Going underground

Richard Estes, The L Train, 2009

From my article about advertising on the MTA for Craig Raine's Arete magazine:—

'Up above, the surface dwellers are sipping designer vodka by the pool, looking out over a sea of razor-flat abs. Down below, the most fervently expressed wish is for a face that does not look like a pizza. If the advertising above-ground is the city’s super-ego writ large, the advertising you find on the New York city subway is something like its subconscious: knotted with frets and fevers, the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Do you have alcoholism? Too many chins? Bed bugs? Do you need a personal injury lawyer? Night school? A chemical peel? Not that advertising on the subway is without aspiration, necessarily. As on the London Underground — or, for that matter, the dystopian futures shown in the films Blade Runner (1982) and Brazil (1985) — it boasts its fair share of ads for beach getaways and booze, there being nothing quite like being trapped in a 42-tonne steel coffin with 188 of your fellow New Yorkers to sharpen one’s taste for escape. “The other 9 to 5”, runs one vodka advert, offering a grimly comic choice of rat races: round-the clock work or round-the-clock obliteration. You choose. 

This is exactly why I love the subway, the natural mode of transport for daydreamers, poets, escapologists, fugitives from justice and fantasists of all stripes. On the street, you walk through the city protected by a force field of potential litigation, and driving by car or taxi is much like high-speed luging. I spent my first few years in the city nervously fondling the taxi ID numbers written in braille on the back of the driver’s seat, wondering what impression it would leave on my forehead in the event of a crash and whether it would count as written evidence. The subway pushes you into close and unfamiliar proximity with the human beings you actually happen to share the city with, and the very unpleasantness of the experience offers an on-the-spot lesson in tolerance. “A Million New Yorkers Are Good Without God,” states an advert paid for by a private donor last year. “Are You?” Actually, no, I’m not: not with my fellow man’s armpit just a few inches from my left nostril. If this is all there is to life, I’m getting off at the next stop. 

The MTA is the last place you’d want to advertise atheism. On the contrary, the urge towards transcendence is acute, as evidenced by the strain of metaphysical yearning to some of the ads. One of my favorites is for something called the School of Practical Philosophy, which offers a 10-session, $90 introductory trot through such time-tested truisms as “Become aware of where you are right now,” and “Feel your feet on the ground” and “Watch the breath as it enters and leaves the body. Now be aware of hearing… Taste. Smell.” None of this is advisable on the subway, you understand, and likely to lead to an immediate loss of consciousness, but the ads made a bold pitch nonetheless: “THIS POSTER CAN MAKE YOU HAPPIER THAN ANY OTHER ON THE SUBWAY”. That’s how the poster read when I first arrived in the city, anyway. A year or two later, I looked up and found that the more achievable promise of “SUSTAINABLE HAPPINESS” had been put in its place. If only Thomas Jefferson had followed a similar amendment when drafting the declaration of independence, I thought, and America might have turned out to be a very different kind of place.

When the New Young Americans are British

From my first film column for Intelligent Life, about British stars playing American:—

'Today’s young British stars are different creatures. Gym-toned, buff, flanked by their super agent and accent coach, they aspire to ambidextrous, trans-Atlantic careers — more American than the Americans. When Christian Bale loosed a torrent of expletives on the set of Terminator: Salvation after a director of photography walked into shot, the greater shock for Americans was not his language, but the accent it was delivered in:  “Christian Bale is British???” spluttered one blogger. After playing an English-rose-in-bloom in An Education, Carey Mulligan couldn’t pluck her own petals fast enough, first in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, then Nicolas Winding Refn’s ultra-violent thriller Drive, and then Steve McQueen’s numb sex-addiction drama Shame — a record-breaking trip to the dark side, achieving in two years what Helena Bonham Carter managed only after two decades of patient struggle. 

Partly, it’s a generational shift — Mulligan and Garfield are the children of globalization, the internet, Labor’s ‘rebranded’ Britain. Mulligan was born in 1985, the same year A Room With A View was released, the flagship of the Merchant Ivory fleet. So was Kiera Knightley.  Garfield and Henry Cavill were born two years earlier in 1983. The girls were five and the boys were seven when Tim Burton’s Batman all but blotted out the moon. The big British hits of their youth were Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and Trainspotting (1996), an odd couple on the face of it, but both rooted in a particular world — West London and Glasgow, respectively — and also possessed of the double-jointed marketing savvy to view those worlds from the outside, thus playing like gangbusters for foreign audiences. 

Slumdog Millionaire pulled off much the same trick — a self-conscious exoticism that exactly catches the flavor of national identity in the globalized, internet age. Caught in the moon-glow of YouTube, the Disney channel and The X Factor, kids dream the same dreams now, from Brixton to Bangladesh. The great question driving the internet, above all others, is “Who are you?”  — or, as the first line of Hamlet has it, “who’s there?” The web has made Hamlets of us all, soliloquizing into the ether, fishing for contact, both newly conscious of our national identity and quick to discard it if we don’t find it working for us — if it doesn’t ‘play.’ “I'm not American and I'm not French, actually,” Michel Haznavicious told the DGA when he accepted his directing award for The Artist last year. “I'm a filmmaker.” A canny bit of awards-season politics, perhaps, in which one feels the hand of the maestro himself, Harvey Weinstein. But a revealing glimpse into the multi-colored fuse-box that is the soul of the 21^st-century entertainer. Just don’t tell Superman. I think the guy is an illegal alien.' 

