See You Next Wednesday - An Evening with John Landis

Once upon a time, there were two men called John, and they towered above all others in spraying fuel on the simmering embers of my nascent cinephilia. Back in 1994, I was fortunate enough to attend a Q&A with John Carpenter at the National Film Theatre to accompany the world premiere of his wonderfully nuts Lovecraftian feverdream In The Mouth of Madness.

16 years later and, on Tuesday 16th March 2010, I finally caught up with John Landis on exactly the same stage at the now-renamed BFI Southbank. An unflagging bundle of enthusiasm, self-confessed film geek Landis came straight from a day's shooting on Burke and Hare at Ealing Studios and sat with the audience through a rare showing of his 2004 documentary Slasher before regaling us all with his encyclopaedic knowledge and love of movies for two hours, starting out by taking photos of the audience from the stage and wrapping it all up by exhorting us to go and watch Scott Pilgrim vs. The World when it arrived, directed by his friend Edgar Wright who was sitting amongst us.

The following is cobbled together from a bunch of notes I made over two years ago, so cut me some slack.

On his friendship with Alfred Hitchcock:

During their regular lunch dates, Hitchcock expressed his irritation that Dressed To Kill was frequently referred to as “Hitchcockian” by calling Brian DePalma “that boy that steals from me” to which Landis said:
"But Hitch, he’s not stealing from you, it's an homage."
"You mean fromage?"

On bad movies:

Landis unashamedly loves bad movies, in particular the oeuvre of Roland Emmerich, singling out the recent 2012 and the delirious absurdity of characters attempting to out-drive a natural disaster. He also pointed out that film is the only art form where you can experience the worst possible entertainment and still have a good time.

I’ve just discovered that Landis recently restated his affection for Emmerich’s logic-defying excesses on German TV as he wandered around London with Terry Gilliam:

On Coming To America:

During the making of Coming to America, Landis was made aware of comments by Spike Lee bemoaning a trend of “old Jewish guys pretending to be young black guys”. [Despite extensive research, I’m unable to locate the interview that Landis cited. However, Lee does have form for this sort of thing. For an example, see page 57 of Spike Lee: Interviews on Google Books for Lee’s remarks on the writing staff of In Living Color during a conversation with Elvis Mitchell from 1991].

Despite the well-documented acrimony between Landis and Murphy at this stage in their collaboration, Landis, knowing what an incredibly gifted mimic Eddie Murphy is, approached him about flipping this around by turning a young black guy into an old Jewish guy, which led to the creation of the character Saul. (This is the zenith of a relentless downward spiral that leads to Norbit - Coming to America marks the first time that Murphy played multiple characters in a movie, so maybe Landis has to shoulder a little bit of blame for kicking off that particularly unwelcome trend in Murphy’s career.)

On The Spy Who Loved Me:

Landis was one of many uncredited writers (along with Stirling Silliphant, Ronald Hardy, Anthony Burgess and Derek Marlowe) who worked on the script for Roger Moore’s third outing as James Bond, claiming that his major contribution was the downhill ski chase that opens the movie.

On Into the Night:

His first flop. Landis told an anecdote of being summoned to meet Jack Nicholson to discuss the project in a remote location (Aspen, perhaps?), that turned into an unusually treacherous trip due to the snow and icy conditions, just so that Nicholson could turn it down on the grounds that the Ed Okin character (eventually played by Jeff Goldblum) is passive and never actually does anything, spending the whole film being led around by Michelle Pfieffer's character. Nicholson softened the rejection by saying that he still thought that it would be a great movie and he looked forward to seeing it. Landis conceded that maybe Into the Night was just "too weird" for audiences. Personally, I think Into the Night ranks way up there with his finest work and the three-way knife fight between Carl Perkins, David Bowie and Jeff Goldblum in a darkened hotel room strewn with corpses whilst Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein plays in the background is just glorious:

On casting Burke and Hare:

Landis professed his love and admiration of Ronnie Corbett, saying that he was the only member of the cast he had to fight for to get him into the movie. He called him a great actor and a national treasure, acknowledging that “national treasure” in the UK means that you've been on TV for over 25 years.

