Through a glass, darkly

One of the interesting things about cinema is the way it allows us the chance to arrive at a mediated view of our unpleasant past. By that I mean that it gives us the distance to be objective and with that distance comes insight.

For example, with the exception of The Hurt Locker and In the Valley of Elah, there have been no films that deal with 9/11 and the war it prompted in any meaningful way. They also tend to fail at the box office because people generally insist it's just too soon and memories are too raw. They may have a point because, with the exception of The Deer Hunter, the first film to engage with Vietnam in a meaningful way was Platoon which came out more than ten years after the end of the war. Given that there is no serious end to America's middle eastern conflicts in sight then we may have to wait a while before we see it dealt with on the cinema screen.

In Europe however we are going through what I think of as 'second generation syndrome' and this has led to a number of interesting films about the Second World War. From Holland we have Black Book, from Germany Downfall and Sophie Scholl, from France Days of Glory, Female Agents and most recently Army of Crime. Each of these films examines different, not always pleasant, aspects of the wartime experience with candour and frankness and the results are often touching and always powerful. What is most interesting, it seems to me, is that these subjects were left largely untouched by the generation that was most directly involved in the war; it was simply too painful for them to deal with. Generally they have been made by the generation that came after - I accept that Paul Verhoeven lived through the war but he was very young - and as such they are able to take a detached look at events which may only seem shameful with the passage of time.

These musings are prompted by just having watched Katyn which is a stunning piece of cinema from the Polish director Andrzej Wajda which was deservedly Oscar nominated this year. Wajda is one of the most underrated of European directors and perhaps the least celebrated of the greats, but he is still making films at the age of 83 and his talent remains undiminished.

Katyn is the story of the titular massacre of Polish soldiers in the early days of the Second World War. Twelve thousand officers were killed and that's a big number to get your head around; Wajda's inspired device is to tell the story through their families waiting anxiously for news of loved ones. The background may be epic but the story in the foreground is intimate and affecting - Richard Attenborough does it all the time.

Katyn is actually what cinema is all about. It highlights a story which is an absolute outrage but it also makes important points about identity and nationalism and the ultimate tragedy of all of those people caught in the middle. And even though the story takes place almost seventy years ago I couldn't help but feel contemporary resonances which is the real power of cinema in the hands of a genius such as Wajda.

Pride and the importance of performance

The London Film Festival starts tomorrow and for the first time our DFTV course is represented. The Search is a film directed by Mark Buchanan and written by Gregor Barclay, who were graduates of the first DFTV course. It has been selected as an official entrant in the LFF Short Film section which is something of a coup for us. And it is a double celebration for the course because Believe, a short film by Paul Wright who graduated the year after Mark and Gregor is also being screened at the LFF. This comes in a year in which Believe was also selected for Edinburgh and won a prize at Locarno. The industry is already predicting great things for Paul http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/london_film_festival/article6867715.ece

Obviously with a new cohort of first year students taking their initial steps into the industry the achievements of their predecessors - and recent predecessors at that since the course has only been running for six years - can hopefully act as an inspiration.

What is so inspiring about both The Search and Believe is the quality of performance. These are great looking films but, within reason, a lot of people can do that. What sets them apart are the nuanced shaded performances that Mark and Paul have drawn from excellent casts. And in a year when so many Scottish films are blighted by weak scripts and performances barely worthy of the name, it is genuinely encouraging to see work such as this. I remember when Paul's graduation film Hikikomori screened at the RSAMD and at the end there was that wonderful beat of awed silence as the audience realised they had seen something special before the Concert Hall erupted into sustained applause. I overheard someone afterwards saying 'You know with most student films you wonder when it will end, with that one I wondered how it would end'. That's a rare compliment.

Both Believe and The Search deal with big themes - almost epic in fact - but they also deal with real people and that's why they are so accessible and so successful. You will wonder how they are going to end but you will be haunted and touched by the way that they do.

