My song of the summer, no question

From Wikepedia:—

"Kiwanuka grew up in Muswell Hill, North London, the son of Ugandan parents who had escaped the Amin regime.^[4][5] He attended Fortismere School, leaving there in 2005 after completing his A-Levels.^[4] He was regarded as a very friendly and modest student with a huge circle of friends and a great appreciation for all different genres of music. He could regularly be seen in school concerts and recitals playing bass guitar and jazz guitar. He then went on to study at the School of Media, Arts and Design at the University of Westminster.^[6] Kiwanuka is a supporter of Premier League side Tottenham Hotspur."

Every word sings to me.

FALL SCREENGRAB 2012: Actors

From Top: Denzel Washington in Flight; Bill Murray in Hyde Park on Hudson; Jamie Foxx in Django Unchained; Channing Tatum in Magic Mike; Jeremy Renner in The Bourne Legacy.

On My iPod: June 6th 2012

1. Never by Orbital
2. Sunshine in Chicago by Sun Kil Moon
3. Time Bomb by Kylie Minogue
4. 1904 by The Tallest Man On Earth
5. Little Talks by Of Monsters and Men
6. Nothing Left by Girlyman
7. Sweetness in her Spark by Lightships
8. The Real Thing by Audra Mae & The Almighty Sound
9. Gone Today by Lambchop
10. Playful Pizzicato by Benjamin Britten

Woman: the other Alien in 'Alien'

My piece on Alien and the academics for Slate:—

After a marketing campaign of such ever-evolving ingenuity that it put certain alien life forms we could mention to shame, Prometheus has almost landed. Audiences are looking to Ridley’s Scott’s science-fiction thriller for answers to many questions — who or what is the space jockey? Where did we call come from? Why do all movie robots style their hair with a neat side parting like Michael Fassbender? The mystery of what we should call the damn thing, however, remains inscrutable to all but the higher species of humanoid. A sequel? It takes places before the events of the first film. A prequel? Scott and his actors have been Delphically warning us off the term. Prometheus takes place in the same “universe”, says Scott, and uses “strands of Alien’s DNA, so to speak”  — a wonderfully rich metaphor for him to float given what the Alien films have to say on the subject of reproductive rights and their usurpation. 

“The birth of the alien from Kane’s stomach plays on what Freud described as a common misunderstanding  that many children have about birth, that is, that the moth is somehow impregnated through the mouth,” determined Barbara Creed, Professor of Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne, in ‘Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: an Imaginary Abjection’ (Screen, Vol 27, 1986), just one of hundreds of academic theses spawned by Scott’s 1979 shocker and it’s sequels. Academics have always loved science fiction, of course. No film studies syllabus is complete without an invitation to panhandle alien-invasion B-movies from the fifties for a clammy projection of cold-war fears and nuclear anxieties. There was always something a little lorldy about this kind of approach to pop-artefacts, as if the little dears couldn’t tell what made their hearts pitter-pat so until the redoubtable professor arrived with his chalkboard, duster and special subtext X-ray specs. 

But the small cottage industry of analysis that has sprung up around Alien is something else again. In 1980, the highly-respected academic journal Science Fiction Studies devoted an entire issue to the first Alien — an event that may, in time, come to rank alongside Cahiers du Cinema’s All-Hitchcock issue of 1956. Since then, there has been no looking back. We’ve had Alien as feminist allegory (‘Woman: The Other Alien in Alien,’ Women Worldwalkers: New Dimensions of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 1985), Alien as mothering fable (‘Mommie Dearest: Aliens, Rosemary's Baby and Mothering” Journal of Popular Culture 1990.), Alien as abortion allegory (‘Voices of Sexual Distortion: Rape, Birth, and Self Annihilation Metaphors in the Aliens Trilogy,’ Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1995). Even Jones the cat got his own diagram, courtesy of James H Kavenagh’s essay ‘Son of a Bitch: Feminism, Humanism and Science in Alien’ (October, no 13, 1980), which sought to align the alien attack on humans with an Althusserian-Marxist takedown of humanism in general:—

“The founding term in the film is human (S)... The anti-human (-S), is, of course, the alien, and the not-human (S) is Ash, the robot. The cat, then functions in the slot of the not-anti-human (-S), an indispensable role in this drama.” 

Good to know. 

What is it about the Alien films? No other modern science fiction film has inspired this level of termite-like deconstruction save perhaps Scott’s own Blade Runner whose rain-soaked surfaces teem with postmodern theorists researching doctoral theses with titles like ‘American Exceptionalism and the Complicit Postcolonialism of Blade Runner’ and ‘Data and Dick's Deckard: Cyborg as Problematic Signifier.’ Which suggests that there is something about the rich, art-directed layer-cake of Ridley Scott productions that positively cries out for Greimasian semantic rectangles 

“It has absolutely no message,” insisted Scott of the first Alien, “it works on a very visceral level and its only point is terror, and more terror”. Of all the things you can do with the film — be frightened by it, thrilled by it, repulsed by  it — studying it seems the last thing on anybody’s mind, except of course Science Officer Ash,  secretly eyeing  up the alien for the company’s weapons division. When it comes to the burgeoning field of post-doctorate Alien study, Ash graduates summa cum lauda.  Study is all he wants to do. 

 “It’s a perfect organism, its structural perfection matched only by its hostility” he says.  

“You admire it,” says Ripley. 

“I admire its purity,” replies Ash, “a survivor, unclouded by notions of remorse, morality.” 

Hence Ripley’s fears in James Cameron’s sequel of 1986, Aliens: “Just tell me one thing, Burke. You're going out there to destroy them, right? Not to study. Not to bring back. But to wipe them out.” 

It’s one reason Alien scholars tend to be a little down on James Cameron, although they love the elevation of Ripley to post-feminist action figure —  “get away from her you bitch!” — and approve of the fact that all the white males become dead white males at a faster rate than all the the none-white males (see Greenberg, Harvey. ‘Fembo: Aliens' Intentions’). Marxists, too, have clucked with approval at the series clear-eyed take on corporate malfeasance and outer-space worker rights.  And Freudians, needless to say, have had a field day, at least with the first film, for a movie more in need of a trip to the analyst would be harder to find. 