REVIEW: The Five Year Engagement

So we knew about Jason's Segal's slobby, slightly self-hating, love-handled charms. And we obviously knew about Emily Blunt's mixture of gameness and dry wit (an unbeatable combination). For me, the real revelation in The Five Year Engagement was Alison Brie, fresh from playing Pete's hoity-toity wife in Mad Men and here acquitting herself of an impeccable sloan-with-a-phone English accent, all the while bringing off some stealthy and not so stealthy scene theft involving silly voices; early on during a wedding speech, delivered basso profundo to stave off tears, and later on, as Elmo to Blunt's cookie monster during an in-depth and very serious discussion of emotional commitment. Now, Blunt's cookie monster is good, if a little half-throated, but Brie's Elmo is a gurgling, unselfconscious delight: I wanted all such conversations on this topic, in every romantic comedy made forthwith, delivered in the same saucer-eyed squawk. C+

The year Hollywood changed hands

'The Summer movie season officially starts in the U.S. when The Avengers opens on May 4th. Overseas, though, the season has actually already gotten underway with Battleship's foreign rollout. This extended schedule is indicative of the growing importance of the overseas market to Hollywood's bottom line—last year, international grosses accounted for 69 percent of overall sales, compared with 66 percent in 2010 and 64 percent in 2009. Nearly all big-budget movies this Summer are designed with the intention that they will earn at least 60 percent of their revenue in foreign territories, with the biggest grosses likely coming from developing countries China and Russia. As usual, sequels like The Dark Knight Risesand Ice Age: Continental Drift should fare the best, though some original movies like Brave, Snow White and the Huntsman and Prometheus will likely make their mark as well.'

'Thanks to strong openings in China and Russia,Battleship took the top spot at the overseas box office away from Titanic 3D this weekend.' — Box Office Mojo

This seems to me one of the significant trends capturing Hollywood in its undertow. It started, arguably, with Jurassic Park in 1992, the first year in Hollywood's history in which overseas earnings out-stripped domestic. Ironically, the French took the opportunity to man the Bastille barricades and complain loudly about American "cultural imperialism," seeing in Spielberg's dinosaur thriller a replay of D-Day, only this time with Dinos. Well, Jurassic Park was a Higgins boat alright. But it wasn't aimed outward. It was aimed inward. The Invasion was America's. These days, the studios are owned by international conglomerates. It is the foreign markets which determine which films get made: international grosses now account for 69 percent of overall sales. America now twiddles its thumbs, waiting to find out from China and Russia which of its movies are hits. 
From The Economist:—  

Mr Cameron arrived in Beijing on Saturday and will soon be attending a screening of “Titanic 3D” at the Beijing International Film Festival (the re-release opened earlier this month to staggering sales in China). But his most important business will be conducted in private meetings, including with state-owned China Film Group. Speaking in an interview on Sunday, he said a priority of this trip was to explore a co-production deal with the Chinese firm on “Avatar 2” and “Avatar 3”. Mr Cameron says he would need to be satisfied in advance that his planned films would meet the approval of censors. If that key condition can be met, he is keen on the potential payoff. “There are economic advantages,” as he puts it. Mr Cameron’s meetings this week come shortly after the news that “Iron Man 3”, starring Robert Downey junior, will be a Chinese co-production. The gravitational pull of the Chinese movie market, nonexistent less than a generation ago, is now an undeniable force, sucking in all Hollywood blockbusters (and lesser projects) that venture within its event horizon. Hollywood studios, independent producers and directors regularly cycle through Beijing in search of partnerships with Chinese production houses—often seeking money to finance their movies, as well as access to a suddenly lucrative market.  

This year China will surpass Japan as the world’s second-largest movie market, after America. Chinese box-office takings totalled 13 billion yuan ($2.06 billion) in 2011, an increase of 30% from 2010, which in turn had been more than 60% higher than in 2009. The number of movie screens has doubled in five years to more than 10,000 (and is projected to reach 15,000 in speedy fashion), and the new screens are mostly digital and 3D-capable. Meanwhile America’s market is stagnating. Takings in North America (America and Canada combined) declined by 4% in 2011, to $10.2 billion. Mr Cameron suggests that by the time “Avatar 3” is released later this decade, China may well rival America as the top movie market.  

The 2012 film I am most curious to see

From Ang Lee's forthcoming Life of Pi, the 2012 film I am most curious to see — John Hillcoat's Lawless, Jacques Audiard's Rust and Bone, Michael Haneke's Amore and Steven Spielberg's Lincoln following up quickly behind.

Sasha Frere Jones on Kraftwerk

'Early reactions to Kraftwerk were often hostile, and sometimes verged on xenophobic. In an interview published in Creem, in 1975, the critic Lester Bangs asked the members of Kraftwerk if their machines were “the final solution” for pop music. “No, not the solution. The next step,” Hütter responded, and he was right. Pop’s non-narrative phrases, glittering, brief melodies, and reliance on technology can be traced directly to Kraftwerk’s concept of Mensch-Maschine, or “man-machine,” which was not just the name of the band’s seventh album but also a guiding principle. The sound is rooted in the interaction between computers and people—which, for many of us, is what now fills our waking hours. Kraftwerk’s melding of machines and everyday life is far from eugenic, though; it’s remarkably gentle, even a bit melancholy. The bicycles and cars and computers and radios and calculators that inhabit their albums are a friendly lot. When Bangs tried to provoke the band by citing William Burroughs’s assertion that one could start a riot with two tape recorders, Schneider responded, “A person doing experimental music must be responsible for the results of the experiments. They could be very dangerous emotionally.”' — Sasha Frere Jones on Kraftwerk