100 Minutes I'll Never Get Back

Although it wasn't my first choice I was sufficiently intrigued by The Invention of Lying to think it might be a worthwhile night at the pictures. Reviews had been mixed but the premise was intriguing.
The film allegedly does what it says on the tin; Ricky Gervais is the man who invents a lie in a world where everyone tells the truth. Except that it's not really; this appears to be set in a world where people are so naive they believe everything they are told which is an entirely different prospect.
The film lost me about ten minutes in, after it had expended all of the predictable blunt spoken gags. After that it became an exercise in deconstruction to try to work out just how awful it is and where it goes wrong; the answers are 'very' and 'everywhere'.
Let's leave aside the notion that Ricky Gervais is a very limited actor - this character, as are all his others, is a retread of David Brent and Andy Millman - but whatever appeal he has is limited to the small screen. Projected on a big screen he is a charisma vacuum leaving a large hole where his character ought to be. Let's hear it for co-stars Jennifer Garner and Rob Lowe who do what stars are supposed to do and twinkle as if their lives depend on it.
The frustrating thing about the film is that it has the potential to be a very powerful satire but bottles it in the end. Gervais seems to be making a point about organised religion when one of his fabrications - the only well-intentioned one - becomes an article of faith for a desperate populace. How sad are their lives when they latch on to this one shred of hope, an interesting point which isn't explored.
Incidentally only when Gervais becomes the new Messiah do the people start to question things. Why don't they just accept what he tells them as they do in every other part of the film.
The notion of religion being the ultimate lie is similarly intriguing but it is discarded without much examination once it has served Gervais's short term comic purpose. Rather than explore this issue we go for a sappy rom-com ending which relies on almost everything we have seen before being turned on its head.
However given this film's capacity for somersaults that should come as no surprise.

Is it that time already?

On the basis of doing as I say and not as I do this blog has been neglected while I have been encouraging students to maintain their own contributions. However with a new cohort of students it seems reasonable to take virtual pen in hand once more.

Looking back on this summer has been a discouraging cinematic experience - there were so few films that I felt I wanted to see and with those for which I did express mild interest, the feeling soon passed. I find myself more and more waiting for the joys of Sky Movies, especially Sky Movies Classics.

Just this week I found myself in something of an Eighties nostalgia fest in watching Point Break and 48 Hours back to back. A couple of things occurred to me. First, how watchable Patrick Swayze could be when he was on top form, second how Eddie Murphy squandered the potential to be one of the greats, and finally why does no one rave about Walter Hill.

Hill is a writer turned director who also does a bit of producing - a sort of two-fisted Renaissance man. As a director his work includes The Warriors, The Long Riders, Southern Comfort, and The Driver - each of them a masterclass in economy of narrative and providing the maximum bangs for the studio's buck . 48 Hours is in the same mould; tough, red-blooded and unremittingly macho but at the same time capturing a fundamental sweetness at the heart of the relationship between tough cop Nick Nolte and released convict Eddie Murphy.

Relationships are also at the heart of Point Break with FBI agent Keanu Reeves torn between surf guru Patrick Swayze and petite Lori Petty. But we know which one he really loves - he didn't travel halfway round the world for her! Like Hill's work on 48 Hours, Kathryn Bigelow directs the action scenes in Point Break with commendable and almost reckless vigour, especially surfing scenes which even now are jaw-dropping in their spectacle. It's interesting to consider what a modern director would have made of either of these movies. I suspect they would have taken comfort in digital technology but the physical effects of the pre-digital era take a lot of beating.

Looking back after almost thirty years these films seem cheesey but it is important to remember that we are looking back through a window that they created - the buddy movie may seem tired now but these two films along with Richard Donner's Lethal Weapon franchise created the genre.

As for Bigelow, her time has come again with The Hurt Locker - still on my must-see list - which is being touted as an Oscar contender. Hill hasn't directed a film for ten years but he did give us Deadwood as a producer and for that alone we should be grateful.

And then there was one.....