Alien has issues. It has mommy issues. And sex issues. It has a thing for strong women (who it also likes to ogle in their undies). It’s a hot mess — a Freudian fever dream, with its crabby and post-coital atmosphere, its rebirthing imagery, its queasily gynaecological production design, it’s night-sweat of male anxiety. A “particularly horrifying confusion of the sexual-gyneacological with the gastro-intestinal” wrote James Kavenagh (‘Son of a Bitch: Feminism, Humanism and Science in Alien’) of the famous John Hurt birth scene, in which “a razor toothed phallic monster gnaws its way through his stomach into the light — a kind of science fiction phallus dentatus.” Is Scott’s alien a boy or a girl? A “phallus dentatus” one minute, Kavenagh endows it with “vaginal teeth” a few pages later.  

Thornier still is the issue of Warrant Officer Ripley’s underwear, as glimpsed in the final scene where she climbs into a space suit for her climactic show-down with the alien. For some this undoes all the film’s good work in deconstructing, destabilising and generally dissing oppressive male patriarchies. In ‘Feminism and Anxiety in Alien’ (Science Fiction Studies, vol 7, no 3, 1980) Judith Newton determined the alien to be “a potent expression of male terror at female sexuality”, found the third-act survival of the two woman and one black character  “especially promising”, but found her smile turning to a frown at the sight of Ripley stripped to her bikini pants: “not standard gear for space duty” she noted sternly. “Ripley is not only divested of coalition and reinvested with femininity, she is also reaffirmed as a Company Woman.... Though in many ways a fine and thrilling hero, [she] is robbed of radical thrust.” 

No so fast, countered Kavenagh. “I would disagree with an ideological denunciation of the film as simply another exercise in conventional sexism on the basis of the scene in which Ripley removes her uniform to appear in T-shirt and panties,” he wrote. “Such criticism would be hard-pressed to avoid repressive and self-defeating assumptions about what constitutes sexism, and irrelevant assumption about what constitutes the film and its ideological discourse.” A cunning move:  the panties weren’t sexist. The accusation that the panties were sexist was sexist. But maybe a trifle over-defensive, coming from a man 

It was left to Melbourne’s Professor Creed to broker a tentative piece between the two camps. “Much has been written about the final scene, in which Ripley undresses before the camera, on the grounds that its voyeurism undermines her role as successful heroine,” she wrote with an air of weary summary in ‘Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: an Imaginary Abjection’ Screen, Vol 27, 1986.   What if Ripley in her panties “signifies the ‘acceptable’ form and shape of woman…. The display of woman as reassuring and pleasurable sign.” It’s the system of signification, stupid!  As for the sex of the alien “the alien is the mother’s phallus,” she determined “but the alien is more than a phallus, it is also coded as a toothed vagina, the monstrous feminine as a cannibalistic mother.” Voila, thanks to another of those toothed vaginas that seem to be all the rage on college campuses these days 

(Note to self:— cancel that college lecture tour I have planned to promote my latest book, ‘If You Could See What I’ve Seen With Your Eyes’: Returning the Replicants’ Gaze in the Work of Ridley Scott. 

It remains to be seen whether Prometheus can keep up this  tradition and secure tenure for the next generation of up and coming academics. On paper things look good, starting with that title, which continues the tradition of space-ships named after literary-mythic figures (Conrad’s Nostromo in Alien, now Prometheus, of Shelley fame). The company is up to its usual tricks of post-Capitalist oppression, launching innocent souls on a scientific expedition that turns into a mad scrambles  for survival. We have more androids, space suits, fallopian-tube corridors, horrifying births and even the sight of Noomi Rapace in her underwear. An image of post-Feminist empowerment? Or just another space honey to delight the male gaze? Answers on a single-spaced sheet of paper please. No cheating. No blotting. All replicants — repeat ALL — will be forcibly ejected from the examination hall. 

AN ALIEN BIBLIOGRAPHY 

—Abbott, Joe. ‘They Came from Beyond the Center: Ideology and Political Textuality in the Radical Science Fiction Films of James Cameron’, Literature Film Quarterly 22.1 (1994).
—Bell Metereau, Rebecca. ‘Woman: The Other Alien in Alien’ in Weedman Jane B. (ed.) Women Worldwalkers: New Dimensions of Science Fiction and Fantasy (Lubbock: Texas Tech P, 1985). —Berenstein, Rhona. ‘Mommie Dearest: Aliens, Rosemary's Baby and Mothering’, Journal of Popular Culture 24.2 (1990).
—Bundtzen, Lynda K. ‘Monstrous Mother: Medusa, Grendel, and now Alien’, Film Quarterly 40.3 (1987).Chien, Joseph. ‘Containing Horror: The Alien Trilogy and the Abject’, Focus Magazine 14 (1994).
—Creed, Barbara ‘Alien and the Monstrous-Feminine’, Screen, vol. 27, No 1 (1986), also Kuhn, (ed.) Alien Zone (1990).
—Colwell, C. Carter . ‘Primitivism in the Movies of Ridley Scott: Alien and Blade Runner’ in Kerman Judith B. (ed.) Retrofitting Blade Runner (Bowling Green, OH : Popular, 1991).
—Cobb, John L. ‘Alien as an Abortion Parable’ Literature/Film Quarterly 18.3 (1990).
—Davis Genelli, Tom and Lyn ‘Alien: A Myth of Survival’, Film/Psychology Review 4, No. 2 (Summer Fall 1980).
—Elkins, Charles, (ed.) ‘Symposium on Alien’, Science Fiction Studies 7.3 (1980).
—Gabbard, Krin. ‘Aliens and the New Family Romance’, Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 8.1 (1988).
—Goodall, Jane R. ‘Aliens’, Southern Review 23.1 (1990).
—Greenberg, Harvey R. ‘Reimagining the Gargoyle: Psychoanalytic Notes on Alien’ in Penley et al, Close Encounters (1991).
—Greenberg, Harvey. ‘Fembo: Aliens' Intentions’, Journal of Popular Film and Television 15.4 (Winter 1988).
—Kavenagh, James H, ‘Feminism, Humanism and Science in Alien’, October, no 13 (1980).
—Kuhn, Annette. Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction (Verso, 1990).—Naureckas, Jim. ‘Aliens: Mother and the Teeming Hordes’, Jump Cut 32 (1987).
—Newton, Judith. ‘Feminism and Anxiety in Alien’ in ‘Symposium on Alien’, Science Fiction Studies vol 7, no 3 (198), also Kuhn (ed.) Alien Zone (1990).
—Miles, Geoff and Carol Moore. ‘Explorations, Prosthetics and Sacrifice: Phantasies of the Maternal Body in the Alien Trilogy’, CineAction! 30 (1992)
—Matheson, T. J. ‘Triumphant Technology and Minimal Man: The Technological Society, Science Fiction Films, and Ridley Scott's Alien’, Extrapolation, 1992 Fall.
—Rushing: Janice Hocker. Evolution of the New Frontier' in Alien and Aliens: Patriarchal Co-Optation of the Feminine Archetype’, Quarterly Journal of Speech 71 (1989).
—Scobie, Stephen. ‘What's the Story, Mother?: The Mourning of the Alien’, Science Fiction Studies, (Mar. 1993).
—Slattery, Dennis Patrick. Demeter Persephone and the Alien(s) Cultural Body’, New Orleans Review 19.1 (1992)
—Vaughn, Thomas. ‘Voices of Sexual Distortion: Rape, Birth, and Self Annihilation Metaphors in the Aliens Trilogy’, Quarterly Journal of Speech 81.4 (1995).