On Hollywood today:

With a hint of amused irritation, Landis noted that some of the younger breed of Hollywood executives don't know their history, recollecting that he has been asked in meetings: “Did you ever see Animal House? That's what we want.” Understandably, he’s insulted and flattered at the same time.

There was so much more, and the event was recorded by the BFI, with selected highlights available to view here.

I went to see both Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Burke and Hare on the weekends they opened. The former ended up being one of my favourite films of 2010. The latter didn’t. But I confess that I just really enjoyed the fact that I could go and see a brand new John Landis movie on a big screen and, as always, I can’t wait to see what he does next.

When in Hollywood, Visit Universal Studios. Ask for Babs

It Came From The Archives! - Nic Balthazar’s Ben X

Still rooting around in neglected folders. Retooling unfinished pieces for publication here on the blog and briefly glancing at things that have been out there at some point in the past but are no longer available. I’m going to start recycling some of the latter here, otherwise all those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain....Here’s a review that originally appeared on the now-defunct Write on Film (Hi Marie!) back in August 2008.

The debut movie from Belgian filmmaker Nic Balthazar, Ben X unfolds from the perspective of Asperger's sufferer Ben, as he gets through his rigidly-structured daily routine by immersing himself in the lush pixelated landscapes of the MMORPG ArchLord (the one place where he feels truly in control) before the drudgery and discomfort of the real world encroaches on his virtual reality.

Very loosely based on real events (which I can't go into in any great depth without blowing the ending), Ben's story is interspersed with posthumous faux-documentary footage analysing the events of the film by most of the major players, as the narrative creeps little-by-little towards a teased and seemingly-inevitable tragic denouement.

As a diverting thriller, Ben X crackles along and is watchable enough, there are enough neat twists and reversals to keep an audience engaged and Greg Timmermans is excellent as the titular Ben, all barely-repressed tics and twitchy anxious movements as he struggles to function in a world that doesn't quite make sense to him.

But Balthazar seems less interested in what it means to live with Asperger's Syndrome - it just appears to be a plot-motor to tell a story about feckless teens and out-of-control bullying, and Ben's love of ArchLord, whilst interesting in illustrating the way in which he operates differently in distinct and yet not-quite-separate "worlds", teeters dangerously close to a flashy, over-used gimmick when the virtual environment of the MMORPG is overlaid with comparatively dreary Belgian suburbia to show how Ben retreats into his innerlife as a coping mechanism.

The final half-hour obliterates believability beyond any reasonable suspension of disbelief, indulging in nonsensical narrative contortions just to get the story to where it wants to be. Nevertheless, there is a kind of emotional logic at play that almost let's Balthazar off the hook and up until that point the movie has built up sufficient viewer goodwill that makes it all slightly easier to forgive.

Balthazar has a striking visual style and an undoubted facility for spinning an entertaining story, and Ben X is certainly ambitious with much to recommend it, but now and then I had the nagging feeling that it was all an elaborate shaggy-dog story masquerading as a gritty teen thriller.

Quid Pro Quo, Douchebags

(Digging through a folder full of documents that I never did anything with for a variety of reasons, I found this. I can see why I left it alone for a couple of years. It’s a really angry, somewhat rambling screed on the hateful The Hangover. Re-reading it, I find that I’m still just as angry about it, but my powder is now suitably dry, and I felt like taking it out of mothballs and throwing it out into the world. So here it is. At the very least, it should make a nice change from people griping about Prometheus.)

"The most commonly reported characteristics of a hangover include headache, nausea, sensitivity to light and noise, lethargy, dysphoria, diarrhea and thirst. A hangover may also induce psychological symptoms including heightened feelings of depression and anxiety."

Add feelings of uncontrollable rage, and that pretty much nails my feelings after enduring Todd Phillips' hit comedy / vile piece of shit The Hangover. For this particular tirade, I'm going to have to do two things that I usually try to avoid - I'm going to be overwhelmingly negative about something in writing (as I prefer to talk up the good stuff rather than expend energy trashing the shit); and I'm going to indulge in spoilers. Lots and lots of spoilers. If you haven't seen The Hangover, you are incredibly fortunate and hopefully this will dissuade you.

There's a line of dialogue in The Hangover that encapsulates everything that's wrong with the film: "You know, everyone says Mike Tyson is such a badass, but I think he's kind of a sweetheart." Yes, this is a film that holds as part of its odious, twisted worldview the opinion that convicted rapist Mike Tyson is "kind of a sweetheart".

