behave worst, demand the most attention, are either representative of those communities, or worse, the only ones whose stories are worth telling, is self-serving sentimental claptrap. It is also a deep abiding injustice and insult to the genuine, honest, hard-working majority whose contempt for the loud-mouthed, anti-social minority is equal to that they have for the slumming journalists and film-makers who propagate this lie because it flogs papers to people who want their unexamined prejudices massaged; or puts privileged bums on film festival seats and permits smart-arsed critics or self-obsessed grungily dressed actors to dip into a bit of vicarious street cred. Yo man. Innit?

And please don’t talk to me about Ken Loach or Mike Leigh: there is more warmth, more respect, more understanding, more love in 5 minutes of Looking For Eric, Kes or Vera Drake, than in the whole overblown 123 minutes of Fish Tank. Just as Loach’s lovely little Cantona film says more about the ordinary working man’s love of football than all the exploitative hooligan movies put together.

Yes, technically Fish Tank is accomplished: well shot and edited; cinematographer Robbie Ryan wringing at times a bleak, edgy kind of beauty out of the unpromising Essex urban and suburban fringe landscapes; and Arnold’s direction keeps us up close and personal with Mia. But it isn’t enough: it really isn’t. We know exactly what mum’s boyfriend is going to do long before he does it; and the film invites us to accept it as just what you’d expect; just one of those things. Mia’s revenge is as with almost everything else the script makes her do; petulant, stupid, cruel and utterly pointless. And one scene in her seducer’s middle class family home is I’m sure supposed to be shocking but is in reality just gratuitous. If Jarvis was persuaded to do it for real – because “the scene requires it” that’s pretty close to exploitation – it isn’t necessary and it doesn’t work. The paradoxical void at the heart of this frankly vacuous movie is that Director Arnold cannot or will not let her narrative give us the strong, feisty, courageous young woman Katie Jarvis is so effectively portraying. Victimhood plays. Michael Fassbinder is in the same boat: another good actor whose performance outstrips what Arnold makes his character of Connor, first mum’s lover then Mia’s seducer, actually do.

I won’t summarise the plot: frankly as soon as the tone and the characters are set up – you could write it yourself. Fish Tank is a depressing movie: not because it portrays depressing events but because it exploits a one-dimensional, shallow, clichéd perspective on working class behaviour to create a phoney kind of gritty ‘realism’. I’ve seen documentaries and fictional films about poor, underprivileged people all around the world including recently the excellent Frozen River. Sadly and infuriatingly, with the honourable exception of Leigh and Loach especially, what often defines the British movie on these themes, set in these contexts, is the underlying tone and passive acceptance of victimhood as an emotional hook and dramatic driver. This makes poor British people struggling with adverse social conditions seem weak, put upon and lacking in any kind of constructive rebelliousness, proud defiance. In a word - dignity. And I don’t think that’s true – for a second. And no of course I’m not taking the facile Daily Mail editorial tone, that because one or two make it, everyone can. Anti-social, self-hating gestures of destructive defiance may make good copy and ‘gritty’ movies: but they don’t match up against the truthful portrayal of the inspirational determination of struggling people in other cultures, just to survive and maintain decent standards of behaviour and respect for one another within their poor communities. I think Fish Tank takes a grain of truth and turns it into a massive, destructive, perhaps even unwitting, lie. And the kind of people it purports to portray really do deserve better.

Save your money: and if you haven’t seen it, go and see Looking for Eric instead. Even if you can’t stand football – it really doesn’t matter. One bright spot: Katie Jarvis is a real find. She just needs a film worthy of her talent.

Filed under: 2 star, Andrea Arnold, Drama, General | No Comments »

District 9 – Neill Blomkamp

The science is risible: the fiction banal. District 9 is a good B movie with pretensions; and like all good B movies, it rattles along at a pace fast enough for you to almost forgive the cheap n’ cheerful costumes, make-up, special effects and frequently clunky dialogue. A docu-drama, hand-held camera style adds a gritty, mock-realist tone as do the talking heads post-hoc set-up interviews that reinforce the journalistic, documentary tone.

A giant alien spaceship about the size of Kensington arrives from outer space and parks itself a few hundred feet above Johannesburg. The ship and its inhabitants, unlike those in the aforementioned London Borough, have no visible means of support but simply hover with no apparent expenditure of energy (parallels there then) from what none-the-less look like rocket pods on the underside of their ship. There is no disturbance of air or ground beneath the ship. It just hangs there – almost as if it were merely a drawing of a spaceship on a fake background.