Don't let the 'pre-sold' suck your soul

"If anything, the massive success of The Hunger Games is a confirmation of a kind of cultural vapidity or failure. It says "look how malnourished and under-developed we are...look at the spiritual junk food we're eating!" — Jeff Wells   

I feel Jeffrey's pain — the wild success of bad films does test your faith in your fellow man, particularly if you are a populist like me who believes there is no such thing as the lowest common denominator, and that on the contrary, what we have in common is the highest, not the lowest thing about us.  But his despair is quite unnecessary. Just penalize the pre-sold*, and the box office quits its resemblance to the moronic inferno and once again becomes a place of order, harmony and perfectly legitimate hits. The biggest blockbuster of 2010? Inception. Of 2011? The Help and Bridesdmaids. This year so far? The Vow, Safe House and John Carter. There may be films in there you don't like, but none whose success is as mystifying as The Hunger Games is to some. The people have not lost their minds. The movies will not suck your soul. The pre-sold will.


* A refresher: the 'pre-sold' is that quality,  much beloved by movie executives, and shared by sequels, tween-bestseller-/comic book adaptations, that guarantees an audience before a single bum has touched a seat ("The highly anticipated big-screen adaptation of Suzanne Collins' bestselling novel has sold out nearly 2,000 screens in its pre-sale, Fandango announced on Tuesday"). It is what differentiates the faux-popularity of today's mega-blockbusters from the popularity of films made 40 years ago (The Godfather), or even 20 years ago (Pretty Woman). It is populism's circuit-jammer — it's super PAC. 

Kraftwerk at MOMA

Imitating the mockingbird

'Which of these three events, all in the last week, most clearly signalled that the general Election is underway? A) Mitt Romney’s decision, on Tuesday, to pool resources with the RNC. B) Obama’s decision to call out his rival by name for the first time when addressing the Newspaper Association of America on Tuesday. Or C) The president’s brief televised introduction of the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird on the USA Network channel on Saturday night. 

The answer, as any seasoned Politico will tell you, is C).  A) is just economics and B) is forgotten within a news cycle. But no election is complete without movie endorsements. The election of 2008, in the end, boiled down to a battle of the Brandos: on the one hand, Marlon Brando making us an offer we couldn’t refuse in The Godfather (Obama’s favorite film), versus Marlon Brando in Viva Zapata! (John McCain’s favorite film) making us an offer you couldn’t quite understand, in a thick Mexican accent. Nothing told you more about the way the election was going than that face-off between the stealthy and the florid.

Obama’s choice of the Harper Lee classic was a deft, multi-valenced piece of branding-by-association. After weeks of the networks squeezing the Trayvon Martin case for the last drop of controversy, the president aligned himself with a much-loved classic whose message on race comes wrapped in a sweet nostalgia for small-town values. Pivoting towards the election, it retrenched Obama’s status as the defender of the American mainstream, evoking a blissful, pre-Palin era when “small town” and “liberalism” could be spoken in the same sentence, and no problem seemed too big that it couldn’t be solved by an afternoon of somber, sun-dappled reflection by decent, reasonable men in horn rims and seersucker suits.  

 “He is the protagonist for middle American aspiration, pathfinder to the straight and narrow and able to suggest a false ease and gloss that go with probity,” as critic David Thompson has put it. He was writing about Gregory Peck but he could equally well be talking about Obama, who is cut from exactly the same liberal oak as Peck’s Atticus Finch. “If you just learn a single trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks,” Atticus tells his daughter Scout. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view - until you climb into his skin and walk around in it”. It’s pure Obama — the unrufflable paterfamilias and empath-in-chief, with his beer summits and no-drama managerial style — right down to his favored use of the word “folks”.  

Every president also “plays” the president.  With his looks, wit, style and beautiful wife, Kennedy played him as a Bond-era heart-throb, channelling what Norman Mailer called the "subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely romantic desires".  With his bluff self-deprecation and tough-guy one-liners ("They can run but they can’t hide”) Reagan played him as a reluctant High-Noon-era gunslinger, a model aped by every Republican president since, from George Bush (“Hasta la vista, baby.") to George Bush Jr, pantomiming Top Gun aboard the  USS Abraham Lincoln in a S-3B Viking jet.

Obama has proven a judicious, if cautious, custodian of his own “brand”, his election night scored with the soundtrack of the Denzel Washington football movie, Remember the Titans, his early days in office playing out as a Dave-like comedy about an outsider-come-to-Washington, complete with gee-whiz riffs on  presidential helicopters and body guard detail. As the drama of the campaign segued into the grind of governance and Republican obstructionism, Obama has seemed at times more like a storyteller with writer’s block — jammed by the dull clay of his material. But elections always favor the incumbent for narrative, as well as political reasons. Simply put: Americans may not be ready to see this story end just yet. And everybody loves a sequel.'  