(For a more articulate evisceration of this horrific "hilarious" cameo appearance, read Jane Claire Bradley's Punch Drunk: On Rape Apologists and Hollywood Misogyny).

It's the way certain little details start to mount up that really, really aggravated me. Aside from the appearance of former Undisputed Heavyweight Champion and ear-chewing rapist Tyson, there's this:

All of the women in the film are either screeching emasculating bitches or ripe for the fucking. Except for "hooker with a heart of gold" Heather Graham who, in one of the film's most egregious moments, bares a breast to feed her child. Nothing wrong with that, you might say. And you'd be right. Not only is there absolutely nothing wrong with breast-feeding, but there's nothing wrong with showing it on film. So far, so good.

But context is everything, and here Phillips pops a breast on the screen for two reasons and two reasons only - for titillation and comedy. God knows, I'm no prude, and I certainly don't object to nudity in movies. But breasts are not inherently erotic, and yet here breast-feeding is overtly equated with something sexual. And the three gibbering lackwits at the centre of the film are supposed to be uncomfortable at this display of bare flesh, which is supposed, I assume, to generate a laugh. This is even more disingenuous when you get to the photos playing over the end titles and see the heinous shit they got up to over the course of that “lost” night.

To be clear: I don't have a problem with gratuitous nudity. (Some of my best friends are gratuitous nudists). I don't have a problem with bad taste comedies. It's All About Context.

Also: slamming a car door in a baby's face isn't inherently funny. It. Just. Isn’t.

Also also: Are camp oriental stereotypes really funny? Really? What the fuck is wrong with you?

If this weren't such a hugely popular film, and if I hadn't heard from so many people who kept telling me how fucking funny it is, it probably wouldn't stick in my craw so much, as such widespread adulation indicates something rotten not only in the worldview of the filmmakers, but of the audience as well. But let's put that to one side for a minute and shake our heads in confusion at the list of plaudits this festering shitcake has accrued. On January 17, 2010, The Hangover won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. It was also named one of the top ten movies of the year by the American Film Institute. The film won "Best Ensemble" from the Detroit Film Critics Society. The screenplay was nominated for a Writers Guild of America and BAFTA award.

Let's just consider that last one again. Screenplay award nominations. The screenplay may be sufficiently absorbent to work as passable toilet paper, but little more than that. The entire premise of the film hinges on a trio of morons piecing together the mysteries of the night before. And yet it all falls apart once you start poking away at it. For example, if the mouth-breathing arrested adolescents had stayed in their hotel room for five more minutes once they woke up, Heather Graham would have returned to explain it all to them.

Here’s another glaring unresolved plot thread - what about the chickens in the hotel room? They are never explained. Just another piece of the scaffolding of the film that collapses once you lean on it a bit with your brain. You remember brains, don't you? Those are the things that this film asks you to forget you own. (And I don’t want to hear a counter-argument of “You’re thinking about this too much. It’s just a joke!” This screenplay was nominated for awards! I don’t expect it to be a masterpiece of construction like Chinatown or Back to the Future, but it should be pretty damn close to bullet-proof.)

So. The Hangover was loved by most audiences and despised by me. Funnily enough, the criticisms I level at this mess that Todd Phillips curled out on to the screen are not entirely different from the ones sprayed at Observe and Report from many quarters - a film largely despised by audiences and loved by me. (Not just me. Kim Morgan and Anne Billson have also been vocal fans of Jody Hill’s pitch-black comedy).

The fundamental difference is one of worldview. The makers of Observe and Report know that Seth Rogen’s mallcop Ronnie Barnhardt is a monster. That changes everything. The odious fuckwits behind The Hangover think the objectionable shitheads are just regular guys having a fun weekend of sex and booze. After all, as Jeffrey Tambor keeps repeating with a knowing wink and smile throughout "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right guys? Heh heh heh." Oh fuck off, Jeffrey Tambor, for coming out with that hackneyed line as lazy shorthand to legitimise reprehensible behaviour as mere harmless, boyish fun. What makes this all the more galling is that Tambor played one of the great all-time screen fantasist monsters as Hank "Hey Know" Kingsley on The Larry Sanders Show, in a show that was both dark and funny and made us love the central characters without ever letting us forget how fallible and monstrous they could be.