Mysteriously, the human inhabitants below leave this uninvited guest unmolested, to block out the sun for 3 months before deciding it might be politic to have a butcher’s. Good job the aliens didn’t actually choose Kensington – the bloody thing would have been clamped within a day and towed off to a compound somewhere in 2. Eventually the authorities enter the ship and discover its alien inhabitants are only marginally less weird than those of the Royal Borough. They are wasp-waisted anthropods with wobbly tendrilled faces – the space-travellers not the Kensingtonites. So with that endearing, typically human response to something or someone new, the visitors are christened ‘Prawns’. On discovery, we are told they are emaciated. I just buy into this, having no idea of my own what an emaciated Prawn actually looks like. I mean, all Prawns look pretty emaciated to me, especially those I get in my starter.

With a deplorable deficiency in town and country planning, the Prawns are ferried to the ground immediately beneath their spaceship where of course being alien and unwelcome they are too lazy to work or move on, dependent upon benefits; and so over 20 years, we are told, create a slum township. Urban blight comes no worse than this. Must have kicked the crap out of property values.

Despite some grandiose reviews to the contrary, for me D9 is a technical triumph of form over content. Designer Philip Ivey’s urban wasteland Production Design and Emilia Roux’ Art Direction combine well to generate a grungy Soweto-style township; and Clinton Shorter’s largely edgy soundtrack softens towards the climax of the film into an almost elegiac tone with a single-voiced African half-chant, half-song counterpointing evocatively the images and unsurprising clichéd narrative outcome. The most innovative thing about D9 is the brilliantly successful, on-line viral-marketing that blogged it into a newsworthy opening weekend in the US. Specialist blogs and a cleverly constructed official web site have fed the incipient paranoia of cyber-surfers around the world longing for an idiotically simple but false trivial explanation for serious, real, complex issues. That they found a ready-made market for this tosh in America does not astonish.

D9 began as a neat little idea and a much seen 8 minute film that explored it. Despite a couple of thousand or so people and a bit of money flung at it – it remains a neat idea, made on the relatively cheap, explorable in about 8 minutes, expanded to a tad under 2 hours. Bullet-headed, bullet-brained stereotypical Afrikaans baddies, working of course for a big bad corporation (MNU) outsourcing social control and re-location of unwanted aliens for an acquiescent South African government, take on with gleeful brutality, the mission of removing a couple of million asylum-seekers from another planet. The aliens are assumed to be dirty, immoral, ugly and parasitic – nothing new there then. When nerdy Wikus van de Merwe (brilliantly played by Sharlto Copley), laughably unqualified for the task, is put in charge of the re-location by his evil father-in-law Piet Smit we are signalled the train wreck to come.

Like the class bully put in charge of the gang for a day, Wikus leads the start of the clearance with all the enthusiasm of a bully victim given the power to redirect the punishment from himself to others. Wikus is all misplaced confidence and no competence so, fiddling like a kid with a mysterious canister, manages to squirt the black liquid contents into his face. The guy’s a complete schmuck and everyone except his pretty, pretty unlikely wife “baybee” his word not mine, knows it.

Much pseudo-scientific bulls**t ensues. Wikus, like an anthropodic re-make of The Fly has screwed up his genetics and is turning into a Prawn. Well to be exact a palpably phoney 3-pronged pincer has been clamped over his own arm to represent his transmutation from nerdy human to nerdy Prawn. ‘Wikupod’ – who knows everything, most of it wrong – also suffers from some nicely observed, revolting but cheaply depicted other symptoms like pulling out his own nails and teeth in between projectile vomiting what looks like what Oil refiners call light atmospheric residue – thin, black, smelly and repulsive – but valuable as an energy source.

In one of a number of magic phenomena that pass for science in this so-called science-fiction movie – like hovering a million ton spacecraft with no expenditure of energy – this magic fluid not only eventually powers the spaceship but also genetically transmutes Wikus into a Prawn in about the 4 day timescale of the action. MNU have of course been conducting, without success, medical experiments on Prawns to explain why only Prawns can make their devastating weapons work. They therefore see half-man, half-Prawn Wikus as the key to unlocking the mystery of how to make the Prawn weapons work. Today the Prawn-gun - tomorrow world domination. Until a bunch of extra-terrestrial Lobsters fetch up.

Wikus hides in the only place available - among the Prawns. Once there he hooks up with what I guess we have to call a kind of King Prawn, mysteriously called Christopher which to be honest with no standard of comparison, really doesn’t sound a very Prawny name to me. Chris has a child, an intelligent, endearing little ‘Shrimp’ who alone amongst the cast, or the audience, likes Wikus. How Shrimp came into being is hard to imagine as D9 is an almost totally female-free zone. Not surprisingly. This is speculation on my part of course as sexing Prawns is not part of my skill set. And sticking what look like bras on the upper part of bodies with no discernible breasts doesn’t really convince.