Once upon a time in the Eighties there were three great American film makers who stood comparison with anyone the rest of the world had to offer; Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Clint Eastwood.

Over the years Marty got obsessed with the fact that he didn't have an Oscar and seemed to be prepared to go to any lengths to get one. Eventually he got one with the overpraised The Departed - I know this because I was one of those who overpraised it. It's not that it wasn't good, it just wasn't great but at least it wasn't The Aviator so let's give him the Oscar and let him get on with his career.Sadly it hasn't turned out that way and we still await his next movie never mind his next great one.

Woody of course already had an Oscar but he seems to have turned out the same way. It's criminal to see the man who made Annie Hall and Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters bouncing around Europe for the cash to make films he wouldn't even have considered in his pomp. His latest Vicky Christina Barcelona is another to be watched through latticed fingers, whatever qualities it has are really only commendable in the sense that it's not Scoop or Cassandra's Dream. As he did in his British sojourn Allen confirms that he really only knows one type of character, even in a film set in Spain he manages to populate it with characters from the Upper West Side of New York. It's embarrassing to watch the film bounce around locations like a corporate for the Spanish Tourist Board - given the extensive narration I'm not even sure it qualifies as a film, possibly a narrated screencast. It makes you shudder with apprehension at the thought of his next film.

Meanwhile Clint Eastwood goes from strength to strength making films that are both conventional and challenging, a film about boxing that raises moral issues about euthanasia, a film about heroes that questions the nature of patriotism, and even a minor film like The Changeling raises questions about corruption and feminism.

Once upon a time there were three great American film makers - now we have one great film makers, and two makers of occasionally great films and there's a world of difference between those two categories.

What I did on my holidays

Did you know that the Oscars are barely six weeks away? Funny how things catch up with you quicker as you get older. I have spent the past few weeks catching up on award season contenders and my initial impression is that for the first time in a long time there may be some genuine competition this year. Generally by this time we have one film which has been annointed sometime before Xmas as the darling of the critics/chattering classes and it then processes regally amassing armfuls of baubles until Oscar night itself. Not so this year; there are a lot of worthy contenders and it is hard to make a strong case for any one film to the exception of others.

Doubt, for example, is not a great film but it has at least four Oscar-worthy performances. Similarly The Wrestler per se may not be worth a Best Picture nod but Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei will take a bit of beating. I think you might also say the same about Frank Langella and Michael Sheen in Frost/Nixon.

Revolutionary Road is the sort of film that makes it worth enduring the intellect-free expanse of the summer months to spend two hours of your time with this in the winter. A stunning piece of work that suggests Kate Winslet may not be overlooked for long. Ironically her greatest competition is herself in that she is also likely to be nominated for The Reader. Again this is an exceptional piece of work but the film haunts me for all the wrong reasons.

The acting is superb, the direction is marvelous, and although I watched it three weeks ago I can't stop thinking about it. There is a fatal flaw at the heart of this film; there is a moral equivalency between Nazism and the subject matter which seems entirely unbalanced - I can't give more details without spoiling it but would love to talk to you guys about it once you've seen it. And yet, and yet, and yet...this film will not leave me alone.

Defiance is another that has me thinking, not in any deep intellectual way, but simply that every time I see the trailer I remember more things I liked about it. It's unashamedly heroic which is rare in these cynical times.

Biggest disappoinments? Definitely Milk which is overly-romanticised hagiography and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button which for all its technological marvels is overlong, flabby, and failed to engage me at almost any point.

As for hidden gems, I finally came across Brideshead Revisited which, despite the obvious problems of adapting such a monster of a book, still emerges quietly triumphant especially in the performances of the two leads.

Naturally all will be revealed on Oscar night and by that time you will have had the chance to put your money where your mouth is with the grand DFTV Oscar sweepstake. Watch this space!

If you know the history....

How much responsibility does a director have to the audience in terms of its awareness about the story he is telling? I only ask after a week of watching films and TV shows that are based on true stories but whose impact would undoubtedly be altered by what the audience already knew. Coincidentally two of the pieces, which I watched on consecutive nights, both starred Michael Fassbender.

