The browning version

Bruce Norris, the author of the play Clybourne Park, has refused to allow his play to be staged in Berlin after he discovered that one of the African-American characters would be played by a white performer in blackface. Meanwhile, the Royal Shakespeare Company has come under fire when it emerged that the Chinese play The Orphan of Zhao would be performed by a mostly Caucasian cast.

Meanwhile, a glance at the credits for Baz Luhrmann’s much delayed movie version of The Great Gatsby reveals that the corrupt Jewish businessman Meyer Wolfsheim will be played by Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan. But he doesn’t white up. So that’s OK.

PS: Accusations levelled at Cloud Atlas as well. Such larks.

PPS: Tom Sutcliffe covers similar ground in The Independent

On Looper

So I saw Looper at the weekend, and it was pretty good, I thought. Clever concept, good acting and although there were effects, they were used sparingly, to legitimate ends, not simply for cheap thrills. I’d heard a bit about the make-up work that supposedly helps us to believe that Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis are the same person, but to be honest, it just made me think that Joseph Gordon-Levitt was wearing a funny nose, so he looked a little bit less like Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but not noticeably more like Bruce Willis. I did like the diner scene, where they sat staring at each other as if they were in any number of films in which one actor plays two roles and – through the magic of split-screen or some such jigger-pokery – confronts himself. Ideally, of course, they’d have made use of the technology depicted in the film and sent an older Gordon-Levitt back from the future; or pulled a younger Willis forward, whichever is cheaper.

But is it just me, or do films these days tend to be more about other films than about people or things or ideas? Of course, this doesn’t mean that the director is consciously borrowing from other film-makers, or paying homage or spoofing or – heaven forbid – ripping them off. To be fair, Rian Johnson doesn’t set out to be the cinematic answer to DJ Shadow or The Avalanches, concocting art almost entirely from samples of other art; it just feels that way. The author dies as soon as he signs off the final edit; this is all in the reading.

So in Looper I spotted thematic or stylistic elements of, in no particular order: The Omen; Carrie; The Terminator; A Matter of Life and Death; North By Northwest; Twelve Monkeys; The Sixth Sense; Mad Max; The Matrix; Léon; The Usual Suspects; Source Code; Back to the Future; Blade Runner; Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea; not to mention a fat handful of Doctor Who stories (say, Genesis of the Daleks, with its killing-baby-Hitler parable, City of Death and The Angels Take Manhattan). Oh, and given the fact that the only women in the story are reduced to the archetypes of wife, mother, servant or whore (or combinations thereof), sexual politics straight out of Mad Men.

But again, maybe that’s just me.

Roger Moore and the all-you-can-eat cultural buffet

Out of Bangkok for the weekend, we flick on a movie channel and find, of all things, The Man With The Golden Gun. It’s a justly derided effort, the point where knob gags and silly sound effects finally got the upper hand; the egregious Sheriff JW Pepper returns, the Jar Jar Binks of the franchise; and although some previous Bond girls had been pretty inept standard bearers for feminism, surely Britt Ekland’s Mary Goodnight was the first to be a certifiable moron? The only reason we end up watching it is to catch my brother-in-law’s cameo as a voiceover artist. (He dubbed the cocky Bangkok urchin who helps Roger Moore fix the motor on his boat, and then gets pushed into the khlong for his troubles.)

The depiction of the Thai capital is culturally confused, to say the least, especially when it comes to the martial arts scenes. Although Bond attends a muay thai (Thai boxing) bout, he also finds himself tussling with sumo wrestlers (Japanese), then confronted with what appears to be a school of kung fu warriors (Chinese), a couple of whom dabble in krabi krabong (Thai swordplay); and he’s finally rescued by a pair of feisty sisters – one speaking Thai, the other Chinese – who show off their karate skills (Japan again). And when we finally get to Scaramanga’s lair in Khao Phing Kan (now more commonly known as James Bond Island, on Thailand’s Andaman coast), we’re told it’s in Chinese waters. We’re being presented with one big, homogeneous exotic Orient, like one of those pan-Asian restaurant buffets where you’re encouraged to pile inept renditions of satay and sushi and green curry and dim sum on the same plate.