Wolcott on Hemingway & Gellhorn

'Owen’s Hemingway has nothing of Nick Adams in his harmonium. He’s on high alert every moment, a predator in pursuit of other predators, bullying and brazening his way to the center of attention, barking out epigrams and instructions (“There’s nothing to writing, Gellhorn--all you do is sit down to your typewriter and bleed”), a life-force that never lets up. He writes like he fucks and he fucks like he drinks and he drinks like he fights and he fights like he fucks, and all this ferocity do get wearisome. Sexually, Hemingway and Gellhorn get on like a house afire, literally. Their first torrid fusion occurs during a bombing raid in the Spanish Civil War, their nude bodies in D. H. Lawrence primal eros embrace lit by the flames outside the window as ash and falling plaster fall like angel fluff in benediction. Pretty tough act to top, but later we see them grab a quickie in the wardrobe room of a Cuban showgirl troupe, the camera ogling the sumptuous rears and breasts of the showgirls as they change costumes as Hemingway and Gellhorn continue doing the locomotion. When the film cuts from this furtive, tropical coupling to a closeup of a hummingbird dipping its long beak into a flower, I didn’t know whether the laugh it got from me was intended or if Kaufman had lost his mind, thought he was doing something arty.' — James Wolcott, Vanity Fair

REVIEW: Moonrise Kingdom (Anderson)

Things we liked about Moonrise Kingdom:—

— Kara Hayward, her eyeshadow, the realism of her tears, the sense of her as Margot Tenenbaum's younger sister
— the last twenty minutes, the action finale, the use of budget
— The exteriors, the overcast weather, the diffuse palette, the rain
— The name Redford, for a bad guy
— The Benjamin Britten music
— the kissing, and the electrical spark
— the Francoise Hardy track
— Bill Murray's pajamas
— the happy ending

Things we didn't like so much:—

— we were a little divided on the boy, I thought he was too young for her, Kate didn't mind
— the familiarity of the first 10 minutes (the whip-pans, the doll's house stuff, etc, when the rest of the film felt lifted by a fresher breeze)
— the affair glimpsed in summary, rather than dramatized
— the consequent dearth of Bill Murray scenes

Conclusion:—

— Better than all the recent ones
— not as good as Rushmore or Tenenbaums

B+

INTERVIEW: Harry Belafonte

My interview with Harry Belafonte for The Daily Telegraph:

'First comes the voice: low and sandy, with a rustle like old parchment, or the crackle you hear on gramophone records. “I’m at the UN,” says the voice, over my cellphone. “We’ve had an emergency meeting that’s run over. I’m very sorry. I’ll be with you in 20 minutes.” As excuses for celebrity lateness go an emergency meeting at the UN to help solve the water shortage in Africa just about passes muster — better, certainly, than “broke my heel,” or “had to fire mom”. Besides, it gives me a chance to snoop around Harry Belafonte’s office suite, located on the 14th floor of Martin Luther King Labor centre just off Broadway — political activism and theatre, Belafonte’s twin muses, fused into one address. The shelves bristle with humanitarian trophies and awards: enough cut-glass plinths, bronze obelisks, plaques and paperweights to start a small foundry. On the coffee table, a yellowing edition of the New York Times from 1969 bearing news of the moon landing. Looking through the window at the ageless ziggurats of midtown Manhattan, I half expect a string section to strike up the opening bars of ‘My Kind of Town’. 

Finally, Belafonte arrives wearing a long woolen coat over a roll-neck sweater and a svelte wrapping of old-world courtesy. “I do hope you’ll forgive me,” he says, taking my hand. He walks with a cane these days, after a stroke two years ago, but otherwise he is in impressive shape, holding himself ramrod straight, all 6 foot of him, topped off with that fabulous brown orb of a head, as provocative as only the baldest heads can be: Like Colonel Kurtz’s, or the prophet Elisha’s, it is not bald so much as bared, like knuckles, or ambition, or soul. Belafonte at 85 gives off the grave affect of an old testament prophet, with the gnarly life force of one of the trees pushing its way, slowly but inexorably, through the sidewalk below. 

“Every day for me is a chess game,” he tells me, his eyes glittering shrewdly. “another day at the board. My mother once said to me, ‘Never go to bed at night knowing there was something you could have done during the day to fight injustice’. I found many ways to beat the enemy at the point of challenge and make sure my pawn was in the right place, and if it wasn’t make sure I had a knight to back it up.” 

The first singer to sell 1 million copies of an album (Calypso in 1956), Belafonte was the first black male sex symbol on movie screens in the still-segregated fifties. He was also the first performer of any stripe to fully grasp and exploit the interface between politics and celebrity, acting as gofer between to a hesitant Kennedy and Dr King; rounding up a celebrity-studded lineup — Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Paul Newman, Tony Bennett — for 1963’s March on Washington; and persuading Sidney Poitier to accompany him on a morale-boosting mission to Greenwood, Mississippi, in the summer of 1964, arriving in dead of night to find the headlights of the Klan lighting up the airstrip. After dinner in Greenwood’s black district with a hall-full of civil rights volunteers, Belafonte belted out Day-O. Even the Klansman standing guard outside joined in. 