"It's like my mom always said: you can polish a turd, but it's still a piece of shit." Brandi (Anna Faris) in Observe and Report

Pitch Slap

"One thing that always surprises me about career advice is how lousy most of the writing is. They say the same boring, formulaic ideas over again. They convince you that if you do this one thing, it will all work out for you. The worst thing they do is tell you to follow the rules. This is a terrible idea." - Susannah Breslin (How to Not Be Unemployed)

Here's an unassailable truth for ya: I have written a lot of different things for a lot of different people over the years. Magazines, blogs, books. Shorts, videos and documentaries. And not one of those writing gigs came about as the result of a pitch.

That's not to say that I haven't ever pitched an idea. Of course I have. Mountains of them. Pitches that I dashed off as half-arsed afterthoughts. Long, detailed, drawn-out pitches that I spent days tweaking, buffing and polishing until the monitor screen itself seemed to glisten. Not one fucking nibble. Nothing.

Any word that I've ever written that ended up in a pay cheque came about because someone approached me. Maybe they knew me personally or by reputation. Maybe I was a friend of a friend or a recommendation. Maybe they knew me from other things that I'd already written. There’s more than one way to skin a gig.

If you’re waiting for a point to all this, where I come up with a neat, tidy conclusion about what this means, then you’re shit out of a luck. I’m really not trying to say that pitching is a waste of time. Maybe it just means that pitching is an incredibly inefficient way of getting your stuff out there. At least, my experience certainly seems to bear that out.

(This also applies to any kind of job application - hundreds (if not thousands) of people applying for the same job in the same way. The odds are stacked against you, no matter how goddamn brilliant you are).

Maybe the point is this: it’s more fun when you want me more than I want you. Or maybe it just means that the only person I’m interested in competing with is myself. And that the best way to get stuff out into the world is to take the road less travelled. Not through the front door, crowded with noisy people queueing up for their shot. I prefer to sneak in the back window. I’ve never had a problem with working hard. Sometimes, it makes more sense to work smart instead.

Rambling (almost) over. I’ve been thinking about this a fair bit recently. I’m never short of things to write. I’m the King of Spec, and I’ll happily write stuff for my own amusement forever. But I find myself craving the benefits of collaboration again. Working with or for smart people with ideas that I haven’t thought of and perspectives that maybe I don’t have. Basically, I’m in the mood to shred my rule book and shower the place with confetti. And I'm starting to build bricks to smash through the back windows that no-one else seems to be looking at. Developing...

Neural Integration

It doesn’t hurt to remind the world of who I am every now and again, so here I am. Hello. Here, have a mini-bio:

Writer. Journalist. Editor. Producer. Script doctor. Blogger. If it involves words, I've probably done it. Apart from poetry. Iambic pentameter gives me a damn headache. The relentless data churn of the modern age being what it is, a lot of my stuff is out-of-print or offline, but I tend to sling links to scribblings of note on here from time to time.

Sometimes, the people that I’ve worked with say some very nice things about me. We shouldn’t laugh and point at these people for their lapses in judgment. We should copy-and-paste their praise instead. Like this:

"Great guy, great writer, brilliant brain. Don't just sit there brief him ...great results." - Peter Penny, CEO, Connected Pictures

Oh, I’m also a very small, misshapen cog in the sleek, shiny beast that is They Quiz, London’s finest monthly film pub quiz. If you haven’t been to one, your life is sorely lacking the required amount of joy and laughter. You should do something about that.

I haven’t done one of these for over two years, so indulge me whilst I take you on a whirlwind tour of all the places where I soil the Internet with my virtual jibba-jabba.

Where I can be found online in 2012:

Stray Bullets - You’re looking at it. This blog is about eight years old, and I’ve been meaning to move it off Blogger for at least half of that time. Soon. Maybe. If you are a relative newcomer, please dig through the archives so that you too can become one of those intensely irritating people who say “Man, his old stuff was better”.