The following day we stop off at a place called Palio. It’s essentially an open-air shopping village, supposedly designed to resemble an Italian town, although the attention to architectural detail and authenticity doesn’t appear to have extended to the stuff in the shops. There are several places selling sort-of antiques in a non-specific European style, with Capodimonte knock-offs and faded French tapestries jostling against Union Jack cushions and a few postcards of Audrey Hepburn; in one, we’re serenaded by a compilation of German love songs. Lots of Thai people like the notion of Europe, and the veneer of sophistication it brings with it; but actually engaging with the details at a level deeper than a fake Gucci bag seems to be too much effort. Maybe this is Asia taking its belated revenge on 007.

In between we pay an all-too brief visit to Khao Yai national park. It’s the rainy season, so the forest is at its peak of lushness; and the macaques are as endearingly obnoxious as ever. There are meant to be wild elephants but I’ve never seen one there and neither has anyone I’ve asked. Occasionally you see the evidence of their fleeting presence: piles of dung; crushed foliage; maybe a footprint. And I wonder if someone on the park staff has the best job in the world, going out just before dawn to create teasing, hopeful hints of something that doesn’t actually exist.

Tony Scott, Top Gun and speaking truth to death

I hadn’t intended to say anything about Tony Scott, who has died in Los Angeles. That was until the tributes started rolling in, most of them praising his skills as a film-maker of merit, many seeming to wallow in the writers’ own memories of seeing these movies in the 80s and 90s, as if this period was some sort of lost Eden. This wasn’t just Ridley’s kid brother, they argued, not just a maker of loud, glossy, dumb action flicks; this was an auteur, a craftsman, the Welles of weaponry, the Bergman of blowing stuff up. The unexpectedness of his demise and its horrible circumstances seemed to have the makings of a Princess Diana phenomenon, as those who had derided Scott’s work during his lifetime attempted to make amends.

So I suggested, through the medium of a popular microblogging site, that while his death was sad and my sympathies went out to his family and friends, in my opinion he made rather a lot of rubbish films. And a number of people took exception to that; too soon, was the general theme.

Let’s be clear; I wasn’t kicking the man. I never knew him, but I’m happy to accept that he was a lovely bloke and he’ll be much missed. I did, however see many of his films. Some of them – True Romance, Enemy of the State, maybe The Hunger at a pinch – had their moments. Most were glossy and stupid and owed more to the traditions of MTV than MGM; when I heard the news of his death, a whole slew of titles came into my head and I had to sift through them to make sure I wasn’t thinking of Adrian Lyne or Joel Schumacher or Roger Donaldson, fellow ringmasters of flashy vacuity. But one of them stayed on the mental list, a film that I believe goes beyond not-very-good into the realms of the truly horrible. And that film is Top Gun.

Top Gun is often described by its fans as a guilty pleasure. I don’t really believe in such a concept; it’s perfectly OK to have favourite films (or books or music or whatever) that you know aren’t particularly good in any objective, critical sense. I’m unashamedly fond of several of the films of John Hughes, whose commercial peak was at around the same time as Scott’s, but I know that’s as much to do with where I was and who I was when I first saw them. They’re not that great, but they have a quirky attitude and an essential moral decency that remains modestly attractive.

No such defence is plausible when it comes to Top Gun. If Hughes’ take on the 80s centred on the beautiful losers on its periphery, Scott’s vision was the pure, glistening centre, Reagan and Thatcher and raw, shiny power. Quentin Tarantino’s ironic post hoc analysis of its supposed gay subtext only shows up its lumbering quasi-fascism; I’m reminded of another unworthy icon of mid-80s pop culture, the stadium concerts of Queen, fans of whom would punch you in the eye if you dared to suggest that Freddie Mercury was anything other than heterosexual. Some young bloods went into finance after they saw Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, believing that Gekko’s “greed is good” schtick was a genuine statement of moral purpose. We can laugh at them, but not at their contemporaries who joined the armed forces after seeing Top Gun. They got the message, loud – very loud – and clear. The US Navy even set up recruiting booths in cinema foyers. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that people who like Top Gun can’t be friends of mine; but they’d have to try that bit harder. Back then, there were Tom Cruise people and there were Molly Ringwald people and we didn’t go to the same parties.

