On Film

September 13, 2006

Geoffrey Wright's Macbeth

It would be tedious to begin this review with lofty considerations of Shakespeare—of who the man was; of what modern treatments of his work should be. We were treated to enough of that when op-ed pieces all over our nation opined with Bloomian reverence to defend the Bard from outcomes based education. Nothing was ever really said, except heated calls for the protection of our great canon. I myself am sympathetic to Harold Bloom’s conservatism, but a Year 10 classroom is not the place for it, and I am certainly not sympathetic to journalistic hacks huffing and puffing in Shakespeare’s shadow.
And so to move away from the grandiose, I’ll tell you this—I think Shakespeare’s important because Kenneth Branagh taught me so. It was then that I began to get a feel for Will’s skill with “pathos” and “gravitas” and all those words forlornly shackled to the dramatic arts.
Branagh’s Hamlet was great because Branagh knew Shakespeare, and you, Geoffrey fucking Wright, are no Kenneth Branagh. If we are to accept this basic principle, that Shakespeare’s “big plays” are great, and can still tell us things, then we are saying that Shakespeare must be the centre of a modern treatment—the script writer, editor and advisor. In Wright’s Macbeth, cheap theatrics and a taste for fetish are the unfortunate centre, and Shakespeare seems very far away…

A Humble Litany of Advice Written for Geoffrey Wright in the Hope That He Will Never Make a Film Ever Again:

1. Cast actors who can act and understand Shakespeare. I can not stress this one enough, Geoff. If you are bold enough to adopt Macbeth, then bloody well do it. Allow good actors to inhabit your film, to fill the spaces with the grand and subtle grotesqueries of Shakespeare. Great actors can do this with their eyes; good actors should be able to do it with Will’s words. In this case, bad actors mumble and mutter words they clearly have no idea about. It is obvious. It is rude. It is embarrassing. It is fucking blasphemous.

2. Reliance on a highly contrived aesthetic to divert the audience from the hollowness of it all just won’t do. Ostensibly, this film takes place in modern day Melbourne—in the heart of the city’s gangland milieu. In reality it takes place in Wright’s bawdy, neo-gothic fantasies—all fashion and fetish so that the actors are made to wear clothes resembling the reprehensible wankery of a Milanese catwalk. iPods boom in the background, and De Palma-red soaks everything. The witches are lascivious demons, all pout and curves, and Worthington reduces the teetering Macbeth to Liam Gallagher suffering a methamphetamine nightmare. Swagger, swagger, swagger, suggesting nothing of the major curse he has inflicted upon himself—his own intimacy with his heart of darkness. Ahh, to hell with it. You get the picture. Shakespeare needn’t work within the physically realistic—but, damn it, the press kits promised me gritty verisimilitude of Melbourne’s gangland. I got delirious goth fantasies instead. So what? Well, it accompanied a distorted Shakespeare—like a carbon copy was placed over the First Folio and mistakenly shifted a few inches.

3. An obnoxious score just won’t do either. The strings in this film made me ill, so much so that I wondered if infrasound had been smuggled into the score. Either way, they are an obnoxious distraction, much like the actors, the sets, the costumes, and the lighting. It is all, simply, too much. Too earnest. Too cool. All groin and gore and guns. Yes, Shakespeare was often all that, but then so are the porno vids I keep under the bed. I’m gonna go out on a limb and suggest that Shakespeare had a little something else, right? but Geoffrey Wright just couldn’t see it. Don’t go see this.

Posted by Marty at 5:44 PM

April 28, 2006

We, the People: Dave Chappelle's Block Party

I was browsing through a bookstore yesterday when Gore Vidal’s latest caught my eye: Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson. The premise goes something like this: with these guys laying the foundation, just what the fuck went wrong with America?
Vidal’s lofty ruminations on the first three presidents were sparked by a conversation he had with Jack Kennedy back in 1961, two years before his murder broke the spine of America.

Vidal isn’t the only one asking this question. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of titles in bookstores asking “what’s wrong with America?” Our newspapers house the debates, our talk-shows broadcast the polemics and American anchormen explain socio-demographic models of America—blue and red coloured maps of the Last Great Hope. Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly prove that liberal-baiting is still a great way to get attention, Michael Moore wages war against Bush and credibility, while editors, academics, film directors and musicians carve up the States into segments of the urban and the rustic.

And that day in 2001 won’t go away either. This month former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani testified at the death-penalty trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the man who has admitted to conspiring with al-Qaeda to crash aircraft into American landmarks. Giuliani told the jury what he saw as he looked up at the smoking towers:

I saw several people—I can’t remember how many—jumping. There were two people right near each other. It appeared to me they were holding hands.