— my post for The Guardian

REVIEW: Titanic 3D (dir. Cameron)

I'm sure it's the best conversion to date, but it's still a conversion, which means that the action is segregated into a series of planes, as in a diorama, while the actors remain stubbornly and defiantly in 2D. The only places it worked, I thought, were the shots at the prow and stern of the boat — Rose looking down into the churning water, Jack doing his king-of-the-world routine, the upended stern in the finale. All nicely vertiginous, but  the over-the shoulder shots now make it look as if the conversations are taking place across a tennis court. It actively dispels the intimacy Cameron fought so hard to achieve. I still love his film, while wishing its detractors happy, contented lives, shorn of all cornball sentiment and sappy dialogue (what do they do when someone tells them "I love you?" Send it back for a rewrite?). I love Di Caprio in it, so beautiful, long and lean you wonder he doesn't get ushered onto the lifeboats with all the women and children.  I love Rose once she gets her hair wet (not so much before, with her ringleted hair and awful make-up), and most of all the sight of her wading through jade-clored water, indomitably, with an axe. I even like Billy Zane, delivering his lines like a villain waxing his mustache. Also, the shot of those massive pistons below decks, pumping in a row, like a bunch of terminators doing bench-presses. All shots of the boat at night. That eerie moment of calm, right after the collision, when everyone thinks they've gotten away with it ("that was a close shave"). I just preferred it all in 2D, thank you, although I appreciate the effort. B+

Eleven rules for box-office appeal

In 1941, a year after his movie, The Great McGinty, won the first ever Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, celebrated screenwriter/director and "father of the screwball comedy," Preston Sturges, drew up the following "eleven rules for box-office appeal."

A pretty girl is better than an ugly one.
A leg is better than an arm.
A bedroom is better than a living room.
An arrival is better than a departure.
A birth is better than a death.
A chase is better than a chat.
A dog is better than a landscape.
A kitten is better than a dog.
A baby is better than a kitten.
A kiss is better than a baby.
A pratfall is better than anything.

Summer movie screengrab 2012: Actors

Bruce Willis in Moonrise Kingdom; Tom Cruise in Rock of Ages; Andrew Garfield in The Amazing Spiderman; Jeremy Renner in The Bourne Legacy; Leonardo di Caprio in Titanic (3D).

Once Upon a Time in America

How American is the American film industry? Blockbusters like Avatar scoop up 70% of their revenue overseas, these days. Most young directors groom their sensibilities online, in hyper-space, in bullet-time.  Even the alt-auteurs like Aronofsky and Fincher are headcases, in the best sense of the word, furnishing  Brueghelian innerscapes that feel only tangentially tethered to identifiable quadrants on the map. Tarantino long ago abandoned Los Angeles to jet off into a pulp movie-verse of the his own imagining, while  Wes Anderson jet-sets around Paris, India and the Pacific rim, before stopping off for tea with the Dahls. The task of national historian has fallen to HBO. Scorsese's connection to the streets is fully excavated. Nobody will give Spike Lee any money to make a movie. Woody Allen long ago left New York to send pretty postcards from Paris, Rome.  Michael Mann can be the Homer of urban Kevlar-vested America, when he puts his mind to it in. James Gray is the Dostoevsky of Brighton Beach — Neil Simon minus the mawk.  Alexander Payne and Jason Reitman takes aerie snap shots of middle-America from the mile-high-club. Amongst Hollywood's A-List, it is the Coens, of all people, show the most consistent fascination with the country in which they were sired, pulling together a patchwork quilt covering  New York in the 1950s (The Hudsucker Proxy), Los Angeles in the 1940s (Barton Fink), Mississippi in the 1930s (Oh Brother Where Art Thou?) and 1990s (The Ladykillers), Texas in the 1980s (Blood Simple) make that twice (No Country For Old Men), Minnesota in the 1960s (A Serious Man) and 1990s (Fargo), Arkansas in the 1880s (True Grit). Their latest, Inside Lewellyn Davies, sets down in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early sixties. I may be looking forward to this film more than Wes Anderon's Moonrise Kingdom and Tarantino's Django Unchained, if for only this reason. American filmmakers' greatest resource — America herself — may get a little attention. 

On my iPod: March 24th 2012

Rizzle Kicks - When I Was A Youngster from TobyLoc on Vimeo.

1. Some Nights — Fun.
2. Pull of the Eye — Donkeyboy
3. Holland — Cold Specks
4. When I Was A Youngster — Rizzle Kicks
5. No Way Down — the Shins
6. Garden — Miike Snow
7. Silent Song — Daniel Rossen
8. Out Of The Game — Rufus Wainwright
9. Myth — Beach House
10. Into Giants — Patrick Wilson

A quarter of the way through 2012 and my favorite albums are, thus far: Fun's Some Nights,  The Shin's Port of Morrow, and Kathleen Edwards' Voyageur. Best film: The Grey. Best novel: Billy Lynn's Long Half-Time Walk by Ben Fountain. If only all criticism were this brief. Leavis was a windbag.

They're going to put me in the movies

 'In 1968, while meditating with the Maharishi in India, John Lennon was seized by a great idea. The Beatles had been looking for a third film with which to follow up the success of A Hard Day’s Night and Help!. How about an adaptation of J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings? McCartney could play the hero Frodo, Ringo his devoted sidekick Sam, George Harrison would make a great Gandalf and who else for the grasping Gollum but Lennon himself? Hadn’t he already warned against the siren pull of all-powerful rings (“I'll buy you a diamond ring my friend / If it makes you feel all right”) in Can’t Buy Me Love? Accounts differ as to what happened to the project. According to director Peter Jackson, who brought his own version of The Lord of the Rings to the screen in 2001, it was J R R Tolkien who nixed the idea. According to Apple film chief Dennis O’Dell, McCartney and Lennon approached Stanley Kubrick to direct the film, having lunch with the director at EMI studios, where he told them the book was “unfilmable”. The Beatles turned instead to making Magical Mystery Tour, pilfering some left-over cloud footage from Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove for a sequence depicting an acid trip. 