When the disgraced politician John Profumo died a few years ago, a number of commentators argued that he was by no means a bad man; he was a good man who did a bad thing. Tony Scott was a good man who made a very bad film and I don’t feel bad for saying so.

#London2012: regarding the keirin

 

I’ve just realised that in the midst of the most spectacular sporting event to grace my native land since they cancelled We Are The Champions, I’ve written three blog posts about the opening ceremony and precisely none about the actually running and jumping and throwing and all that malarkey. You see, when healthy lads of my age were glued to Grandstand and World of Sport, or out in the park trying to emulate Kevin Keegan or Brendan Foster, I’d be stuck in my bedroom using the continuous paper my dad brought back from work to recreate in prose form the dystopic sci-fi that dominated my imagination and TV viewing.

So while I have the deepest respect and admiration for plucky Victoria Pendleton and her success in the keirin yesterday, I have to admit that to me, this is not so much a sport, more a combination of 

and

and

Vertigo vs Citizen Kane: battle of the fat blokes

The results of the 2012 Sight & Sound Poll are out and the collective wisdom of hundreds of critics and directors asserts that Vertigo is, notwithstanding what everyone has said for the past 50 years, better than Citizen Kane; one white, male, overweight raconteur and curmudgeon nudging another off the pinnacle. I don’t agree: I don’t think it’s even Hitchcock’s best movie, and it’s not my favourite either (which is a different thing, but more on that later).

Every time one of these polls is staged, the same quibbles arise. What’s the bloody point of it all? Well, the first point is to shift copies of Sight & Sound (or Film Comment or Empire or whatever) and then, on a more altruistic note, to raise awareness of the richness of cinema as an art form, to encourage people to see some movies again or for the first time and to provoke debate and discussion and dialectic. Obviously nobody is arguing that Citizen Kane was, in some empirical and absolute sense, the best film ever until 2002, but that this has now ceased to be the case, as if helium has usurped hydrogen as the lightest element.

The other gripe concerns the selection of those who vote in the poll, and with it the whole nature of elitism in the creation of a canon. “But my favourite film is Star Wars [or The Godfather or The Shawshank Redemption or Dirty Dancing] so why should I care what Mark Kermode or Quentin Tarantino thinks?” The answer of course is that Kermode and Tarantino have almost certainly seen Star Wars, whereas I’m not sure how many diehard devotees of Star Wars have seen Vertigo or Kane or Tokyo Story (number three on the list and top of the directors’ picks). And when you’ve seen Star Wars and Vertigo and several thousand other movies of all genres and periods and countries, you start to realise that there’s a difference between your own favourite film and the film you consider to be the best. (Back to Hitchcock: I suspect Rear Window or Psycho are among his best, but my favourite is Spellbound, even though I’m well aware of its glaring faults. And as for Welles, I’d pick The Stranger or Chimes at Midnight over Kane.) So ultimately there’s nothing wrong with having Star Wars as your favourite film, but without any critical context, why do you expect us to care?

That said, a well organised poll does tend to say something about the sampled group. I always think of the time customers at the David Lean Cinema in Croydon were asked to pick the best film of all time; confronted with the glories of Hitchcock and Welles, Ozu and Kurosawa, Bergman and Ford and Wilder and Ed Wood, they picked that epic of love and loss and duty and windy bonnets, Mrs Brown. If only Hitchcock had replaced Kim Novak with that nice Judi Dench, there would surely be no arguments.

PS: In the New Statesman, Ryan Gilbey – one of the voters – queries the dearth of recent movies in the list.

In the dark

20 or so years ago, I was in New York, watching Coppola’s Dracula movie, the one with Gary Oldman. It was in a cinema in Times Square, which wasn’t quite the piss-stained hellhole it had been, but still had a certain grubby frisson about it, a potential danger in the shadows. Around 40 minutes in, raised voices cut through the soundtrack a few rows in front of me, an argument about a woman apparently. And then I saw the shadow of a man rising from his seat and throwing a flailing punch. The house lights came on almost immediately and at least a third of the patrons were already hurrying for the exits. “Damn, that guy could be carrying anything!” hissed the man next to me as he made his move. Security guards arrived; the brawlers were removed; the leavers cautiously came back to their places; the film restarted. But there remained a distinct air, in amongst the tropes of horror and vampirism and possession, of a very real violence out there. My hotel was only about four blocks away, but when the film was done, I got a cab.