Shrapnel - My Tumblr blog. The short explanation is covered by my tagline over there: "Jagged shards of popular culture eviscerating the flabby guts of the Internet". For a slightly longer explanation, I’m lazy, so I’ve done a cut-and-paste on my response to a fan of my mad reposting skillz over there: “There’s no particular algorithm to the things that I hurl up here, or the frequency of posting. It’s just a collection of the pop-culture artifacts I excavate whilst mining the recesses of the web, armed with little more than a search engine and a whim. It’s also probably a reasonably accurate snapshot of my obsessions and preoccupations at any given time.”

Last.fm - Most of the stuff I squeeze into my earholes is scrobbled and logged here. You can usually tell when I’m working on something, because the stuff I rack up skews towards background music - jazz and soundtracks, primarily. Otherwise, my tastes tend to run towards funk and hip-hop. Recently, I’ve been listening almost exclusively to the Beastie Boys, for reasons that shouldn’t need further elucidation.

I’ve also started fooling around with This Is My Jam on an irregular basis, largely because it crossposts to Twitter. (Yes, This Is My Jam is the new Blip.fm)

Twitter - If you really want to hear me crapping on in 140-character bursts all day, every day, then you are in for a treat!

Flickr - This dinosaur doesn’t know that it’s dead yet, and I still throw photos up here on an incredibly infrequent basis. (I was on Instagram for a short while, but like a drunk taking a shit on the dancefloor, Facebook had to come along and spoil the fun.)

Pinboard - My bookmarking service of choice, ever since I moved away from the ailing Del.icio.us (another victim of Yahoo!’s cycle of acquisition and neglect).

I am no longer on either Facebook or LinkedIn because, really, who can be fucking bothered? Not me, that’s for sure. I am, however, on Google+. I’m not entirely sure why. I’m a big fan of the latest redesign, but that hasn’t helped to make it a more active place. Social networks don’t really work if people don’t use them, and Google+ is Tumbleweed City. I’m keeping it on a microscopically short leash for now.

How to contact me - If you know me personally, then pick up the goddamn phone. Or send me an email. Otherwise, Twitter is best. Alternatively, slap something in the comments here or use the “Ask me a question” function on Tumblr.

When the Boogie Started to Explode

I was reminded the other day of an idea for a book that I pitched a few years back on the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever. I just dug up the proposal off an old hard drive and, as the publisher decided to pass on the project a long time ago, I thought that I may as well sling it up here on the blog for your amusement / entertainment / derision. Here it is...

 “…Where do you go when the record is over…”

That was the tagline on the poster for Saturday Night Fever when it came out in 1977. This proposal is about exactly where you go next.

My proposal uses the original movie sound track to Saturday Night Fever to travel through time and space using scuffed black vinyl as a magic carpet. Because the book isn’t really about disco or New York or the Seventies or even about three blokes with big teeth and falsetto voices from Chorlton-cum-Hardy in Manchester.

It’s really a book about the protean quality of lasting pop music. Music that changes with the passage of time, with history, with shifts in popular culture, with trends and fashion. Music that represents different things to different listeners. The music itself is static and unchanging. It's just the ears that hear it are constantly shifting and processing the sounds with all the baggage of perception, wish-fulfilment and misplaced nostalgia.

The music of Saturday Night Fever has gone from cool to loved to reviled to kitsch and back again. Sometimes at the same time. It’s a complete finite piece of work that seems to be perpetually in flux. It’s evocative of a very specific time and place, and yet it appealed to the broadest demographic imaginable, becoming the greatest selling album of all time (until Michael Jackson’s Thriller came along). It’s a chaos of contradictions.

The seed of the music came from an article by a British journalist, wrapped around a film from an Australian producer set in Brooklyn. As the years pass, the soundtrack transcends the details and minutiae of its creation or even its raison d'etre. It’s become something else, and it keeps on becoming something else all the time.

On July 12th 1979, there was an event in Comiskey Park in Chicago. It was called “Disco Demolition Night”. It was designed to mark the Day That Disco Died. But railing against anything, regardless of intention, shows that it still has the power to trigger an emotional response. Piles of records were blown up. There were riots and arrests. An indirect side-effect of the event even cost the Chicago White Sox a big game due to forfeit.