The knight riding to his rescue, always, was his audience. Belafonte used to keep a close eye on them, their number and enthusiasm levels, to see if the game was up, whether they had his back or not. In the 1950s it was still a lynchable offence in certain parts of America for black man to so much as look at a white woman, and there was Belafonte on TV, this tall, handsome mixed-race dreamboat, shirt open almost to the navel, singing about his girl in Kingston town in a sweet, dulcet croon: he cut through the water cannons and barricades to score a direct hit on the nation’s limbic system. “Harry was like Valentino,” raved Bob Dylan. 

“The shirt being open was a matter of convenience,” says Belafonte now. “I couldn’t afford a wardrobe. I thought that Pete Segar looked pretty good and Woody Guthrie looked pretty good, so I thought: I can afford a crisp clean shirt every night.” Seeing how women reacted to his ballads, he began to seek out film roles in which he played opposite white leading women: 1957’s Islands in the Sun, in which he played a young black politician who romances Joan Fontaine; or 1959’s The World, the Flesh and the Devil, production of which was shut down when the studio bosses saw the chemistry between Belafonte and Swedish actress Inger Stevens. He was the white man’s fear of black sexuality given devilish form. 

“It boils down to this simple fact. I’m a black man standing on a stage in front of a large white audience somewhere in middle-America. And I sing a song that emotionally touches you and it’s a song of love and you’re a woman and you’re sitting looking at me. What happens to your prejudiced sensibilities, what happens to your culture, what happens when I invade that sacred ground?” He pauses, then adds, “the sexual thing was not without its distractions. I grew up in a very dysfunctional family. I swore to myself I would never be caught in that when my turn came. When I saw the same patterns beginning to repeat themselves, I began to get out of sorts. It was a big part of what drew me into psychoanalysis.” 

The son of a Jamaican cleaning lady and a ship’s cook, Belafonte has never forgotten what it was to live four or five families squeezed into a few rooms in Harlem, the smell of Caribbean food cooking, his father drunk, yelling, beating his wife and son until his hands were bloody. His struggle with his father’s legacy has been the subterranean fight of his life, running through his own womanizing, gambling addiction and two marriages — he is now on this third, to photographer Pamela Frank — like lettering through rock. It’s no coincidence that one of his favorite film roles is his turn as a gangster in Robert Altman’s 1996 Kansas City. “I realized I could play mean,” he writes in his 2011 memoir My Song. “I just had to summon that old hard streak, the one that had pulled me out of poverty.” 

For many years that was enough, he thought. He put food on the table, and a roof over the heads of his four children, by two different marriages, while he jetted around the world to fight the good fight on behalf of his “other family,” as he puts it — the “family of man” — making up for long absences from with armloads of gifts. “I was always sure that everybody had a great birthday party, gifts and stuff, but the needs of children are infinitely greater and more sensitive to daily stuff that I didn’t pay attention to,” he says. “Now I watch my children raise their children and I see all the things they do for them that I never did for them and I understand the grievousness of it, the gravity of it.” Psychoanalysis has helped him greatly, he says, to “fill the spaces where I was transient, or delinquent, or just plain shit… I’ve tried to live a life that was not considered sexist, or womanizing and all that stuff. I don’t know how well I did but I gave it a try. I’m still working at it.” Halfway through out interview, Belafonte takes a call on his cellphone. “Hello? Fine but why are you calling? Did I sleep with you last night?” Pause. “Miss Tyson, forgive me,” he says flashing me a conspiratorial grin. “How are you? What’s up?” It is the actress Cecily Tyson. The old devil dies hard. 

There is an edge to Belafonte, even now. The last few decades have seen his transformation into a one-stop-shop humanitarian multi-tasker, picking up causes as he goes — recording We Are the World to combat African hunger, raising money for the children of Rwanda, visiting Hugo Chavez to get up the nose of the Bush administration — but I wonder if he ever misses the bad old days. Their energy, their focus. “It’s been a nightmare without them,” he says, laughing. Initially enthused by the election of Obama, he has subsequently turned into one of the president’s harshest critics. “Dr King once said that politics without morality is tyranny. I don’t see his moral centre. I can’t find his moral line. I don’t understand his passion, outside of perpetuating the system and making sure that his time at bat he didn’t default.” 

He doesn’t see any starlets at the barricades any more, either. “Where are the artists today who will step into the breach and dare to make that kind of call? Dare to show that kind of concern, display that kind of courage? They just don’t hang out quite the same way we did, the whole bunch of us. Burt Lancaster, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman. We all came from different places, but it made for a helluva game. Bono corralled everyone recently pretty well. Contribute to the red cross, help feed the hungry — these are all good things. You get to go home and say you’ve done enough. A soft game, we would call it. We were sitting here ducking bullets.” But the interview must draw to a close. Another call has come through, this time from the South African Ambassador.'

The pre-sold is for pre-suckers

Hollywood is scared, and we should be grateful. Over the weekend, “Men in Black III” grossed $55 million ($70 million if you include Monday’s holiday). That may sound like a lot of money, but “MIB 3” cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $375 million to produce and market. Which probably makes it one of the three most expensive movies in Hollywood history. And it’s not just “Men in Black.” Disney spent $275 million on “John Carter” (not counting marketing, which likely added another $100 million). The movie grossed a scandalous $72 million domestically. Warner Bros. spent $150 million on “Dark Shadows” and Universal spent $209 million on “Battleship.” Those movies have grossed $63 million and $44 million, respectively. Paramount’s low-tech Sacha Baron Cohen comedy, “The Dictator,” saw its budget balloon to a reported $100 million, and will be lucky if it breaks $50 million at the box office. (James Cameron couldn’t have spent $100 million on that movie if you made a “Brewster’s Millions”- style bet with him.) One bomb during a summer is routine. Three epic bombs would make for a very bad season. But five of them before Memorial Day? 