It’s hard to imagine Buddy Holly or Elvis taking a meeting with Stanley Kubrick to discuss film projects. Pop acts had broken into the movies before, but The Beatles were the first to establish the idea of a multi-platform ‘brand’ which is still the Holy Grail of today’s entertainment industry. The Beatles were good at the movies for the same reason they were good at being Beatles: they were each gifted collaborators, their four-way synergy an echo of the rough, collaborative magic that powers the film business. If anyone was going to get the movies it was going to be the band with two lead singers, three song-writers and a drummer who was also a star. 

Of the five films the band made together, A Hard Day’s Night (1964) is definitely the jewel in the crown — “the Citizen Kane of jukebox movies” in the words of critic Andrew Sarris, and certainly the only rock musical with an Oscar-nominated script. Writer Alun Owen spent a day with the Beatles in Dublin in 1963, when their touring schedule was at its most chaotic, catching perfectly the mix of sarcasm, wordplay and absurdism with which the Beatles twitted their fame: “How did you find America?” “Just turn left at Greenland.” The band would experiment with surrealism throughout their film career, from the Dadaist cut-up of Magical Mystery Tour to the child-like vers libre of Yellow Submarine, but arguably their instincts for the absurd were at their sharpest when recording the day-to-day existence of being a Beatle, Dick Lester’s scuffed black-and-white photography capturing a Beatles-eye view of Beatlesmania which threw the conventions of the rock musical up in the air and made a dash for it — into the future, to MTV, and the faux-documentary aesthetic of reality TV. 

Help! (1965) cost twice as much — “like ordering up your holidays” said McCartney of the Bond-like fly-past of exotic locations — but felt out-of kilter with the band’s mood, the title track a howl of anguish from an increasingly out-of-it Lennon: “I was fat and depressed and crying out for help.” Magical Mystery Tour (1967) remains “the only film to have been written, financed, produced and directed by a pop group,” writes Bob Neaverson in The Beatles Movies, and that dearth of collaborators — and, as it turned out, appreciative audiences — tells you all you need to know about the film, a slipshod psychedelic collage which seemed intent on effecting a divorce between the Beatles and their public. Interestingly, it was Yellow Submarine (1968), a project which the group shunned initially as a cash-in for kids, that retapped the Beatles unique blend of innocence and subversion — which restored their ‘brand’. Even though the band were dubbed by actors, the film’s mash-up of Op Art exuberance and fond Edwardiana made the strongest case yet for the Beatles being the missing link in English comedy between The Goons and The Pythons. 

Monty Python’s Flying Circus began broadcasting just as the Beatles broke up. Ringo made a brief cameo in a 1972 edition of the show, which Paul McCartney used to stop recording sessions to watch; and it was ex-Python Eric Idle with whom George Harrison teamed to produce Time Bandits, The Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life, the two men’s fond, sparky collaboration captured in the recent Martin Scorsese documentary about Harrison, Living in the Material World. 

Not all post-Beatles collaborations were so blessed. Dogs still bark at Ringo Starr’s appearance alongside Harry Nilsson in the 1974 horror spoof Son of Dracula, and they curl up whimpering in the corner when shown VHS copies of 1984’s Give My Regards to Broad Street Paul McCartney’s portrait of the artist as groovy billionaire. The Beatles seem to have been unusually dependent on finding collaborators — Eric Idle, Dick Lester — who reignited something of the old four-way electricity they enjoyed together. There is no sweeter moment in the Beatles oeuvre than the scene in A Hard Day’s Night where the band enjoy a quiet game of Euchre in the baggage car while singing ‘I Should Have Known Better.’ They don’t break into song, in the usual, slightly awkward Let’s-put-the-show-on-here segues of jukebox movies. They just play cards, not even bothering to lip-sync, as if the song were just a daydream. And then, after a few bars, they gently slip into it, the way you slip into a pair of old slippers, or conversation with a friend.' 

— my piece about The Beatles on film for Newsweek

SPRING 2012 SCREENGRAB: Actresses

From Top: Marion Cotillard in Rust And Bone; Rachel Weisz in The Deep Blue Sea; Anne Hathaway in The Dark Knight Rises; Emily Blunt in Salmon Fishing In the Yemen; Eva Green in Dark Shadows; Analeigh Tipton in Damsels in Distress; Emma Stone in The Amazing Spiderman.

The Science of Celebrity Break-ups

"The equation’s variables included the relative fame of the husband and wife, their ages, the length of their courtship, their marital history, and the sex-symbol factor (determined by looking at the woman’s first five Google hits and counting how many show her in skimpy attire, or no attire)... The 2006 equation correctly predicted doom for Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher; Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock; and Britney Spears and Kevin Federline. It also forecast that Will Smith and Jada Pinkett would probably not make it to their 15th anniversary, in December 2012; so far, they’re still married, but gossip columns are rife with reports of a pending split... It turns out that overall fame doesn’t matter as much as the flavor of the fame. It’s tabloid fame that dooms you. Sure, Katie Holmes had about 160 Enquirer hits, but she had more than twice as many NYT hits. A high NYT/ENQ ratio also explains why Chelsea Clinton and Kate Middleton have better chances than the Kardashian sisters... Besides the wife’s tabloid fame, the crucial ones are the spouses’ combined age (younger couples divorce sooner), the length of the courtship (quicker to wed, quicker to split), and the sex-symbol factor (defined formally as the number of Google hits showing the wife “in clothing designed to elicit libidinous intent”).” — New York Times

INTERVIEW: Werner Herzog

“Do not got too far,” says Werner Herzog on the phone when I ask for directions to his house. “If you end up in Coldwater Canyon you will have gone too far.”