It’s too early to know exactly what happened a few hours ago in Denver. But it’s interesting that when the shooting began, people in the cinema next door assumed it was some sort of promotional gimmick and only when bullets started coming through the walls were they shaken into reality. When I saw the newsflash, my immediate reaction was pretty similar; it’s a stunt, and someone in the audience has panicked and tweeted it and some idiot news editor’s taken it seriously. And then the horror sank in; the bullets through the walls. Are we now so meekly accepting of the dominant role of bullshit in our lives – even if we know it to be bullshit – that when reality does intrude, it takes a while to sink in?

PS: Except the FBI did it, of course.

PPS: More tragedy that accidentally becomes art. I might come back to this.

Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself With Tea: 30 years on

Huge chunks of what I know and love about movies I owe to BBC2. Younger readers may not believe that the channel was once something other than a repository for antiques shows, cookery shows, quiz shows and combinations thereof but in the days of three analogue channels and that’s yer lot it was a trove of unexpected gems. There was still a Reithian educate-and-entertain meme in the programming, so they were big on themed seasons that gave an overview of a particular genre or period: over successive Saturday nights I’d watch the Warner gangster movies with Cagney, Bogart and Robinson; the Astaire/Rogers musicals from RKO; contrasting double bills of a Universal horror movie from the 1930s and a Hammer equivalent from the 50s/60; or they’d get the auteur bug and give you a couple of months of Buñuel or Wilder.

But the real joy came when you came across a movie of which you knew absolutely nothing, that had no connection with what came before or after, that just seemed to be thrown into the schedules on a whim. This was pre-Wikipedia, pre-IMDb, remember; all you had to go on was what the Radio Times told you (unless it was in Halliwell’s Film Guide or Elkan Allan’s Movies on TV, the only other references I would have had to hand). So I was rather under-prepared when, at the age of 13 and a half, Auntie presented to me a Czech film,  Jindřich Polák’s 1977 science-fiction comedy Zítra vstanu a opařim se čajem, aka Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself With Tea.

I’ve mentioned this experience – not just the film, but the fact of catching it by chance on a winter weekend in 1982 – to many people over the years. Most of them respond blankly, presumably because they were doing what people were meant to do on a Saturday night in 1982, drinking sweet cocktails to a soundtrack of the Human League. Or maybe they were watching the football. But every once in a while I find someone who was about the right age and the right level of social ineptitude to have been on the sofa, watching the only minority channel going. They usually offer that face of bafflement easing into vague recollection, followed by a specific aspect of the film suddenly leaping back into their consciousness after all this time. “The twins!” “The green faces!” “The comedy Hitler!” I wouldn’t say I’ve consolidated lifelong friendships this way, but there’s a tenuous network of geeks and losers who now understand they weren’t alone, united as they are in a sort of extended water-cooler moment across the decades.

The only reason I know the solid facts about that fateful transition (that it was on Saturday January 16 at 9.35pm, and so on) is that they’re laid out in this review of the DVD, from 2006. As soon as I read it, I felt an urge to get hold of the disc, but at the same time a certain reluctance. Although my 13-year-old self loved the film, something told me that the 40-something me would immediately realise it was a bit crap. So I held off. Until, a few days ago, I happened to come across the whole bloody thing online. And I gave in.

OK, here’s the basic set-up. In the 1990s (or a mid-70s imagining thereof), time travel is a feasible leisure activity and a group of fascists decide to use this to go back to 1944 and give Hitler a hydrogen bomb. They bribe a pilot on one of the time flights to help them; he lives with his identical twin, a scientist who was responsible for developing the technology. On the day on which the trip is scheduled, the pilot chokes to death on his breakfastl; his brother, who knows nothing about the plot, dons his uniform and goes to work in his place.