This kind of box office reporting is myopic in the extreme. America accounts for only 30% of the market these days. It's like basing your understanding of the box office entirely on what happens in just India. John Carter made $282 million worldwide, Dark Shadows made $173 million, Battleship $283 million, The Dictator $96 million and Men in Black III  $216, after just two weeks. Which mean that of these, only John Carter looks like it will lose money, and only by a hair. Only one of the so-called 'bombs' is anything near. 

"Now it looks like on top of all that, there’s a change in audiences: If this summer is indicative of anything, it may be that people are rebelling against transparent blockbuster economics. Make a quality movie about a property people care about — “The Avengers,” “The Hunger Games” — and audiences respond. But simply throw $200 million at the screen for explosions and robots and a warmed-over half-idea because hey, it’s summer? Tumbleweeds." — Jonathan Last, The Daily  

No, no, no, no — a thousand times no. The Avengers and The Hunger Games are examples of the blockbuster formula at its most teflon-plated and audience-proof. The teflon being the 'pre-sold' — that pernicious. mixture of marketing savvy and audience awareness that allows a studio to guarantee a certain number of bums on seats, regardless of quality. In this case: an adaptation of a publishing publishing blockbuster (The Hunger Games) and a combination of no less than four pre-existing separate franchises in one (The Avengers). Quality be damned — or if not damned, then pushed to number 2 or 3 in the queue of considerations. The Hunger Games was savaged by critics and yet stormed the box office, just like Twilight before it (they don't want to see the book adapted, so much as enacted). The Avengers outdid even it's most supine supporters expectations even though no-one would say it came close to the first Iron Man, say, in terms of quality. Why? Because audiences had decided they liked it before they saw it. The whoops started in the foyer. They were presold. 

Bearing the moral weight of a nation

"Justly or not, drones have become a provocative symbol of American power, running roughshod over national sovereignty and killing innocents. With China and Russia watching, the United States has set an international precedent for sending drones over borders to kill enemies. Mr. Blair, the former director of national intelligence, said the strike campaign was dangerously seductive. “It is the politically advantageous thing to do — low cost, no U.S. casualties, gives the appearance of toughness,” he said. “It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.”— NYT

I would be equally worried by the damage done to Americans.  Waging war has never felt as painless as it does to 21st century America. We are heavily insulated from the cost of war by media squeamishness, an all-volunteer force, heavy debt, and now drones. They offer a Lethean draught of moral absenteeism, removing us from all sense of agency with regard to actions carried out in our name. Killing a man ought to carry more weight.  

Aides say Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed in lethal counterterrorism operations. A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions. And he knows that bad strikes can tarnish America’s image and derail diplomacy.

One gets the sense from the Times report not just of the burdens of office, but something altogether unhealthier: the moral responsibility of a nation being borne by one man, rather like those Tokyo nuclear plant workers who absorbed all that toxicity to prevent meltdown. It's got to be cooking his insides. 

Ridley Scott wants what you have

"Macho? Tony's very macho. He'll still climb bloody El Capitan; I tell him he's a fucking idiot. But I prefer the tennis court. I've got a knee replacement because of the tennis." Naturally, Scott's friends are rivals, too, and it was a visit to the set of Cameron's Avatar that convinced him to shoot Prometheus in 3D. "I said to Jim: 'You've gone and raised the fucking bar again! I've got to do something about this...'." — Ridley Scott in The Independent

Ineresting. I don't think "competitive" is the word for this. I've long thought Scott to be the most covetous filmmaker working. It's an extension of his ad background, but everything in his movies is stuff you want, or which he wants, or he wants you to want. His films are eaten up with envy, be it for the rich (Someone to Watch Over Me), for cool hardware (Alien), for great architecture (Blade Runner), for rich food (Hannibal), for French real estate (A Good Year) for high shutter speed shots of dirt raining down on scenes of combat (Gladiator) and now for 3-D. He covets. 

REVIEW: Men In Black 3 (Sonnenfeld)

I liked Men in Black 3 much more than I thought I was going to, but then I did read one too many reviews, starting with Richard Brody's in The New Yorker:—

It’s surprising to see an action film that plays so jitteringly like the stretched-thin, papered-over adornment of an elaborately contrived script that it leaves its framework sticking uneasily out between the edges.

The New York Times's A O Scott asked,

Can you think of a new movie with less reason for existing than “Men in Black 3”?

then regained his good humor in time to conclude

You don’t need to study up on the previous installments or master a body of bogus fanboy lore to enjoy this movie for the breezy pop throwaway it is. Your expectations may be pleasantly low, and you may therefore be pleasantly surprised when they are exceeded.

Ah the cruelty of that kicker. Why has everyone been so begrudging? Are they trying to out-sourpuss Tommy Lee Jones? Play the grumpy cuss to the movie's Will-Smith-like indefatigability?  David Edelstein, in New York, was the best at combining both smile and frown:—

As the younger K, Josh Brolin wears a semi-squashed nose (it is age-appropriately less spread), slits his eyes, and replicates the music in Jones’s voice — that weary, quarter-tone-up-the-scale Southern sigh that makes good comebacks bluesy. They’ve cast a still-untapped major talent — Jemaine Clement, of Flight of the Conchords — as the snarling extraterrestrial villain Boris “the Animal” and concocted a fascinating character in Griffin (Michael Stuhlbarg), a disheveled entity hidden under multiple layers of clothes and driven mad by his ability (more curse than gift) to see multiple futures at once. Such agreeable personalities as Emma Thompson (as the new boss), the dishy Brit Alice Eve (as the younger Thompson), and Bill Hader (as Andy Warhol!) flit in and out. The finished product is in a different league than the whompingly terrible Men in Black II — it hits its marks. But it’s not inventive enough to overcome the overarching inertia, the palpable absence of passion. 