“I have a GPS”

“The GPS will not help you.”

Trust Werner Herzog to make a visit to his home sound as fraught with peril as a Werner Herzog film. The first surprise is that he even has a home. Asked to nominate a point on the map most likely to contain the itinerant German filmmaker, most fans of his films might say something like “halfway up the Amazon, dodging spears.” Or “an Igloo.” In fact, his house is located on a small, steep, winding road off Laurel Canyon, in the wildest and most jungle-like part of the Hollywood Hills, wreathed in foliage, fragrant with honeysuckle, home only to the most reclusive species of rock-star and raccoon. “That figures,” says a friend familiar with his work when I tell them where I am going.

Herzog is often to be found trekking in the trails off Mulholland Drive, where crystal clear creeks snake through the undergrowth, unseen from the road, although his taste for walking everywhere on foot raises eyebrows in downtown Beverley Hills or Bel Air, where you don’t go to the grocery store unless borne aloft by a Humvee. “I have been asked by police. ‘What are you doing?’” he says. “’Just walking.’ They will ask a few questions then drive ahead of me just a few hundred yards I had to pass hem, just to let me know they are watching me.”

He seems to relish the vague air of dispreputability this lends him. The only auteur of world cinema who might conceivably be picked up for vagrancy, he spends little time at home. “I am always somewhere else,” he explains. “I live on the sets of my films.” Indeed, his living room looks more like the living room of an explorer than a film director, filled with artefacts and archeological curios from his shoots. Propped up against the mantlepiece are a set of spears from the long-lost Amondauas tribe of Brazil, documented in his short film, Ten Thousand Years Older. On the coffee table, a book about Ancient Greek hieroglyphs for a lecture he is giving at the New York Public library. Curled up in front of the bookshelves is a long-haired and contented-looking black-and-white cat.

“I never really planned to have a cat but my wife rescued that one from a coyote,” says Herzog casually while fixing me a cup of coffee in the kitchen. “The coyote almost ate him.”

It is traditional among Herzog’s interviewers to note the disconnect between the man and the filmmaking legend — you come expecting cinema’s answer to the wild man of Borneo, who threatened to have actor Klaus Kinski shot and who once hypnotized his entire cast to shoot a movie — and you get a tall, gentle presence, now 69, with soft, pillowy bags beneath eyes which nevertheless retain a kindly sparkle. He one of those soft German accents you might expect to hear on a Viennese psychiatrist. After the Paris premiere of Harmony Korine’s 1999 film Julien Donkey Boy, in which Herzog played a tyrannical, abusive father, his third wife Lena got frantic calls from a Parisien friend of hers, asking “‘is this man really your husband? We are only one flight away, we can give you shelter.’” Herzog, chortles with laughter at the memory. “Which means I was convincing. My wife firmly believes that I am a fluffy husband.”

‘Fluffy’ might be pushing it. Beneath the soothing bedside manner lurks mordancy, and both cloak an unusual bluntness, which he used to great effect while interviewing prisoners on Death Row for his new documentary Into The Abyss. It is no coincidence that he took up smoking again while editing the film which he calls “the most intense of all my films so far.” Meeting with one prisoner, Michael Kelly, a buck-toothed 29-year-old eight days away from being executed for a triple homicide, Herzog wore a suit to the interview, “out of respect” but told him, “It does not necessarily mean that I have to like you.” For a few seconds, Kelly was too stunned to respond.

“I knew the film might be over after 120 seconds,” recalls Herzog, “You have to take that risk. But he really liked it and it turned towards me because he saw I was a straight shooter. Everyone is phony on Death Row — the attorneys, the family, they are always phony — and they see from miles away if someone is talking straight to them.” More than just an indictment of capital punishment, Into the Abyss explores a despoiled Texan landscape of trailer parks, guns and bar-room sociopathy, the interviews warmed by small, unexpected inlets of sympathy from Herzog, and buoyed by his gift for oddball questions. Very few interviewers, it’s safe to say, would think to interrupt a Disneyesque tribute to God’s Creation from a prison chaplain with the question, “Tell me about an encounter with a squirrel.” Still less, move the man to tears.

“I knew I had to break him open,” explains Herzog. “And it does. You see a journalist wouldn’t have that in his or her arsenal. You have to know the heart of men. More than anything I’m trying to look very deep into our human condition, into the deep recesses of our soul. I’m curious about us, about myself, on the other side of this bulletproof glass. This is why quite often I would ask them: how would you conduct your life if you could step back to 1969 or 1977 when your crime spree started, and it’s very fascinating: in all cases its no family values, how they raise their children.”

As the old Nietzsche maxim has it: stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back into you. Into the Abyss could easily be title of any of Herzog’s films, with their air of cracked prophecy and moonstruck divination, their penchant for probing inaccessible landscapes and equally inaccessible souls. Herzog himself is largely absent the urge to examine the pathologies that tug him halfway across the globe. “I don’t really question myself about how or when or why,” he says of his films. “I don’t want to look at myself with too much intensity. There’s no such thing as career planning. It just comes at me. There is noise in the kitchen in the middle of the night, something is stirring and I surprise five burglars and I have to deal with them. Uninvited guests. These are the subjects of my movies, and they are coming at me swinging.”