The first was the finale to Peter Flannerys' excellent The Devil's Whore which turns on the central character (John Simm) deciding to assassinate Oliver Cromwell (Dominic West) because he has betrayed the values of the revolution to which they had all signed on. The final scenes are an obvious homage to Dallas in 1963 with Simm as Lee Harvey Oswald and they are undoubtedly tense. However that tension is mitigated by the fact that I knew that Cromwell had not been assassinated therefore I knew broadly how the scene must turn out. Did it affect my enjoyment? Possibly, although altered may be a better word in that rather than wondering
if the plot would succeed I wondered instead how they would finish the scene. But what of those who don't know the story of the British Civil War? How different must it be for them and how does Flannery take that into account in his structure of the scene?

For someone of my age it is almost unthinkable that there would be people who did not know what happened to Cromwell but we must accept the reality of the modern world and its increasing self-centredness. I was told, for example, by more than one cinema manager that there were audience members during the run of Titanic who were devastated that the boat sank; they were unaware that this was a true story and were shocked that Kate and Leo were not saved as Hollywood convention would dictate.

Moving on, the following night I watched Hunger, again with Fassbender this time in the key role of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. As an aside the YBA crowd e.g. Sam Taylor-Wood, Tracey Emin have all been dabbling in film to limited success but only Steve McQueen has genuinely made the transition from visual art to cinema with this haunting film.

Unlike The Devil's Whore, Hunger makes no concession to the audience's understanding of events. We open up in The Maze Prison and the appalling conditions and we are completely immersed in the experience of the H Block prisoners. Even the voice over of Margaret Thatcher is not identified so if you don't know what she sounded like - a slim possibility I grant you - then you have no idea who it is. Surprisingly this works very well because the lack of context focuses the mind on the central argument which is the morality of the hunger strike. This is a huge issue and frankly you don't want to be distracted by wondering if the chronology is right or that Fassbender doesn't look much like Sands.

This is an issue that also affects Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon where the dramatic fulcrum of the story is an invented conversation. Peter Morgan admits he invented the scene simply for dramatic effect which is permissible because this is drama not documentary. However there are those who have accused the film of other, less evident, alterations as in this article from The Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-drew/ifrostnixoni-a-dishonorab_b_150948.html

To go back to my original question I think the answer is 'none'. The director's responsibility, it seems to me, is first and foremost to the film he wants to make; how the audience wants to respond to it is their own business.

And the winner is....

Actually it's way too early for that but the first awards of the awards season have been announced and both - National Board of Review and Washington Critics Circle - have gone to Slumdog Millionaire. Having seen it at the weekend, I can understand why - this is a terrific piece of film making.

The dramatic device is deceptively simple, on the brink of winning the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire the contestant, a young man from the slums, looks back on the life that has brought him to this point. It's a clever device because Celador, which created Millionaire and produced the film, controls the game to the point where every international version is identical. That means the film is accessible to audiences all over the world.

It is powerful, harrowing, entrancing and ultimately uplifting and Danny Boyle does a terrific job technically. This film will doubtless win many more awards between now and Oscar night.

One of its main contenders will be Frost/Nixon which is equally riveting. Far and away Ron Howard's best work it presents the epic interview between David Frost and disgraced US president Richard Nixon as an interlocutorial (look it up!) version of Rocky. I remember seeing the interviews when I was a younger man but had no idea of the drama involved in setting them up; as it turns out these conversations would be the defining moment in the career of each man.

Michael Sheen is excellent as Frost but Frank Langella's Nixon steals the film. Wisely deciding against pure impersonation he gives a performance that manages to extract some sympathy for this particular devil.

This week I'm hoping to catch up with Benjamin Button, W, Hunger and a couple of others.

Unfortunately this week sees the final episodes of two excellent TV offerings - Spooks and The Devil's Whore. I miss them both already, however Spooks at least will be back.