This is why Edelstein is the best film critic we have right now: he will always let a performance steal from him the severity of his own conclusions (that description of Brolin doing Jones is marvellous). He's a floozy for fleshtones. Because put like that the movie sounds pretty good. And it is. I don't know why everyone has their legs crossed so tight. In many ways it is the fullest expression of Barry Sonnenfeld's anarcho-absurdist view of history as cosmic-pinball-machine: the MIB series has always been the best adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy never made. I loved all the jokes to do with scale in the first film — tiny guns that blasted you off your feet, rubber balls that wrecked buildings, whole galaxies in tiny amulets and so on. It was the world's first schlemiel blockbuster, with a cosmic-neurotic's view of the universe that turned the machismo of action moviemaking on its head. (Imagine Sleeper, if Woody Allen had been press-ganged into active duty on a summer blockbuster and somehow survived). I can't remember anything that happened in II — Will Smith must have hit me with that neuraliser of his — but the third is roughly the equal of the first, thanks to a deep bench of gags, Michael Stulberg's neurotic omniscient (the closest Sonnenfeld has come to a self-portrait), and an expectedly sweet ending that hit me right between the eyes (Brody thought it "gloopy", but then that's critics for you: the one thing they consistently undervalue is emotion — even the good ones like Anthony Lane, who thought Finding Nemo a mis-step for Pixar because it was too 'sentimental'). I would take Edelstein's point further and suggest letting the performances carry you away and forget about plot completely, rather in the manner of the old Bob Hope and Bing Crosby 'Road' pictures. The only thing I really didn't like was Will Smith's paranoia about people invading his space; it didn't seem a joke to me any more, after that footage of him slapping that Russian. It could be his Oprah's-sofa moment. B

The new blog title: an explanation

So the blog has undergone a name change. Not because I'm any less taken with our president, who continues to do an excellent job, but because the innocence of the 08 election has been dissipated. When I first started blogging, I came up with the title Taking Barack to the Movies in part because my heart was touched by Obama's complaint that he couldn't get out as much as he used to; also because the election felt like the biggest movie I had ever seen  — except it was real, and developed a little bit every day, with plot twists and recurring characters. It even had its own soundtrack: first the National's 'Fake Empire', that the campaign used, then Trevor Rabin's ludicrously stirring theme from Remember The Titans, starring Denzel Washington, which played the night of the Democratic Party Convention, and again on election night, as if to prove that sometimes life can turn out as well as a Denzel Washington movie. The new title is taken from Friar Laurence's warning to the young lovers in Romeo & Juliet:— "These violent delights have violent ends / And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, / Which as they kiss consume. The sweetest honey / Is loathsome in his own deliciousness ' And in the taste confounds the appetite." Which is how I feel about a lot of things these days — summer movies, election stats, the candy from the newly-opened Sugar Shop on Baltic street. 

Far from the bright centre of the universe

One of my favorite pieces of writing about Star Wars, which celebrates its 35th anniversary today:—

'In the summer of 1977, I saw "Star Wars" twenty-one times, mostly by myself. I was thirteen—that kid alone in the ticket line, slipping past ushers who'd begun to recognize me, impatient to get to my favorite seat. All twenty-one viewings took place at the Loews Astor Plaza at Forty-fourth Street, just off Times Square. The Astor Plaza was a low, deep-stretched hall with a massive screen and state-of-the-art sound, newly enough renovated to be free of the soda-rotted carpet that was a feature of New York theatres in those days. I associated the theatre with the Death Star; getting into it always felt like an accomplishment.'

My own thoughts on seeing the film as a kid in Cornwall here:—

'... to the average 10-year-old, there was only one only thing that could possibly be cooler than the thought of owning your own spaceship. And that was the thought of owning your own spaceship for such a length of time that it had broken down on you repeatedly, reaching the same level of fond decrepitude into which people let their cars sink. “What a piece of junk!” exclaims Luke. “She may not look like much,” replies Han Solo, “but she’s got it where it counts, kid”— an exchange of dialogue that provides such a neat encapsulation of critical opinion on the film that you wonder why critics in 1977 didn’t simply put their feet up and leave the film to itself. For junk is everywhere in Star Wars. It fills its characters’ garages and homes, their spaceships and speeders. One race of creatures trades exclusively in junk: when R2 D2 and C3PO land on Tatooine, they fall into the hands of Jawas, small feral creatures who drive around the planet in a big mobile rag-and-bone shop for robots, stopping every now and again to hold a garage sale, which is how Luke comes to buy the droids — as junk. The Star Wars universe, in other words, seems to run on roughly the same principle as a New York thrift store, except with less in the way of woolly hats and more in the way of laser cannons. The only piece of new technology on display is, of course, the Death Star, which disposes of its junk in a big garbage masher, and into which Luke and his merry band naturally fall, like seeking like. That the Empire are the only people in the universe who haven’t yet heard of recycling is enough to mark them out at the bad guys. The good guys don’t buy off the peg; they tinker and solder, retrofit and weld. They are to be found in their garages, souping up their landspeeders, or up to their necks in the wiring of the Millennium Falcon. As Han Solo says proudly, “I made a few modifications to her myself.” 

Everything points back, in other words, to Lucas’s most formative experience — souping up his Fiat Bianchina in his garage — and forwards towards his defining aesthetic as a filmmaker. For Star Wars, as many critics have pointed out, is itself junk — quite literally so. It is made up from the spare parts of other movies — offcuts of western, snippets of swashbuckler, and scraps of dialogue well past their sell-by date. “You can type this shit George, but you sure as hell can’t say it,” complained Harrison Ford — the only real actor in there, who further embarrassed proceedings by giving the only real performance, in which his disdain for the goings on is palpable: the sequels would fight hard to keep him and Luke separated, as if sensing that Luke’s ascent up the Jedi pole would never withstand Ford’s powers of sarcasm. But then Star Wars was never really about good acting, any more than the Road Runner cartoons were about the detailed delineation of beaks. A film which avoids close-ups like an introvert avoiding eye contact at a party, it is a movie consumed with motion blur and escape velocity, forward thrust and back blast. That’s all the Force was, really, once you had stripped it of some of the more mystical mumbo-jumbo in which Lucas wrapped it: that feeling you get when you’re driving so fast and well that you feel you’ve merged with your car, no longer really conscious of the decisions that you’re making, but thinking through the car’s fenders and chassis. If you’ve ever gone into the Zone while playing a video game, its much the same feeling. Star Wars is junk but it is fast junk. It’s got it where it counts.'

America vs The World: Bombs Away!

The second of my film columns for The Guardian:—

Memorial Day is fast approaching, so naturally one’s thoughts turn to the Fallen, and to the shared sacrifice of European and American continents as they united in common cause against the spectre of global tyranny. But that’s enough about the reviews for Battleship. 