Nonetheless, it is hard to resist the temptation to trace his comfort levels around levels of danger that would fry the nerves of the average person, back to Herzog’s experience growing up amid the rubble of post-war Germany. The day after Herzog was born in Munich in 1942, an allied bomb destroyed the house next door to the family home; they fled to a remote mountain village in Bavaria, where the young Herzog never saw any films, television, or telephones; to this day, he refuses to carry a cell phone. “We were only forced to be self-reliant very quickly,” he says. “We were forced to invent our own toys and our own games. We had to invent. And of course I was not completely settled in this village in the mountains because my family — my mother and my brother — were refugees. We were in a way outsiders.”

“My earliest memories as a child is my mother wakes me my older brother abruptly and carries us up the slope behind the house and says ‘boys, you have to see this because the city of Rosenheim is burning and Rosenheim is 35 km away but the entire horizon out there was yellow and orange and pulsing. And we knew the world out there was burning. The cities were burning. So growing up you know there was something out there. The biggest of all questions which is still haunting me is this: how is it possible that such a civilized nation as Germany with such great poetry and composers and philosopher and writers and painters, within a very few years turns into sheer barbarism. How is it possible? I still do not have a real answer. I only know the alarm signs out there. It can happen easily and it may happen to others, maybe not as radically as it happened to Germany but my sensory organs are very, very alert.”

Certainly that flight — from ruined city to arborial idyll — prefigures the journey of many of his films, all of them fraught with the suspicion that civilization is a thin mask, easily cracked to reveal the snarl of savagery beneath. They also harbor an unfakeable horse-whisperer sympathy for the marginalized, dispossessed and spiritually orphaned, from young Kaspar Hauser, released into the community after the forced isolation of his childhood in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, to Timothy Treadwell the crackpot environmentalist seeking communion with bears in Grizzly Man, to Dieter Dengler, the German pilot whose remarkable survival story in Vietnam Herzog traces back to his experience growing up as a child in bombed-out Berlin in first Little Dieter Needs to Fly and then again Rescue Dawn. Clearly the story means something to him: he shot it twice. How much Dengler’s story was smuggled autobiography?

“Only partially,” he answers. “We were both very hungry as children and we both grew up fatherless. In his case his father perished in Stalingrad. My father simply did not return from the war, until finally [my parents] divorced. So there was no father around.” Herzog’s abandonment by his father, who left the family when he was still a young child, is by far the most striking trauma of his childhood, although he doesn’t see it that way. “It was anarchy in the best sense of the word,” he wrote in Herzog in Herzog. “There were no ruling fathers around and no rules to follow. We had to invent everything from scratch.”

Herzog’s Oedipal wound matched Germany’s own. To watch the five films Herzog made with Klaus Kinski — Aguirre the Wrath of God (1972), Woyzeck (1978), Nozferatu The Vampyre (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982), Cobra Verde (1987) — is to be driven to the inescapable conclusion, reached by so many Germans of that generation, that the man in charge is out to lunch. His films occupy a fatherless universe of fervid spoliation and energetic chaos, populated by petty tyrants and false prophets, and plagued with the lingering suspicion that not only have the lunatics taken over the asylum, but the even more radical suggestion that we might all be better off that way.

“I qualify as a survivor,” says Herzog of his collaboration with Kinski, caught in all his full-throttle dementia in the 1999 documentary, My Best Fiend. “Neither was he mad or am I mad. I am clinically sane, although sometimes people who were with us believed that I was the dangerous one and he was just the barking dog. Because I was so quiet. That happened on Fitzcarraldo, when Kinski would throw his tantrums, all the native Indians, the warriors hunters — they proposed to kill him and I mean seriously. It isn’t a joke. In their culture, it is all very softly spoken never a loud word, they touch your hand very, very softly they would only whisper, they would huddle and whisper and then fall silent. One of the chiefs said to me, ‘they are not frightened of the madman who was yelling.’ They were frightened of me because I was so silent.”

Post-Kinski, Herzog’s films give the impression of an imagination in recovery, getting its puff back. He shot several operas, but didn’t direct a feature film for a decade, and while he has since returned to the fray — most recently a feverish remake of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant starring Nicolas Cage — it is with his documentaries, most notably 2005’s Grizzly Man, that he has scored his greatest successes. Herzog’s reputation as the patron saint of the dispossessed has, meanwhile, made him a hero to a younger generation of filmmakers, who sign up for tuition at his Rogue Film School, which shuns the impartation of technical prowess for ephiphanal truths (“Follow your vision. Form secretive Rogue Cells everywhere. At the same time, be not afraid of solitude.) Occasionally, he even gets a call from Hollywood.

“I don’t participate in red carpet events, parties and such, but I somehow have a very pleasant relationship with the industry. They do not need me and I do not need them either, so that makes a very good platform of contact,” says Herzog, clad in a fleece from his recent role in the forthcoming thriller One Shot. Someone despicable? “Of course. That’s what I’m good at. Apparently the production company, and the director Chris McQuarrie and the actor…. what’s his name….. the leading man who did Mission Impossible…. Tom Cruise! Yes Tom Cruise believes I am a very dangerous man.”

“I read it all the time — that I am some sort of maverick filmmaker. No. I am not a maverick. All the rest of Hollywood or the film industry worldwide — these are the mavericks. I am dead centre. Everyone else is eccentric. I occupy the centre, the centre of our time, the centre of our cultural climate, the centre of vision, the centre of storytelling in every single aspect, I know I am dead centre. When you look at the academy awards last night you know that this is rather eccentric. And then you look at me.”

"You may have a point,” I say, not sure whether the gleam of megalomania in what Herzog has just said is genuine, exaggerated for camp effect, or simply the honest truth of the way he sees it.

“Not 'may'. Do Have,” he insists. “ In capital letters. I DO HAVE a point.”