The jury, nine men and three women, were to hear more: the emergency phone call of Kevin Cosgrove, an insurance worker trapped on the 105th floor of the south tower. As jurors listened to the tape, a video played showing the south tower at the precise time the emergency phone call was being made:

9-1-1: Okay. I’m still here … still trying … The Fire Department is trying to get to you.
KC: Doesn’t feel like it.
9-1-1: Okay, try to calm down so you can conserve your oxygen, okay? Try to …
KC: Tell God to blow the wind from the West. It’s really bad. It’s black. It’s arid. Does anyone else wanna chime in here? We’re young men. We’re not ready to die.

Moments later, as the video footage showed the tower collapsing, Cosgrove is heard screaming “Oh God! Oh!”. The call ends.

Red. Blue. War. Terror. If sentient aliens were to take the cultural pulse of America today, the grim and erratic results would stupefy. Words and screams and satire of the nightmare that happened to us; the nightmare of what we did in response to them. Us? Them?

If there is a salve to these discussions of division, it is Dave Chappelle’s Block Party. If there has been much too much discussion of what is wrong with America, then Block Party tells us that there is much right. There always has been.

In 2004 comedian and hip-hop lover Dave Chappelle struck on the idea to throw a block party on the corner of two quiet streets in Bed-Stuy, a ‘burb in Brooklyn. The idea was simple enough: he would fund the staging of some of America’s best alternative artists—Mos Def, Talib Kwali, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Dead Prez and others (including a surprise reformation of The Fugees)—and people would come, and life would be experienced in all its American splendour. Simple.

Before the concert, held in September of that year, Dave travelled to his home-town near Dayton, Ohio, a very small town with wide-open spaces and little stores that sell you cigarettes. And he brought along gifts—golden tickets that entitle its owner to a return bus-trip to NY and accommodation once there, all so the lucky owner can catch the party. Tickets were free—this was all on Dave’s dime—and the only requirement was that you like hip-hop.
Dave’s America is a large one, and he approaches black parole officers, near-toothless white codgers on park benches, black youth and an elderly white lady who has been selling Dave cigarettes for years. She jumps on the chance.
One lady laments that she can’t make it to Brooklyn that weekend because she’s taking a trip to Canada. “Canada?” Dave quips, “tryin’ to dodge the war?”

People of all types flock to Dave, and he happily receives them, chattering away, joking amiably, being funnier and cooler and more sympathetic than most people I have ever seen. In his eyes there is no sign of recognition of division.
Before Dave heads back to NY to organise the event, he chances upon a practice session of Ohio State University’s marching band, rehearsing on what may be a paddock. He strolls up to the band’s leader: “You wanna go to NY?”
A few days later the band, populated with smart and gregarious kids, are opening the concert with Kanye West. The joy in watching Dave watch what he’s made is itself worth the price of entrance.

It is a film of a concert. Yes. It is also the most successfully political film I have seen, and that is said in wake of the overtly political—and skillfully made—Goodnight and Goodluck and Syriana.
Nowhere in this film will you hear discussion of Washington. Nowhere. In fact, the film’s very politics are located in its failure to ever mention Washington. Its politics are in portraying Dayton, Ohio and Brooklyn, NY as the same, but different. This is Dave’s America, where there are only people—of different races and postcodes, yes, but people, all the same. The politics of this film are in realising that the real politics are in the streets. Are in organising people for good. Are in creative freedom and honest and skilful music. Its politics are in Dave’s subtle understanding of the responsibilities the White House has given itself. Its messianic idealism. The discovery that the White House is about re-shaping the Middle-East, not helping East Harlem.
It’s about knowing that the White House is irrelevant, and so is shouting about it.

Dave’s politics are also in his celebration of hip-hop, a quintessentially American gift. He celebrates it, revels in it, and for the sole reason that it’s enjoyable. This film is Dave realising that he has the freedom and the money to enable his sharing of that enjoyment. And when Dave addresses the camera and talks about the great talent of Thelonious Monk, he does so not as a jingoist, but as a fan. That’s patriotism.

Dave had a dream: to use his fame and fortune to put on a free gig of great music. In doing so, and having the smart Michel Gondry film it, we have a sunny and truly patriotic vision of America that we should all be proud of. A vision which should re-shape our understanding of what politics are, and can be.