“A preposterously lunkheaded salute to American naval machismo” snorted Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph. “It seems that the U.S. Navy is as much committed to the production of this film as is the toy company” opined Le Monde’s Thomas Sotinel. As news of the hostile European reception spread, American critics equipped their reviews with a pre-emptive Euro-snob missile defense shield. “That the movie didn’t exactly receive hosannas in Europe should surprise absolutely no one. This is a Super-American movie,” bristled Jeff Simon of Buffalo News. “It would be like asking Belgian or Italian or French audiences to be happy about a sudden American invasion.” 

Ah Memorial day: an opportunity for solemn reflection on the folly of foreign conquest. At the cinema, on the other hand, it marks the start of blockbuster season, when the studios roll out their latest squadron of world-beaters designed to club the indigenous cinemas of the world into whimpering submission. When Jurassic Park came out in 1993, Gerard Depardieu compared the American film industry to a “war machine,” while French culture minister Jacques Toubon declared the movie “a threat to French national identity” claiming it was every Frenchman’s “patriotic duty” to see Germinal instead, there being no better known antidote to T Rexes that works more effectively than a 21/2-hour film about French coal-mining. 

It’s not hard to understand why the French would be sensitive to the threat of invasion — complaining of "McDomination" and calling Paris Disneyland a "cultural Chernobyl"— after their experience in the second world war. Ironically, it was America’s military success in 1945, and the ensuing popularity of all things American, that first brought a tidal wave of Hollywood movies down on European heads — 120,000 prints in 1950 alone, causing producer Walter Wanger to hail a victory for ”Donald Duck diplomacy” and calling Hollywood “a Marshall plan for ideas... a veritable celluloid Athens,” more important to America “than the H Bomb.” 

Or failing the H Bomb then Clark Gable — the most lethal device for intercontinental submission after the V-2 rocket. When Gable went shirtless in It Happened One Night (1932) he caused a drop in Argentinian undershirt sales; and when he instructed an Italian boy how to eat a hamburger in It Started in Naples (1960), he sparked a furious row amongst Italian chefs about the pernicious effect of Yankee imperialist cuisine. As one of the characters in Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair, 1948) drily remarks, “If you give them food its relief. If you leave the labels on it’s imperialism.” 

There has always been a contradiction in the charge of cultural imperialism that globalization has only exacerbated. When Brian Keenan was taken hostage by Hezbollah extremists in 1986 he noted with some puzzlement that they were all dressed a headband tied and knotted at the side above the ear, like Rambo:— “This all-American hero, was the stereotype which these young Arab revolutionaries had adopted. They had taken on the cult figure of the Great Satan they so despised and who they claimed was responsible for all the evil in the world. Emulating Rambo they would reconquer the world and simultaneously rid themselves of that inadequacy which they could never admit.” 

Kennan’s story illustrates a fascinating paradox: like the muscled, flag-waving American action heroes that came after him, Rambo was a big success in America, but an even bigger success overseas by a box office margin of almost 2 to 1. He was a Frankenstein’s monster shaped by the international trade winds. The same with Spielberg’s dinosaurs which made 1993 the first year in Hollywood’s history that overseas revenues outstripped domestic ones — a crucial tip of the see-saw. 

“Jurassic Park was a political hardball that was used as a symbol of the American invasion, the second invasion of France, this time not to liberate but to occupy,” Spielberg told me when I interviewed him most recently. “That was the party line on it, and I was caught up in the middle. The blockbuster began in America, so no matter who the writer and director and producers are, of those films, even if it’s an Italian director, and a French writer and a British producer, if it makes a lot of money, almost too much money, it will accused of being an ‘American’ blockbuster. The world is shrinking. The internet has shrunk it to half its original size. We are closer neighbors in cyberspace than we ever have been in our collective history.” 

If this was true in 1993 it is even truer today. In 2012, the proportion of profits coming to the studios from overseas is a staggering 70% — an industry-reconfiguring statistic. In many ways, Hollywood has ceased to be the indigenous film industry of North America and become instead the world’s jukebox, pumping out what Michael Eisner once called “planetized emtertainment”. Which is why Battleship, like The Avengers before it, opened overseas first, leaving the domestic market to follow the foreign lead. 2012 will likely go down as the year Hollywood looked abroad to find out which of its movies were hits. While Battleship bombed domestically, taking only $25 million in its first weekend — “John Carter numbers” as one analyst put it — it took over $200,000 million overseas, with the very people most predisposed to finding it a “lunk-headed salute to American naval machismo.” 

Americans can be forgiven a note of complaint at this ongoing effort by the rest of the world to paint them as lunkheaded and macho and obsessed with their military. They tried to kill Battleship. As Al Pacino says in Godfather Part III, “Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in.”

REVIEW: The Dictator (dir. Charles)

In Borat, Sasha Baron Cohen impersonated a fictional Kazahkstani journalist, roaming the streets of New York, whose Stone-Age views about women and virulent anti-semitism are received by his smiling American hosts with a rictus of dumb-foundment and horror. The joke depended for its effectiveness on the patronizing attitudes lurking within the warmth his American hosts extended to their foreign guest, trapping them in ever tighter circles of squirming unease. We didn't just laugh because Borat was backward — we laughed because anyone could believe someone so backward could exist. The film satirized credulity.  In The Dictator, by way of contrast, Sasha Baron Cohen plays a fictitious Middle-Eastern dictator roaming the streets of New York, whose Stone-Age views about women and virulent anti-semitism are received by his smiling American hosts with a rictus of dumb-foundment and horror because they are paid to do so, being actors in a movie. I don't think Cohen has realized just what a seismic shift in writing style was being asked of him here.  The shift from pseudo-documentary to fictional comedy, if done properly,  would have sent him back to the drawing board to relearn his craft, recalibrating his outrage-levels, offense-loads and torque-percentages to see what fictional situations could bear. He appears not to have done any of this this. He's simply written what once he improvised, acted what once he enacted, and the results, with a few exceptions — a great gag about General Aladeen learning to masturbate  the 9/11 helicopter skit you've already seen in the trailer — simple roll out of end of the canon, and drop to the ground with a thump. Few of the gags connect with anything because they're not aimed at anything. Cohen isn't satirizing credulity because credulity is something actors are paid to suspend: Ana Farris must make her way through her scenes with Aladeen affecting not to notice his offensiveness, which seems a little less impressive, once shorn of the daring Cohen displayed in Borat, most of whose scenes risked  a punch in the hooter. We admired his balls, and that admiration was a good enough substitute for our sympathy. But sympathy in fiction must be earnt, and requires a very different sort of daring. He seems to have fast-forwarded right to the late part of Peter Sellers career where he couldn't get through a sketch without corpsing, and everyone sniggered along, too frightened not to join in. C+