Chris, Shrimp and Wikus hook up to recover the magic fluid about a pint of which has supposedly taken 20 years to accumulate and is the secret of the escape of the Prawns, though where they are going to escape to, given that apparently their own planet is kaput, is not spelled out. To break into the human lab where the fluid is kept Wikus negotiates to buy some Prawn weapons from a gang of gangster Nigerians who have stockpiled them dreaming of eventually making them work. The Nigerians are of course irreducibly criminal and pathologically, credulously stupid, thinking that eating the flesh of the Prawns will magically transfer their power and access to their weapons to the eater. So the Nigerian gang leader wants to dis-arm Wikus and tuck in to a plate of pincer tartare. I’m not going to even try to unpack the underlying racist stereotypes and patronising condescension here but the way some critics have glossed all this beggars belief. D9 has been called a political allegory – forgive me but allegorical my *rse.

I don’t want to get into a theological dispute about the definition of sci-fi as it used to be humbly known, but bolting together about 2 tons of remaindered girders and scrap metal with no visible hydraulics or alternative means of conveying energy to overcome gravity isn’t science fiction - it’s pseudo-science fantasy. Magic. I can suspend disbelief about Star Trek Phasers, or death rays etc but D9 makes everything, guns, spaceship, robotic transformer-like iron suit etc etc look just like our guns only of course much much bigger, our weapons, our robots but then simply magics them into action with mere cinematographic trickery – in this case laughably cheapo, unconvincing trickery. That’s ok for films like the Transformer franchise - we know we’re not supposed to take them seriously.

District 9 has its moments of B movie tension largely generated by clever cinematic skill but it remains for me an 8 minute idea inflated beyond credibility; but worse, it is a cleverly web-hyped, internet marketed product which for all its so-called freshness and innovation, still has a Sony Corporation distribution deal to exploit the viral marketing lift-off. Some way off what the Times critic called a sci-fi classic - despite its Blade Runner rip-off ending.

Corollary: Science-Fiction

This is not intended as a definition: trying to define a ‘genre’ misunderstands the ‘grammar’ of an artistic genre which must remain fluid and be subject to expansion and change over time. This is more an observation.

It is accepted by the genre that Extra Terrestria vistors to our planet are more ‘advanced’ than us. That by advanced we mean technologically advanced is demonstrated first by the fact that they got to us and we couldn’t, yet, get to them. For dramatic purposes we generally, but not always, give them weapons that make them invincible technologically.  The fundamental premise of Science-Fiction it seems to me is that however advanced they may be, alien technology must operate in, conform to the same natural world we do - with gravity, friction etc. Science-fiction for me must recognise this limit. This is good, for it is the limit all art needs to generate the imagination and creativity to convince us that this limit can be mastered. This is why Wells’s classic War Of The Worlds is a brilliant work of the imagination for he finds the way to defeat the Martians not in superior weaponry, technology, but through their mortal lack of defense against a tiny organic threat that the smallest human baby posesses. This category distinction is precisely what the recent re-make lacked and despite its many merits, why it could not match the poetic power of the ending of the orginal film based upon Wells’  conception.

Another paradigm - this time from movies. It is said that for its time, in the light of the known science when it was made, Kubrick’s 2001 - a Space Odyssey was as faithful to known science as any film then or since.  Kubrick, like Wells, embraced the known scientific constraints of the natural world and this profoundly affected the visual aesthetic of his film.  Just accepting the way people would actually have to move in a weightless enviroment generated a poetic quality to the imagery but was a challenge to the dramatic pace he could achieve. Hence the tone of detachment ‘other-worldliness’ that sets up the final development of the film satisfyingly.

This is why I think District 9 is wrongly called Science-Fiction. Its participants do not credibly overcome the limits of the natural world - no, through the aesthetic misuse of camera technology they are made to just magically act as if the limits don’t exist. Magic for me is fantasy.  Nothing wrong with that: but if your narrative is fantasy based why clunk it all up by furnishing your characters with weapons, vehicles, artifacts every one of which looks just like ours but bigger. And magic. That’s lazy fantasy. For fantasy also needs some form of limit, some sense of what apparently cannot be done: without that limit, when the imagination of the artist takes us beyond it and  convinces us, we lose precisely the sense of fantasy and thereby precisely what delights, terrifies, entrances us about what we see and hear.

Filed under: 3 star, Action, Extended essay, Fantasy, Philosophical, Sci-Fi | No Comments »