Posted by Marty at 2:59 PM | Comments (2)

February 4, 2006

Capote

I have just watched Capote, and a few things are on my mind. Firstly, Jon Stewart’s comments to Phillip Seymour Hoffman after he had watched the film: “Phillip, I’m not usually prone to hyperbole, but… you are the best damn actor in the world right now”. This may well be true, or it may not, but the Oscar should be his….
The other thing? Well, Capote himself. I have read most of his work, what little of it there is: lush, superficial portraits which said as much about Capote’s celebration of celebrity as it did about the subjects—Louis Armstrong, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando. There is also an equally lush collection of shorts, some of them exceptional (“Dazzle”) & his sparkly novella of the holes in the high-life, the cinematic version of which would cement Audrey Hepburn’s star. There is also his last published work, the unfinished Answered Prayers—immaculate prose, perhaps his shiniest yet; but the words were employed as a bitter and final self-advertisement, and the few friends he had remaining were betrayed. It was an unfinished work in every sense.
And, of course, there was his great fraud, the novel that would establish him as the US’s most famous author—In Cold Blood. I say fraud, not as a test of the book’s veracity (a calculated portrait of the killing of a family of four in deepest Kansas, and the killers that would later hang for it) but the way in which Capote sold it—as the first “non-fiction novel”. It is how Capote chose to call the book, and most critics followed. Capote himself said to George Plimpton in 1966 (the year of the book’s publication): “It seemed to me that journalism, reportage, could be forced to yield a serious new art form: the ‘nonfiction novel’”. Well, that’s true, but few pointed out that it had been done before—by Mark Twain (Roughing It) or Stephen Crane (Maggie); Daniel Defoe, even, over 200 years prior. But still, despite Capote’s boasts, the piece was widely hailed a masterpiece, and it is the best thing he ever wrote.
Capote watches Tru write the thing, and the film paints a highly questionable man, pursuing questionable ends. Admittedly, it’s a portrait consistent with my view of him—one which comes with reading most of his work, studying Plimpton’s anecdotal biography (Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintences and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career), and reading the acerbic criticisms of his contemporaries—Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer especially. That view is this—Capote was a gifted raconteur, eloquent writer, egomaniac, alcoholic, professional liar and cheat. He squandered his talent with personal excess, and was a terrible friend. His legacy should be stronger than it is.
The film suggests most of this, and paints a man with a flexible morality—if a moral structure at all. Capote was intent on greatness, and ignored much, and trampled many, in his attempts to attain it. In this film we see his friend Harper Lee as a quiet moral advisor, tending to Capote’s cruel calculations. We are then reminded of Lee’s great work—To Kill a Mockingbird, and are reminded of its message of moral fortitude. We see it lacking in Capote, as he ignores his friends and manipulates one of the killers, Perry Smith, in an effort to extract the information he needs. At one point, after Capote has established Smith’s trust, and removed his personal diary from his possession, Capote reads from it to Lee, mocking its author. It’s a cruel exercise.
In another scene, we hear Capote refer to Smith as a “goldmine” as Capote vaingloriously anticipates his writerly success. We are asked what the moral boundaries of reportage are, and are reminded of the ethical difficulties when those moral responsibilities preclude, or interfere with, artistic ones.
Capote eventually realises his betrayal of Smith—but he also realises that without this act, his book may never have been written. Is Capote, as a writer, obliged to perform as moral authority? Perhaps not, but he is as a human. We’re led to believe that human responsibilities and artistic ambition are often in conflict, but that they should be much better negotiated than Capote’s effort.
Finally, as I think of Capote’s last days—wild, sad days soaked in drink and with few friends by him—I’m also inclined to read the importance of friendship as a soft and slight sub-text to this excellent film.

Posted by Marty at 3:48 PM

January 11, 2006

Best Films of 2005: Part I

Downfall
Director/ Oliver Hirschbiegel

Strange that most of cinema’s Hitlers have been played by Englishmen. Or perhaps not, if you consider the habit an extension of the Allies’ victory—a sort of meta-capture of Hitler; a showy and unusual detention of his image. Either way, what’s more significant about his cinematic portrayals is the consistent reluctance to treat him as, wait for it… a human.
Our usual, victory-embalmed depictions of Hitler have usually been Hitler as Evil—an unambiguous evil-doer; a spit-specked tyrant kinked with strange sexual appetites, encouraged to destroy Europe by an uncanny force of personality and Germany’s weak collective will. No, no, scrap that first part. There hasn’t really ever been a treatment of “personality”—merely unapologetic archetypes of evil which serve to place Hitler on a stage so lofty, or so low, as to render a real and meaningful examination of him useless.
I’m inclined to think that the stage we set for him is so high, or low, as to prevent us from looking at ourselves—Hitler wasn’t human, so we don’t have to ask ourselves any serious questions. We can sleep safe.
Well, we can’t, and this film—a German film—knows it. It’s smart enough, and brave enough, to show Hitler as flawed flesh—a strange, mad and pitiable character, bent with delusion as Berlin and his 1000-year Reich begin to crumble. What’s more, the key figures around him are portrayed as strange, loathsome, human figures also. Goebbels, his cheeks sunken, his eyes small and black, bleats his absurd belief in the Reich’s eventual triumph, keen to catch the ear of his dear Fuhrer. Colouring his speeches is the unmistakable sound of Russian artillery, their advance inexorable, the German army pitifully spent.
Goebbel’s wife, hysterically piqued, makes arrangements to kill her six children—an effort to save them from a world without National Socialism.
We see Speer—calculating, idealistic, self-serving—wishing Hitler farewell before he leaves Berlin and possible death. Goring is strangely absent in this film, but when we see him the lapels are perfectly kept, and his medals hang straight. Around him are mid-level Nazis, drinking themselves stupid to escape it all.
We also see fragments of Hitler’s plan to destroy public infrastructure (an idea secretly, partially thwarted by colleagues)—and as the Germany he destroyed contemplates this latest act of brutality, Hitler marries his girlfriend and retreats with her to his private room—metres beneath the ravaged Berlin streets—and hands her a cyanide capsule. He takes one himself and, just to be sure, places the barrel of a revolver in his mouth.