Blowing up records doesn’t work. Because music doesn’t really exist in the grooves of an LP, or in the coded 1s and 0s on your computer’s hard drive. That’s just the medium. It isn’t the thing. Because the music really lives in our minds, where it can be anything we want it to be, whether we love it or hate it.

 
No music died that night. I can prove it. Case in point: Another son of Chicago, Barack Obama. In late 2008, during one of his presidential debate rehearsals, one of the lights blew, flickering on and off like a strobe light in Tony Manero’s beloved 2001 Odyssey. Standing quietly at the podium, under his breath, the 44^th President of the United States began to sing the Trammps’ “Disco Inferno.” Burn, baby, burn…

See? The music never changes. The context always does. Saturday Night Fever has defied trends and fashion long enough to become part of the pop culture establishment. If you endure for long enough, rightly or wrongly, you get branded a “classic”. Who’d have imagined 30 years on that the music and images would be referenced like they were in the 2005 family animation Madagascar with Marty the zebra strutting like Travolta, the Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive high on the soundtrack.

And Saturday Night Fever doesn’t just travel forwards in time from 1977, it echoes backwards into the past too. Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven” is a wah-wah remodelling of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, believed to have been written between 1804 and 1808. In the 2008 documentary Man on Wire, A Fifth of Beethoven pops up again over footage of 1974 New York and the story of Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk between the towers of the World Trade Center. From Vienna to Brooklyn in the space of a few short centuries…

And as much as Saturday Night Fever has become the emblem of all that was good and bad about disco, it arrived at a time when the whole disco fad was starting to wind down. The phenomenon ended up giving disco one last surge of life, didn’t it? Did Saturday Night Fever decisively kill disco forever? Or is it one of the only genuinely enduring pop culture artefacts that is going to survive from that era?

Not just an emblem of a time or a movement. It’s bigger than that, too. At the post-9/11 Grammys, the Bee Gees Stayin’ Alive played over footage of the towers of the World Trade Center. A song about growing up as a scrappy rebellious Brooklynite becomes an anthem about defying terrorism. It doesn’t matter what it’s supposed to mean. It can mean anything you want it to.

And the weird contextual disconnect was there from the very beginning. The music was already at odds with the story of the film. Saturday Night Fever must be one of the most fondly misremembered movies ever made, conjuring memories of dancing and joy. But that’s not right. It's a harsh and brutal coming-of-age story about rootless city kids who live to fight and fuck, and who can't see beyond the next Saturday night. No one listens to the album thinking about black eyes or gang rapes. They think of white polyester suits and glitter balls and a multi-coloured, brightly lit phantasmagoric nightclub.

Considering that it is first and foremost dance music, it’s accumulated a reputation as easy listening pap - elevator music (or should that be “elevator shoe” music?) which, come to think of it, would be a fitting tag as Saturday Night Fever's credibility has gone Up and Down so many times over the decades.

The book would be structured to look at the album and the strong emotions and responses it has garnered, both positive and negative, and how the image of the album has altered many times down the passing years, using anecdotal and historical context to make my points. Ultimately, it would be a book about an album that works as personal memory and history and collective memory and history. And it’s never the same thing for long, or even in the same place.

A Truly Free Pyschopathology

2012 is going to be the year that Battlefield Internet really ramps up, waged primarily on two fronts: piracy and privacy. The opening salvos have already been fired. SOPA. PIPA. The revelation that Twitter has been selling archived tweets to marketing companies. The introduction of Google's policy changes at the beginning of March. The death of Megaupload and the rise of the darknet. Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.

We have a symbiotic, sometimes even parasitic relationship with the internet. (If I couch this in terms that would normally be used to describe a living, breathing organism, then that's entirely deliberate.) We adapt to the way it changes, and it in turn changes again to the way in which we've adapted. Sometimes, we're the frog in the pan of slowly boiling water, and we don't always know when we should jump before it's too late. Or, in other words:

"People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are." 
- Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (8th January 2010)

Maybe it's just me, but I find that terrifying and depressing in roughly equal measure, particularly the chilly, clinical ambiguity of the phrase "current social norms".