Finally....

What can I say - I've been busy organising Richard Attenborough events, trips to the Panopticon, and finishing off my post grad. Anyway here we are so let's catch up - first things first, Choke.

Choke symbolises a lot of what is wrong with indie movies these days. It tries to tick too many boxes - casting Sam Rockwell, playing with narrative structure, daring themes, graphic sexual content - and ends up not actually making a lot of sense.

The film takes its title from a sub plot in which Rockwell scams people by pretending to choke, allowing them to save him, and then leech off them for the rest of his life. But of course he's not a real scam artist, he's only doing it to raise the cash he needs to keep his mother in an institution where she can be cared for in the advanced stages of dementia.

There's also a bizarre sub plot about Rockwell's real dad, an affair with the increasingly engaging Kelly Macdonald, and some nonsense about Rockwell's pal and his stripper girlfriend. There's altogether too much going on to be completely satisfying and as a result the ending seems arbitrary and unearned.

On the plus side it features one of the only two Rockwell performances I've enjoyed and Kelly Maconald is always good value.

Speaking of unearned and aribitrary endings, I also saw Body of Lies which squanders a lot of talent in a story that doesn't so much end as stop in its tracks. I've recommended it to Richard so he can use it as an example of how not to write a film; there's no third act and none of the characters has a dramatic arc.

Also this week I caught up with Gomorrah, an Italian film which invokes the neo-realist tradition in its story of the Mafia in modern Naples. The action is brutal and arbitrary - rapidly becoming the word of the day - but as in all neo-realist films it is neither glamourised or dwelt one. A terrific piece of work and definitely one to recommend to DFTV3 given that we have just started on Italian cinema.

And speaking of terrific work, Mickey Rourke is just marvelous in The Wrestler. Being old enough to remember Rourke at the start of his career I always thought he was the one among all his contemporaries who would have a lasting career. As it happened he didn't, largely through surrendering to a variety of demons. The character he plays in this film has done much the same thing and some of Rourke's longer speeches are surely meditations on his own life and career. Whatever the reason it's a hugely satisfying film which should get at least an Oscar nomination for Rourke.

Speaking of Oscars, Frost/Nixon is on the radar this week so in that apples vs. oranges way it will be interesting to see if Frank Langella is a better bet than Mickey Rourke.

Catching up

After more than 25 years in the private sector I still can't quite get used to public holidays but loving the experience. So, long weekends leave lots of time for catching up on viewing including Quantum of Solace.

It was good but not great; there was no narrative to speak of, just a long and increasingly incoherent collection of set pieces. The Tosca scene in particular was where you could audibly hear the audience lose interest - it felt more like tying up loose ends and setting the groundwork for the rest of the Craig franchise than a film in its own right. Was however fortunate enough to see a digital projection and the clarity of image is very impressive.

Much better was The Brave One which I caught on Sky; a perfect example of how a genre movie can rise above the confines of its class with intelligence and talent. This could have been a Death Wish remake but Neil Jordan's examination of the nature of grief and the part of us which we do not admit to made it constantly absorbing. Jodie Foster was remarkable in the lead with a performance which played like an exposed nerve. The title sucked - obviously decided by a focus group.

Also caught the first two episodes of the new series of Spooks. Goobye Rupert Penry Jones, hello Richard Armitage who is bound to make an impression before his inevitable dramatic farewell. I love the style and look of this show which manages to out-American the Americans. A perfect example of how not to do that came with Flood which I also caught up with. Mesmerically bad and with a cast that includes Bobby Carlyle and Tom Courtenay a salutary reminder that even the best actors have mortgages.

The perfect end to a weekend

I've just watched my recording of the Burt Bacharach concert as part of the BBC Electric Proms season. (Either ask your parents or check out the red interactive button for highlights if you need to know who he is) The man is a genius and I couldn't help reflecting (see what I did there?) as I was watching that he defined the cinematic sound of the sixties and seventies. A guilty pleasure but a treat nonetheless.