Millions
Director/ Danny Boyle

I went on my first date when I was twelve. Her name was Collette, and her mum picked me up in an old car and drove us, and two of her friends, to a large suburban Cineplex. It wasn’t the first time I had been in a cinema, but it was the first time that it left a strong impression on my memory.
It would be lazy and untruthful if I told you I remembered the popcorn smell, or the bubble-gum stained carpet. I don’t. Nor can I say that I remember watching trailers for a new Bruce Willis film, or any film.
Nope.
To be honest, I don’t really remember her… our first kiss, which was exceptionally memorable, came a few hours after the completion of the film, so… I just can’t see her in that cinema. I can only see the film—Sleepless in Seattle. Laugh all you will, folks, but I can also see the warm shield of happy-anxiety that consolidated itself around me as I watched adults fall in love and felt that I was doing the same.
Sheesh.
It was something, I tell you. A magical symbiosis—the on-screen love-trials and dreams became my own, although, at the time, I thought they reflected them. So much so that, even today, the wan pairing of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan doesn’t seem that offensive. Nostalgia demand that I still respect the formula, even though Rosie O’Donnell’s inclusion in the film as the loud-mouth-with-a-heart-of-gold does its level best to blow the whole fucking thing out of the water.
But it still stays.
That film is me then—dumb and happy; at one with the flickering lights and still scared to kiss.
And this film, Millions, charmed the frackin’ socks off me, because, in watching the two young leads discover their great bag-o’-loot, I began watching myself fidgeting in that cinema all those years ago. The times when the centre of innocence still held.

Grizzly Man
Director/ William Herzog

“What a piece of work is man,” lamented Hamlet, and Christ knows if the figure of this film doesn’t inspire the same weariness…
I suppose Hamlet’s words concerned man’s capacity for cupidity and blood, whereas Treadwell’s foibles are less Shakespearian than they are… terribly pathetic. A failed actor, surfer, and drug dealer, it seemed Treadwell’s watershed moment came when he was turned down for a role in the sitcom Cheers—a young Woody Harrelson would later fill the position. So Treadwell, his ego unreasonably kinked, loitered in the vacuums of Los Angeles, selling drugs and surfing a little, still careful to tend to his classic surfer-boy locks. 15 years later, when parts of his body were found in the stomach of a grizzly, far, far away in remote Alaska, the perfectly kempt, golden hair still sat atop his disfigured face.
But let’s get back to California. Things didn’t work out so well for Treadwell here. He considered his skills cruelly unappreciated by the city of angels, and he played his beach life out with great sighs, experimenting with violence and drugs and self-martyrdom. Despite these signatures of banality, it seems Treadwell had enough force of personality to attract friends and sycophants. I doubt if he had anything to sell other than his unusual energy, but it all came to an end anyway when Treadwell hit on the idea to reinvent himself as a Wildman of Alaska—as noble guardian of the bears. He headed north, the actor still not dead within him….

Treadwell moved to the remote plains of Alaska, ostensibly as roaming, independent caretaker of the grizzly bears—a self-appointed role, unrecognized by state officials; his attempt at a heroic realization of Indiana Jones and Dian Fossey.
Nothing, except his own hubris, could have prepared Treadwell for this role, but for 13 years he spent the summers camping in some of the most pristine wilderness in the world—a wilderness co-habited with packs of grizzly bears, foxes and salmon.
“Everything about them [bears] is perfect,” he says, and we know this because Treadwell’s 13-year stretch yielded over 100 hours of footage, ranging from gorgeous panoramic shots, to frightening, pathological monologues cursing the government, say, or the lack of rain.
This is a man whose hubris and self myth-making assumed such grandiose proportions that he stared death in the face every day—but the captured footage, as a result, is breathtaking. Apparently it was the part of Treadwell’s legacy that piqued Herzog so much—in a voice over Herzog congratulates Treadwell for bequeathing him such a fine body of shots—a bear snatching a salmon from a stream; a baby fox running clumsily over a lush field. And it is a remarkable legacy; as Treadwell is too keen to point out, very few humans have experienced (and captured) what he has.