Which (clumsily) brings me to the book I'm reading at the moment. Twenty-six years after George Orwell introduced us to doublethink and the Ministry of Truth, and two years before Judge Dredd's Mega Cities and Block Wars started to appear for 8p Earth Money Every Saturday, there was J.G. Ballard's High-Rise, which, in the light of current shifts in our online landscape, seems more freakishly prescient than ever: 

"...they had little chance of success, precisely because their opponents were people who were content with their lives in the high-rise, who felt no particular objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and data-processing organizations, and if anything welcomed these invisible intrusions, using them for their own purposes. These people were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth-century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed.

Alternatively, their real needs might emerge later. The more arid and affectless life became in the high-rise, the greater the possibilities it offered. By its very efficiency, the high-rise took over the task of maintaining the social structure that supported them all. For the first time it removed the need to repress every kind of anti-social behaviour, and left them free to explore any deviant or wayward impulses. It was precisely in these areas that the most important and most interesting aspects of their lives would take place. Secure within the shell of the high-rise like passengers on board an automatically piloted airliner, they were free to behave in any way they wished, explore the darkest corners they could find. In many ways, the high-rise was a model of all that technology had done to make possible the expression of a truly 'free' pyschopathology." 
- J.G. Ballard - High-Rise (1975)

The Back of Beyond

As 2011 inexorably wound down to its final days and notifications of notable deaths pinged up on Twitter on an almost daily basis, at some point after Harry Morgan and before Bert Schneider, we collectively learned of the loss of writer and journalist Gilbert Adair. I have to admit that I had never been a huge fan of Adair's writing but, prompted by a lovely obituary in the latest issue of Sight & Sound magazine, I rooted around for my copy of Adair's book Flickers: An Illustrated Celebration of 100 Years of Cinema. I'm glad that I did.

Published in 1995 to mark the centenary of cinema, Adair selected 100 images - one per year, from 1895's La Sortie des usines Lumière to Tim Burton's Ed Wood in 1994 - and wrote an accompanying essay. Browsing through the book yesterday, I found myself with a new appreciation of Adair's writing. Joni Mitchell nailed it - we don't know what we got 'til it's gone. Idiosyncratic and defiantly personal film journalism is an increasingly rare commodity. I've banged on before about my frustration with the overpowering glut of generic, homogenous words sprayed online as just another cog in the marketing machine. Critical rigour and independent opinions have become subservient to the demands of Search Engine Optimization and picking the carcasses of dull press releases.

But Adair's writing is imbued with a love of film. As he writes in his introduction, film is "flickering like a great fire in the grate of the cinema screen, around which millions of us have warmed ourselves, gazed dreamily into the flames and occasionally got burnt".

I mentioned in my last post that I had watched 290 movies last year. The last one I watched was Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. Riffling the pages of Adair's book, I serendipitously discovered that he had selected that very film to represent the year 1956. It was a fine way to cap the end of 2011. This is what he had to say about it. Thank you, Gilbert Adair, and take it away. The floor is yours...

Two men sitting in an automobile. Two men outfitted in the felt hats and boxy, double-breasted suits and soberly immaculate collars and ties that, for most of us, have come to evoke the Hollywood cinema of the thirties, forties and fifties rather than any real, still recollectable time or place. This photograph, I admit, isn't "interesting"; its composition isn't eye-fetching; it might have served indiscriminately to epitomize scores of thrillers and dramas and police procedural movies made in Hollywood between, let's say, 1930 and 1960. Precisely. For it's perhaps time to acknowledge the extent to which the textural specificity of the American cinema is contingent upon what might be called its "urbanality". Putting it more crudely, it's all very well talking about The Ten Commandments and Gone With the Wind and Casablanca and Rio Bravo, but what going to the cinema during those years really meant was watching near-identical men in near-identical suits and hats sitting in near-identical apartment rooms and bars and black, bulbous automobiles; was watching movies that were, paradoxically, like nothing so much as books - books without illustrations. And therein, in a way which is difficult to communicate to the uninitiated but which no true cinéphile will ever need to have explained, can be found the medium's metallic poetry.

The film in question is Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and the two men are Sidney Blackmer and Dana Andrews. Its plot is exactly that - a plot - hatched by the newspaper publisher played by Blackmer and the journalist played by Andrews, a plot whereby the latter will deliberately implicate himself in an unsolved murder in order to demonstrate the ease with which circumstantial evidence can lead to wrongful conviction. There is, I should add, an eleventh-hour twist; but it's a twist only until the instant it's revealed; in the very next instant one realizes that the film could not have ended any other way. Jacques Rivette called it a theorem, a tabula rasa. It is, in any event, the rigorous purification of a genre to which Lang and certain of his fellow émigrés, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger and Edgar Ulmer, had given of their best: the film noir.