— my interview with Werner Herzog for The Daily Telegraph. Since we're on the topic, my top ten Herzog films are as follows:—

1. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
2. In The Land Of Silence and Darkness
3. Aguirre The Wrath Of God
4. Grizzly Man
5. Woyzeck
6. Fitzcarraldo
7. Little Dieter Needs To Fly
8. My Best Fiend
9. Nosferatu The Vampyre
10. Encounters at the End of the World

REVIEW: John Carter (dir. Stanton)

"Hollywood is in a tizzy over the early tracking which just came online this morning for Walt Disney Studios‘ John Carter opening March 9th. “Not good. 2 unaided, 53 aware, 27 definitely interested, 3 first choice,” a senior exec at a rival studio emails me. Another writes me, ”It just came out. Women of all ages have flat out rejected the film. The tracking for John Carter is shocking for a film that cost over $250 million. This could be the biggest writeoff of all time.” — Deadline Hollywood

Rich, strange and intermittently stirring. The strangeness comes in the antiquarian fidelity to Burroughs books, or more particularly to the fusty, 19th-century peculiarity of his imagination, with its little fillips of cruelty and absurd, teetering taxonomies — it could be an alien world as described by Darwin. The flying machines look like huge dragonflies and the Tharks are not cute, or easily anthropomorphised, and their edgy, ever-changing relationship with Carter has something of the old, mutually suspicious Imperial squint between England and its subjects. It leaves a modern audience a little off-balance. Are we supposed to like these critters? Ewoks they are not. The script could as well have been in swahili for all I understood of it — it's like the verbiage in Star Wars without Han Solo to cut through the crap — why on earth did they not have John Carter do the same? — but as the first 20 minutes of WALL-E suggested, Stanton really, truly understands landscape and how to make it sing; there are moments of great Vistavision grandeur here, with the actors reeling off gobbledy-gook with great intensity against deserts of vast eternity, all wrapped in another piece of symphonic loveliness from Michael Giacchino — the score hits a sandy sublime. Taylor Kitsch is a little hard to read — tousled, male-modellish and humorless — but Lynn Collins, who plays the bronzed, leonine princess opposite him... who knows whether Collins is a good or bad actress — she could easily be either — but she finds a husky declamatory style that is just perfect for this film. She gives the audience a reason to go back to Mars. C+

Close Encounters of the Auteurist Kind

"What’s fascinating about Spielberg’s early shorts (judging both from descriptions of them and from clips that have been posted, appropriately, on YouTube) is that they are utterly derivative of the pop culture that he had been consuming. They’re amazingly precocious genre films, made by someone who, though still a minor, could have walked onto the set of a TV series and done, at least for some shots, a creditable and even an impressive job of duplicating the old hands’ results. He wasn’t spoofing or subverting genre filmmaking; he was expressing the id-free side of what was on his mind: the movies he loved and the kinds of emotions he got from them. It’s the most impersonal sort of personal filmmaking. He was, in effect, America’s oldest young filmmaker." — Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Leave aside the rather Anton Ego-ish asymmetry of judging a 17-year-old's film "utterly derivative" the judgment also happens to be wrong. I haven't seen the entirety of Firelight but even from the short segment Brody posts certain preoccupations of the young Spielberg, both thematically and stylistically, are immediately apparent. The dawning recognition on the faces of his onlookers; the emotional progress from fear and horror to enraptured, wordless fascination; the rear-view mirror shot, which appears in every Spielberg film; the presentation of his extra terrestrial visitors as a pure light source, as bright and haloed as Milton's God, or Tinkerbell; the suburban setting, and the final landing place of the UFO, amid the toys of a playing child. It's hard to know what else Spielberg could have done, besides commissioning a five-note John Williams theme, or give an entrance to a T Rex, before someone criticized him from the opposite flank for being too self-parodically Spielbergian. Faces, music, light, toys, children: if you can't see Spielberg in that lot then you haven't been watching closely enough.

Back in the saddle again: Intelligent Life's new film critic

The Economist's award-winning Intelligent Life magazine has invited me to become their new film critic and I have gladly accepted. “I am delighted that Tom has agreed to join us,” said Intelligent Life’s editor, Tim de Lisle. “He is admired on both sides of the Atlantic as a writer with a deep love of the movies and one of the sharpest voices in arts journalism.” Readers of this blog will know that I've written — and linked to — pieces for them in the past, most recently a travel piece about New York: Being There and an article about what happens When Novelists Sober Up. I've also written career profiles of Gary Oldman, Donald Sutherland, Martin Scorsese, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Matt Damon. I urge American readers to check out this "terrific" (Tina Brown) and "fabulous" (The Daily Telegraph) magazine here.

The first great pop song of spring

My favorite Norwegian pop group, Donkeyboy, have a new album — Silver Moon — out in a couple of weeks. There will be those who think this sort of thing close to genius and those who those who think it's like chewing someone else's bubblegum. I think it's genius — effervescent and bold and perfectly produced — these guys know pop songs from the inside out. The lyrics are the usual Euro gobbledygook about sideways glances, catching fire, feeling good and being someone, but somehow it's touchingly reminiscent of that time in your early teens when catching someone's eye at the school disco felt as fraught with significance, emotional freight and epiphanal splendor as actual sex. Or as close to sex as you imagined sex to feel like, not knowing for sure since you hadn't actually done it yet. Which is quite a burden of expectation to place on catching someone's eye at the school disco — presumably why being a teenager was so exhausting. But not this song. It's a honey.