Girls on Film: Auterism and hotties

The first of my film posts for The Guardian:—

Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows may have received a kicking from critics, but one person has emerged from the dust-up unscathed: Eva Green, the French actress who plays the evil witch Angelique Bouchard. With her red-lacquered lips, her crazy-beautiful eyes and possessed-marionette limbs, Green’s lolling vamp represents the perfection of a type Burton has long been trying to get right —  from Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman in Batman Returns, to Lisa Marie Smith bosomy Martian in Mars Attack, to Anne Hathaway’s White Queen in Alice in Wonderland. Critics may be wearying tired of the rest of Burton’s directorial signatures — the ornate production designs, the seventies kitsch, the collaboration with Depp — but he’s finally perfected his vamps: peroxide-blonde, big-chested, cinch-waisted, eyes like Bambi’s.  

All film directors have their types. Everyone knows Steven Spielberg for his suburban settings, alien visitations, and Godlike shafts of light but equally consistent is his taste for hot moms, in long t-shirts, cut-off jeans and morning-sexy hair: Teri Garr and Mellinda Dillon in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, JoBeth Williams in Poltergeist, and Dee Wallace in E.T. (dressed as Catwoman for Haloween, she even sends E.T, into a swoon).  Scorsese scholars find rich pickings in the director’s Catholism, his taste for violence, his bruisers, misfits and loners, but less so the women in orbit around them, whether sexily-damaged like Rosanna Arquette in After Hours and Illeana Douglas in Cape Fear, or spitfires like Lorraine Bracco in Goodfellas and Sharon Stone in Casino, giving as good as they get. 

 To which we could add Tarantino’s foot fetish (“he gave her a foot massage!”), Fellini’s breast-love, the lifelong connoisseurship Michaelangelo Antonioni brought to women’s legs, David Lynch’s thing for misapplied lip-stick, Darren Aronofsky’s taste for brainy brunettes and David Fincher’s love of skinny Goth girls viewed from the rear. As New York film critic David Edelstein to concluded, recently, “Fincher is an undies-and-butt man.” You could be forgiven for concluding that the most enduring definition of an auteur is a filmmaker who populates his movies with women he wants to boff.  

The big guns of auteur theory are strangely silent on the matter. In his seminal essay Notes on Auteur Theory in 1962, the influential American critic Andrew Sarris determined that auteur status was conferred by meeting the following benchmarks:  technical competence, personal style and something called “interior meaning” which he variously defined as a director’s “ vision of the world” his “attitude to life” and “elan of the soul.” He said nothing about sexual pecadilloes. Even though the two film directors hoisted highest by the French and touted as auteurist poster boys — Howards Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock — are famous for their taste in women, bequeathing us, respectively, the Hawksian woman and the Hitchcock Blonde.  

In his groundbreaking 1953 Cahiers du cinema essay, ‘The Genius of Howard Hawks,’ Jacques Rivette identified Hawks as “a bundle of dark forces and strange fascinations” — his  “obsession with continuity”, his “obsession with primitivism” and "bouts of ordered madness which give birth to an infinite chain of consequences" — but passed over his equally fervid obsession with insolent, self-possessed foxes, lounging against doorways in tailored suits like Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not (“You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and ... blow.")  Likewise, in their landmark study, Hitchcock: The First 44 Films,   Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol identified the “Hitchcock touch” through all the Catholic motifs in his work — original sin, guilt, martyrdom, crucifixion and so on — but had little to say about his lifelong worship at the altar of cool blondes with perfect manners and a nice line in double-entendres, as epitomized by Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief (“Do you want breast or leg?”), though Truffuat touched on the subject in his book of interviews with the director. 

 It’s a puzzle. French men are not known for their immunity to the charms of women. On the other hand, there’s always been a strong hint of chauvinism to auteur theorists. The carving up of the movies, a collaborative medium, into a series of solo acts, each bearing the unmistakeable imprint of an all-controlling “master,” most often male, is basically the Great Man Theory of history transplanted into movie theatres — the big swinging dick of film theories. Which is maybe why auterism, as conceived by the French in the 1960s and imported into America in the 1970s, has largely been the hobby-horse of young men in their twenties. Control is a young man’s sport. "There are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors,” said Truffaut, at 21, believing that a real man’s signature comes through regardless, like musk or sweat.  Jacques Rivette, at age 25, found Hawks world to be “exclusively male” and dissed Marilyn Monroe as “that monster of femininity.” 

 So what about the women? The recent complaints from the Croissette about the lack of women directors at Cannes   — a “great pity” according to jury member Andrea Arnold — should not obscure the significant advances women have made in turning the cameras on men.  Kathryn Bigelow’s onscreen testosterone experiments have taken her from the young bucks of Point Break —  “young dumb and full of come” — to the more pathological daredevilry of Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker. Sofia Coppola has showcased her rapport with father figures (guess who) in Lost In Translation, and sleek young blades like Stephen Dorff in Somewhere. But the Female Gaze Award for Male Objectification surely has to go to Jane Campion, who got full frontal nude scenes from Mark Ruffalo in In The Cut and Havey Keitel in The Piano. 

“He feigns the active while (re)presenting the passive posture,” writes Missouri professor Jaime Bihlmeyer of Keitel’s nudity in his 2003 academic paper The Female Gaze, the Speculum and the Chora within the H(y)st(e)rical Film. Citing Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva’s work on phallocentrism, Bihlmeyer concludes that by stripping for the camera, Keitel “appropriates a state of ambiguity” and becomes “unstuck from the linearity of the Law of the Father in this display of Other than subjectivity."  

Or, as Ruffalo tells Meg Ryan in In The Cut, "some women have no sense of the cock". Perhaps there’s our definition: you haven’t really qualified as an auteur until an American film scholar has used French psychoanalytic theory to render your ouevre as impregnable as Jean Baudrillard’s left nut.