There is, though, a most curious paradox in the film noir. I yield to no one, as they say, in my love of the genre and I recognize the pertinence of much that has been written about its inherent pessimism. Yet I must confess to never having found that pessimism very convincing. No one in the forties ever went to see a film noir with a sense that he was about to submit to a harrowing but salutary dose of existential nihilism (a nihilism that isn't just a matter of critical interpretation but is quite perceptible in both narrative detail and visual texture), just as no one ever need recoil from watching one on television now. Films noirs are great fun, for God's sake, great fun primarily because they never really do persuade one that the despair that they portray is ultimately a truth of the human condition - in the way that, at least while one is experiencing it, a film by Bergman does, or a novel by Kafka, or an opera by Berg. For most of us, I suspect, their fabled negativity is precisely that: a negative (in the photographic sense of the word) of the fundamental American positivity and optimism. The people who made them (and who were usually, as I've said, European exiles) loved America, just as did the people who watched them. Secretly, I believe, they were not even meant to convince.

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, however, was meant to convince. As has seldom been the case in Hollywood's history, it's a film, a visually drab and unyielding film, about absolutely nothing else but its own subject. Two men in hats and suits sit in an automobile and hatch a plot, two men whose white faces and crisp white shirts stand out against the enveloping darkness like the white chalkings of a mathematical formula on a blackboard, a tableau noir.

Six Minutes To Midnight

Hello, 2012! Before I start biting large bloody chunks out of the New Year, let's nail the coffin lid down on the year just gone.

2010 was a tough year for me that culminated in a perfect storm of banal details (cumulative long-term sleep deprivation; an icy pavement; sub-zero temperatures and a quiet street) that collided to almost end me. I headed into 2011 recovering from my near-death experience feeling tired, gun-shy and burned out. So, for the first time, instead of beginning a year with plans and schemes and wishlists of life goals to be accomplished, I decided to try a different tack. I was trying to do too much. I needed to streamline and simplify my life. I needed a year to lie fallow, retrench and regroup. And that's how I began 2011 with a complete lack of ambition. That way, I thought, I'd have a smoother ride through the coming year.

Well, that didn't work. 2011 was just as tough. Maybe tougher. I may have wanted to take it easy, but the world had other plans.

What I did do in 2011 was sit through 290 movies. Some were great, more were bad, most were forgettable. The important part of that last sentence is "most were forgettable". I wasted time. I have absolutely no intention of sitting through anywhere near as many movies in the next twelve months. Time to stop being a passive consumer of largely disposable entertainment. Less observation, more participation. Turning the tap off on the input, flicking the dial to ramp up the output.

I'm going to be 40 this year. I've got things to do. Let's get on with it.

Wake Up and Smell the Rice

Today, the Criterion Collection are releasing DVD and Blu-ray editions of Seijun Suzuki’s delirious masterpieces Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill.

Would you like some reading material to accompany this visual treat? Of course you would. Good News: In 2004, Wallflower Press published 24 Frames - The Cinema of Japan and Korea, which includes my essay on Branded to Kill. I’d love to point you to a couple of places where you could buy this book, but...

Bad News: A bit of rudimentary Googling reveals that it appears that this volume is now out-of print. All is not lost, though, because...

Good News: I did, however, discover that my chapter is available in its entirety on Google Books. In fact, almost all of the book is there for your reading pleasure. There’s a lot of good stuff in that book from people far smarter and more reputable than me.  I don’t claim to understand the whys and wherefores of Google Books, so I can’t explain why you can read the whole of my chapter on Branded to Kill, but not a single word of my later chapter on Battle Royale.

I’m desperately trying to avoid the usual authorial caveats about material I wrote almost a decade ago. You know the kind of thing I mean. The bits that I re-read that made me cringe, or where I spotted a different way of saying things that were more insightful or useful. Oh well. That book is receding some way off in my rear-view mirror now. Dive in and browse away by clicking here. Enjoy!