The thing is, Treadwell’s philosophy is corrupt from the beginning. Ostensibly, he is protecting the grizzlies—from indifferent government rangers, and rabid poachers, but the experts say that poaching is beneath negligible, and the rangers work at preserving a vast nature reserve, prohibited to humans. So, yes, not only is Treadwell’s adventuring illegal, it also serves no purpose—there really is nothing to protect the bears from. Treadwell’s manic gibbering, his anti-establishment polemics, contain nothing of substance, but point to a man destroyed by his own vanity and desperate search for redemption. This film is so sad because his own actions implore you to consider that there just may be nothing redeemable within him.

So Treadwell runs and rants through the wilderness, still failing after 13 years to arrive at any meaningful biological, ecological or spiritual wisdom. His position was a unique one, but shy of great pictures, his environment seems to have yielded nothing to him other than fuel for a deranged ego. And so, inevitably, he is eaten by a member of the ones he loves, the tragedy ten-fold for a mysterious girlfriend (Treadwell did not allow others to appear on film) is also eaten—their rib-cages, devoid of flesh, visible from the skies. Clearly, Treadwell’s naïve, hippie-arrogance was child’s play, and could never protect him from these beasts. A bear is a bear is a bear, and man is a very funny creature indeed.

Posted by Marty at 9:54 PM | Comments (1)

September 16, 2005

Talkin' 'bout the Blue-blues: Watching Garden State & Prozac Nation

Andrew Largeman enjoys an astonishing arc—by the end of Garden State he has, to my eye, discovered two life-altering things. The first one is this: to live is to be free to feel, even if there is much sadness in this world, and much pain to be felt—and there is and there is.
But Andrew hits on this higher license of an un-medicated existence, and sums it up concisely to his father: “Maybe it’s best just to be who we are. Maybe that’s best.” Andrew discovers that to live is to feel, and be damned suppressing the blue-blues because suffering is existence. It’s a valuable but idealistic lesson; idealistic because there are grades of suffering, and if we are to accept the deepest forms of depression as a disease, not as a disposition, then we must also accept some forms of suffering as insufferable. And so perhaps there’s something else to add to Andrew’s discovery—to live is to feel is to suffer, and it’s worth it, but baby, you gotta be brave. Maybe ol’ Doc Thompson said it best when he wrote: “Buy the ticket, take the ride”.

Andrew’s arc contains another discovery: the importance of wriggling free from the various platitudes that regulate our lives, masquerading as wisdom. In other words, Garden State’s quiet charm is defined by a warm and gentle fuck-you to received advice. When Andrew attains both grief and happiness—and eventually love—through the playfully persistent Nat Portman, he then temporarily abandons her in yet another moment of sterility—a pre-determined observation of the platitude “I’ve gotta go find myself”. He realises his error quickly though (who, exactly, is the author of this wisdom?), and grasps that to live is to feel, and to feel now, to feel all the time. He returns to the source of his happiness, determined, this time, to live. And so they kiss and hug and return warmth to the airport’s lino floors, white walls and the inaudible buzz of bumble-bees.

While Garden State humbly challenges our faith in science and family, and has the skill and heart to ask “how are we to live?” Prozac Nation is its opposite. Too keen to record its maniacally ill narrator, the film only has time for a self-martyring documentation of self-destruction. It is, ultimately, a violently narcissistic film, much too self-obsessed to observe anything larger than its own protagonist’s fall. At the very end of the film, Prozac is introduced, and its narrator comments, quickly and clumsily (she is supposed to be a writer) that it seems that everybody is taking this shit. End film. This, surely, is the firmest sign of the film’s self-obsessed nature—at a point when some larger observation could have been made, the film ends, seemingly too exhausted for social observation after the fervor of self-documentation.
Prozac Nation’s an awful film about an awful person, but, in Garden State, bless it, Braff’s given us a charming reminder that we can still be astonished with this world. We just gotta be brave enough to take it.

Posted by Marty at 11:41 AM | Comments (6)

August 10, 2005

Some Thoughts on Mysterious Skin

Mysterious Skin
Directed by Gregg Araki

This is a tough film—a film that watches a pedophile’s well-designed grooming methods, and records the eventual fulfillment of his grim fantasies. But it is mostly a film about how his two victims (nine at the time of the abuse) deal with the molestation in their late-teens.
One victim replaces the memories with fantasies of alien abduction, and the film watches his slow and agonizing recovery of the “authentic” memories. The other teen sells himself to old men in parks, but we realise that there’s more to this than a quick buck—this teen has equated perverse relations between himself and older men with sexual and emotional fulfillment, yet he is constantly nagged by the blackness of it all.