Well, it wasn’t quite as good as I’d remembered, nor nearly as bad as I’d feared. The budget was evidently tight and the effects now seem primitive, but that’s never bothered me too much; I still enjoy episodes of Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 from around the same time. Polák clearly assumed that the 1990s would look much like the 1970s, but with a few hi-tech innovations thrown in, so flares, fedoras and kipper ties abound alongside the aforementioned time travel, and also washing-up liquid that simply dissolves the dirty dishes. I remember being stunned at the audacity of playing Hitler for laughs (as distinct from something like The Producers, which played *the idea of Hitler* for laughs) but we’ve been through so many Downfall spoofs these sequences have lost their impact. That said, the casting of the historical Nazis is spot on; Goering and Goebbels in particular look just right. And allowing Hitler to converse with a pair of Chicagoan time tourists by having them both speak fluent Czech presents no problems; in my world, Daleks and Zygons and the Sevateem all spoke English.

I must have been so swept away in 1982 by the weirdness and audacity of the premise that I failed to pick up on some fairly contrived bits of plot, such as the anti-ageing pills that a Nazi officer takes to remain pretty much unchanged 50 years after the war. And it’s never properly explained why Jan, the sweet, clumsy scientist, immediately assumes the identity of his amoral brother Karel; there are elements of resentment and jealousy at work (Jan carries a torch for at least one of Karel’s several girlfriends) but the switch seems to be driven by the need to set up a situation rather than arising naturally from the action. The relationship between the two brothers is evidently dysfunctional, but would Jan really be so blasé about Karel’s sudden demise? Other incongruities don’t even have a reason for existing: why, for instance, would a Nazi have a black secretary? And if you’re going to set up a bit of slapstick by the contrivance of having a trampoline on a roof, at least make the ensuing carnage somehow worth the effort.

What does feel uncomfortable – something that would have passed me by 30 years ago – is the political subtext. In this version of the 90s, the Berlin Wall didn’t come down and, we assume, Czechoslovakia never split in two; the last we see of the pro-Hitler plotters, they are being driven away, presumably left to the tender mercies of the Communist authorities. The film was made less than a decade after Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Prague; are we to infer that a plot to hand the H-bomb to Stalin in 1944 would have been perfectly OK? And the final twist, which I won’t give away, almost steps over the line between black humour and pragmatic callousness. Only the excellent, understated performance by Petr Kostka (as Jan/Karel) stops things from getting too icky.

What still works, after the sometimes clunky exposition of the first half, is the insane confusion of the conclusion, with characters returning from the 1940s to a time just before they left and thus populating Prague with several versions of themselves. Again, I was already attuned to temporal paradoxes and multiple realities but Polák pushes the idea far further than I’d ever imagined possible, while still keeping things under control; it’s always clear to the viewer which model of each character is which.

Beyond the merits of the film itself though, there’s the whole issue of how we see films now. Sure, Polák’s work is far more available to people who might want to see it, anywhere in the world, whenever they want, whether or not there’s football going on elsewhere. But according to the counter on the video site, fewer than 1,500 people have taken advantage of such an opportunity; whereas back in January, 1982, several hundred thousand did so, even though they were forced to do it at a time when the BBC2 schedulers demanded. And if I hadn’t seen it 30 years ago, I probably wouldn’t have done it again this time. And this time, I can’t go into school on Monday morning and say “Bloody hell, did you see that bizarre film with the Nazis and the green faces?” in the reasonable expectation that maybe two or three people might have decided not to watch the football.

(What he really means is, he couldn’t be bothered to write anything)

...so anyway, there I was, debating whether to write something in response to this article about SEO content farms or maybe this one by Michael Chabon about Finnegans Wake, or possibly even bring the two together. (If an infinite number of monkeys all with James Joyce masks spent a thousand years typing and then put the results up on Blogger in what position would the post appear on Google if another monkey – this one in a Kim Kardashian mask, perhaps – searched for “bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk”?)

But then I saw these fabulous renditions of movies as Ottoman artworks by Murat Palta

and these wonderful photos of Hollywood stars by the centenarian Editta Sherman

and I got to thinking that words are a bit overrated really, aren’t they?