There’s little hope here—the teen prostitute is wrecked in many ways, and jogs drunkenly towards annihilation, whilst the other teen is sad-pathetic in his sophisticated self-deceit. The film does, if this needs to be said, hammer home the grim repercussions of child abuse.

***
Some time in June, the federal attorney-general, Phillip Ruddock, was notified of a moral contamination. The source of alarm was Mysterious Skin.
Ruddock had been notified by the South Australian a-g, impotent to impose censorship since such jurisdiction had transferred to the federal body.
Prior to this contact, the SA attorney-general had received his notification from Christian-right lobby groups—groups with names like Family First, and the Australian Family Party, and Think of the God-damn Children Party, and…

What’s interesting here is the fact that the film had not yet been viewed by any member of this censorship-chain. Not one.
Curious.

Those mentioned charged that the film could inspire pedophiles, by either giving them something to “think about”, or actually inspiring the fulfillment of fantasies—the cross-over from pedophilia to pederasty. It’s a problematic charge, considering the director has taken great pains to prevent any child actor being involved in, er, compromising situations—-in other words, the director, in making a film about traumatized children, did not, in turn, want to traumatize his child actors. He achieves this well.
Secondly, the film unambiguously documents the profound damage wrought from child abuse. If we are to accept that this film could “inspire” pedophilia, well then, we must also accept that it could also diminish it, as hopeful pederasts view the unchallengeable truths of abuse.

But, fuck it… if the chain of censorship won’t view the films they condemn, then we must laugh it off as atavistic horse-shit, and be done with it…

***
There may only be one thing wrong with this film, and it’s this: it’s terrible. While the film’s right to be released is currently contested in stuffy hallways, common sense demands that I try out Voltaire’s old maxim: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. It’s an obvious invocation, but a suitable one, and Voltaire was always very good with the aphorism. After turning down an orgy, having attended one the night before, Voltaire chimed: “Once: a philosopher; twice: a pervert!” proving he also had a very good sense of humour.
But it may also need saying that freedom without restriction is a chimera, and that this idea goes right back to Plato. Let’s borrow from that old bore Walter Lippmann, who, despite his pretensions, pays here a decent service to Plato:

If there is a dividing line between liberty and license, it is where freedom of speech is no longer respected as a procedure of truth and becomes the unrestricted right to exploit the ignorance, and to incite the passions, of the people. Then freedom is such hullabaloo of sophistry, propaganda, special pleading, lobbying, and salesmanship that it is difficult to remember why freedom of speech is worth the pain and trouble of defending it.

The space between Plato and Voltaire isn’t intractable. The space can be mediated with common sense: placing restrictions on freedoms can be one way of ensuring higher ones—i.e. restrictions on freedom of speech coming in the form of racial vilification legislation can be seen as a trade-off to prevent citizens suffering racism, an extension of cruelty. In other words, if the exercise of speech translates to an exercise in cruelty, we must look at placing restrictions on the former to prevent the latter.
But if we are to legislate against “exploit[ing] the ignorance… of the people” we would be right in demanding that our legislators act as pragmatic and thoughtful representatives, rather than fierce mouths of piety.

Posted by Marty at 10:56 AM | Comments (1)

July 26, 2005

Film Review--The Football Factory

The Football Factory
Directed by Nick Love
Starring Danny Dyer, Frank Harper, Tamer Hassan.

Tommy Johnson is in an army—the Chelsea firm, arguably England’s most notorious group of organized football thugs.
Social theorists would point out that Tommy’s involvement is involuntary; that he’s conscripted by the grim stranglehold of lower-middle-class pecuniary. But Tommy would have it differently—he’s a voluntary member of a privileged troupe.
Tommy’s involvement entitles him to many perks: a sense of regiment and hierarchy which offer systems of mentorship and promotion. In addition, membership accords its soldiers with a rich gestalt—a camaraderie encouraged by a quaffed pint and shared membership, but soldered tight by the ritualized spilling of blood.
Also, membership grants soldiers a real combat zone—cathartic expulsions of lower-middle-class ennui are realised with real battle. Theirs is not a vicarious release—they punch, knife, ambush and flank their frustrations out, and their battles take place exactly where they live out their lives of quiet desperation—the concrete jungles of suburban Britain. So, not for them paint-balling or bungee-jumping; not for them expensive hours on shrink’s couches. No, they exercise real combat, with real brotherhood and real codes. This is their leisure.

Tommy’s a layabout recidivist who plays out his life in the local pub. His life would be, without his hooligan involvement, a dreary mess—a life of quiet pity. But within The Firm Tommy finds definition—his unremarkable self is eerily transcended by his involvement in something larger than himself. This is exactly how religion works, and Tommy, in exchange for his faith, receives loyalty on the battlefield, where he, and others, work out their own personal frustrations.
It seems irrelevant to Tommy that the codes of The Firm are based on thuggery and fascism, and that violence quickly assumes a position unchallenged by moral reckoning. No, the perks are much too great for such things to matter, and so Tommy eases himself into this brave new world….

The film’s succession of pitch-battles between rival gangs is filled with grim portents. Everything becomes a symbol of the inevitable bloody climax—Tommy’s nightmares, his speed-induced paranoiac delusions, his grandfather’s tired advice, even the graffiti splayed on grey walls—each is an obvious sign. This story does not end well for anybody.
A most compelling aspect of this film is Tommy’s inexorable draw towards destruction— Tommy consciously acknowledges the portents (they’re not solely reserved for the audience’s appreciation), but they’re ultimately discarded. The terror lies in knowing that Tommy knows just how obvious the violence is. But—and here’s the drama—he continues, led blindly by his unerring faith in the Firm, led on blood-stained cobbles towards a grim end he knows is coming.
And this may be the film’s heart: if he stays, he may well die, stabbed to death or stomped in a gutter somewhere. But if he leaves, he loses himself—that golden definition provided by his membership. This is Tommy’s choice.

This is not a film about football. It is a film about hooliganism, and for those who naively believe that there’s something about football that inspires violent phenomena, then think again. Football merely provides a sympathetic arch to organized hooliganism—colours, road trips, locals, battlefields. Football provides the means for base dichotomy, upon which gang culture rests.
It is also a film about Thatcherism, that especially English curse of the moribund ‘burbs—hooligans shepherded together in desperate need for solidarity. That, and the smoky corridors of the firm provide the perfect breeding ground for drug running. Money can be made, if you’re willing to put your neck out, but the simple thrill of even that can be a bonus for workers literally bored out of their minds.
The Firm’s glue is cathartic mischief, washed down with helpings of fascism and bullying. There is little here that is ethically sound, and the monotony of violence is often sickening. But, yes, it all makes an unnerving sense. Young men reclaiming their streets, painting their names with blood.

Posted by Marty at 2:06 PM

June 24, 2005

Watching Cinema Paradiso

It was with a special kind of melancholy that I sat down to watch Cinema Paradiso on Monday night. It was a melancholy aggravated by caffeine, but given piquancy by a reading of Flannery O’Connor’s sublime short ”The Life You Save May Be Your Own”. Before the movie began I determined to write a short story of my own, but I wrote just the opening paragraph:

The old man introduced himself as Alan, but asked for me to call him Seagull, and I’m no doctor, but I think he’ll die soon—Seagull smelt of death and tuna and his whiskers were very short and grey: ”My friend,” he said, studying my eyes, ”I have loved very much in this world, but the sadness is now almost total.”

But I did not know the old man, only myself, and I did not feel like writing about him…

***
In 1945 the supreme leaders of Fascism and Nazism had come unstuck—Hitler had overreached in Russia and was paying the price, and, while Berlin was being overrun, Mussolini and his wife were being captured by Italian partisans.
”Let me live, and I will give you an Empire,” Mussolini pleaded, but nobody believed him and the two were shot in the head and hung in a piazza in Milan.
Two days later, Hitler, deep in his bunker, shook hands with his Nazi companions and retreated with his wife into private chambers. Hitler blew his head off, and his wife swallowed cyanide. Their bodies were carried upstairs to a shell-pocked garden where they were doused in gasoline and burnt. Yes, these were strange days….
And so Italy was a strange country after the war—Mussolini was gone, but so was half the country. You could still see fascism in the shadows that were made by the rubble.
Cinema Paradiso captures this perfectly—the war is over, but there’s evidence of it everywhere, most noticeably in the lovingly painted classes of the half-mad and heartbroken that inhabit this film. Yes, the war is everywhere.

The story of this history—the ”what just happened?” numbness that defined most of Europe after the fall of Hitler—is gently navigated through the role of a cinema in a small Italian town. Headed, in sorts, by the inexpressibly lovely Alfredo, the cinema becomes the focus of the community—a marketplace of benevolence and shared history important to those puzzled about what Mussolini’s downfall meant.
Yes, the cinema was a place of escape. Of freedom and community. And strangely, this companionship was being provided by the Americans—the US, overnight, had become a profound ally; providing the half-mad and heartbroken with delicious fantasies. The irony here, of course, is that Hollywood’s success was made possible by the Axis’ capitulation. The US emerged as a superpower—and the spring of late-capitalism funded the Hollywood fantasies that, in turn, provided succor for the Italians. Hollywood’s presence was a reminder to Europe that they had nothing—Italy was confused, Germany flattened, Britain bankrupt and Russia… well, Russia was incorrigible.

But Cinema Paradiso’s heart is larger than any of this—its heart is larger than Mussolini’s cupidity and much warmer than politics… it’s a film that poignantly invests the charismatic, the young and the injured, against the backdrop of a terribly scarred country. This investment is made with such gentleness that the subsequent sadness seeps through like memory. There is very little overt mention of Italy’s woes (that is its virtue) but when there is, you feel it. Alfredo: ”Do as the soldier, Toto—leave. This land is cursed.”

And so Toto leaves, and never comes back, and Italy, like the rest of Europe, begins to rebuild its buildings and values and histories—meanwhile death is there, is always there, and Alfredo’s passing seems to me like the collapse of a very wise and very beautiful empire.

Posted by Marty at 4:45 PM | Comments (9)

June 17, 2005

Review -- Capturing the Friedmans

Capturing the Friedmans
Directed by Andrew Jarecki
[Documentary: USA, 2003]

Stuart Klawans, in his review of this film for The Nation*, reminded us of the persistent strength of the myth of objectivity, and that the myth holds especially true for documentaries. Klawans reminded us that the purchase of the myth confers (in the mind of the viewer) ownership of The Truth — an intellectual omnipotence that out-shadows the knowledge of the participants of the story. It is beneficial to meditate on the strength of this myth—that the very word ”Objectivity” has been used, for some time now, as an arc with which to house concepts like ”equality” and ”truth” and ”professionalism”. The arc’s design, of course, is flawed, and has been profoundly undermined by academics from many stables. It hasn’t really mattered though—the strength of the myth persists, and is ritually given voice in the popcorn-stained foyers of doco-showing cinemas ‘round the country.

In his adroit, but hurried review, Klawans tells us that the film ”quietly convinces us that we, as viewers, may now own the truth—which makes us superior to the cops, the lawyers, the judge and the TV reporters. I need hardly add that we’re also superior to the Friedmans.” Klawans is not, if this needs to be said, convinced himself, but he suggests that this sense of superiority is encouraged by a consumption of the myth. Of course, the film contains its own agendas, whether they’re of the film-makers, or the subjects themselves, and it becomes so that the film very firmly convinces me of the opposite—that ownership of the Truth is a chimera.

In order to demonstrate this, let’s start from a beginning — Capturing the Friedmans is a remarkable film and is so for this reason: it entitles the viewer to an appalling level of intimacy with a doomed family, viewed through the hazy lens of a bankrupt myth. The film leaves in its wake a trail of seductive half-truths that are not, and never can be, pieced together. At the end of the film, we must ask ourselves if we were, in fact, justified in occupying that level of closeness…

In order to tell the story of a father and son convicted on charges of child-sodomy, the film utilizes a strong team of figures involved in the case — police, detectives, judges, lawyers, alleged victims, friends… The film boasts a heavy element of authority symbols — lawyers, judges, police, for whom their authority is coloured by the professional ideals attached to ”objectivity”. These talking heads voice their perceptions, share their investigations**, and we believe them, but with a refundable kind of interest — it’s the sum of the parts (the film itself) that will give us the Real Truth, right? Well, maybe for some. Klawans would say maybe for most. For me, however, this film clearly demonstrates the opposite…

If Klawans is right, and I suspect he is, then the myth of Objectivity is strongest in the documentary form — that ”credible witnesses” (lawyers, police, teachers etc.) are credible only in that they provide a vital part, but it is only the documentary maker himself that can provide the Divine Sum. It would be interesting to note precisely how the documentarian*** came to receive this God-like platform, but regardless it remains absurd to grant it. Capturing the Friedmans, in its multitude of competing truths and histories, and its grim cloak of poorly concealed desires, suggests, to this viewer anyhow, the intrinsically protean nature of this little world.

Of course I still did come to a few conclusions concerning those involved in this film — I decided that Arnold Friedman was sick and confused and profoundly disabled the lives of his sons; I noted, with great interest, the worship of Arnold by the two sons we are permitted to view, and was astonished at how this worship translated into a fierce species of denial; but most significantly, I was made aware of the frailty of my perceptions, and the chimera of total truth… I was also saddened by the deep and ubiquitous brown-sadness that seemed to infect everyone involved in this cursed story.

*Stuart Klawans, ”Candid Camera,” The Nation, July 7, 2003. [http://thenation.com]
**It is interesting to note the varying professional procedures that are employed to obtain truth—for instance, the police have developed their own unique brand of questioning, distinct from that of the lawyer. In fact, it is probably safe to say that not only do their techniques differ, but that they have different values of truth. One police officer describes the difficulty of interviewing children (another group with a vastly different system for obtaining truth) — another speaks of the danger of using hypnosis to encourage ‘repressed’ memories; the risk being, it is believed false memories may be created. And on it goes…
***Clearly there are differing levels of credibility here; neither his fans nor detractors could assert that Michael Moore even pays lip-service to the notion of objectivity.

Posted by Marty at 4:53 PM