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Sunday 16th March 2008
How to read a film: No Country For Old Men
NOTE: CONTAINS SPOILERS
This is a bit late but, due to some surprisingly hostile reactions to the Coen Brothers’ latest feature film, No Country For Old Men, I’ve decided to expand my comments at Louis P’s.
Bloggers have been vitriolic about the movie, accusing it of a range of crimes from harbouring right-wing politics to cinematic ineptitude. I’ve now seen it twice and I have to take issue with both these charges.
The story about the deadly pursuit of drug money across the Mexican US border is framed by the narration of Sheriff Lamarr, Tommy Lee Jones’s ageing police officer, one of the “old men” of a bygone age who realises there is no place left for him in the ugly new soulless world shaping up around him.
It’s based on Cormac McCarthy’s book which I’ve only skimmed but which everyone seems to agree has been faithfully rendered by Joel and Ethan Coen. Synopses of the novel describe it as being about hazard, chance and fate. While this theme is present in the film, there’s another that deepens the abstract notion and roots it in the changing political and social circumstances of Bush’s America. This raises the story above the level of a mere play-off between the "trailer trash" hero Llewlyn Moss (Josh Brolin) and hitman Anton Chigurh: an existential hero who believes he can change his crummy destiny and a villain who not only believes in fate but is convinced of his own role as its agent.
We’re all affected by our environment – artists can’t escape this as they need to crank their antennae to maximum sensitivity. It’s always fascinating to see artists who set out to do one thing, and say quite another. Balzac is a famous case in point — outwardly, right-wing and reactionary, his writing takes a truthful look at humanity that draws the reader to some fairly progressive conclusions about the grim state of their societies despite the novelist's intentions. Screen adaptations often add something of the artistic vision of the filmmaker – otherwise, why bother? It’s admirable the way director Mary Herron flushed out the criticism of American capitalism implicit in Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho: the author not able to reject totally the rewards of the consumerism he so enjoys.
The Coens may well have done something similar for McCarthy’s novel if, as some have asserted, he never intended such a reading. Although, Annie Proulx would demur as she describes McCarthy’s oeuvre as being the “ongoing study of a burning American rage and how common that rage has become.”
One of the achievements of No Country For Old Men is the creation of a powerful screen monster, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), one with all morality stripped away: some insist this isn’t intended as a political statement but it is hard to see this figure as not reflecting the new pitiless phase capitalism is entering. We know what imperialism is capable of abroad, but now even its own relatively pampered western civilians are coming under the boot as the benign mask of the system is ripped off. And even loveable heroes of the conventional story may not survive this onslaught.
This, the Coen Bros are saying, is the cold bleak reality of the world we now inhabit. There is no room for sentimentality, ideals and fellow feeling - these belong to the old men like Tommy Lee Jones who are a dying breed. To Anton Chigurh, a “living prophet of destruction”, it’s all numbers, a warped logic, a person’s life decided on the toss of a coin.
Chigurh, in his relentless cold cruelty and horror, is a force of nature. His rival hitman, Woody Harrelson’s Carson Wells, compares him to “bubonic plague”. Air is his element, his chosen method of dispatch, but the means are all human productions. A cattle-killer. Perfect! In one scene, where he’s stealing from a pharmacy, he’s shot unblinking against the explosive flames of his method of distraction. There’s a precursor in the relentless killing machines of The Terminator - but this monster is entirely human, distorted by capitalist imperatives. And he does love his money.
The filmmaking is supremely effective. Note the way the Coen Bros reverse the order of how much of the horror of the killings you see – reducing it event by event to produce maximum psychological mayhem instead of building to a visual climax. They set this up beautifully as if they were winding up an elastic band in our heads, releasing it in the final chilling moments so that we do the work. And it’s all the more vivid for that.
In a reversal of the usual form, they start with the after-effects of a drug-deal slaughter – humans and animals decaying in the hot southern US sun. Then we are shown the process in the most detailed drawn out killing. It’s of a minor character, the police officer, someone we don’t know and for whom we care little or nothing. Slowly and painfully, his life ebbs away as Chigurh strangles him while communing hypnotically with the deep dark forces driving him.
The random killing of the car driver is seen in gory detail using a captive bolt stunner, a cattle device using compressed air. As we get closer to the fate of the protagonist, we need to see less and less, as it’s starting to take place in our imagination and we fill in the gaps better than any closed-ended film images could do.
Following more crimo wipe-outs by Chigurh, there’s another break with the expected norm. The protagonist’s killing is by the drug criminals, not by nemesis Chigurh, and takes place offscreen with the added touch of the dead woman bystander in the pool.
This has led to some of the shrillest outcries in the blogosphere. Storytelling convention dictates that the worst thing that can happen to Llewlyn Moss is that he fails in his quest to keep the money and is killed. But the Coens ratchet up the horror beyond this. If that’s the worst, then what’s the very worst - what some in film have called “the negation of the negation”, to borrow a term that will have others reaching for their guns?
Yes, they could have had a mundane shoot-out with Chigurh spectacularly killing Moss. But this isn’t solely what the film is about. This is a world that turns on its head our notion of who is heroic, who deserves to die or survive, and all the rest that our cultured enlightenment brains tell us is right. Under the new order, heroes die pathetically while the juggernaut monster destroys innocence. Chigurh reaches Moss beyond the grave by killing his wife and doesn’t even care. The hero has failed, not only to keep the money, but to save his Beloved. The story doesn’t stop with his death but pursues him beyond the grave — that’s horror.
And now Chigurh is abroad in the world to continue his murderous spree.
Darfur, Katrina/New Orleans, Iraq - these are all places where the rule book has been ripped up. And it’s coming to a location near us.
By the time we get to the climactic death of innocence in Chigurh’s pointless, vindictive murder of Llewlyn’s wife, Carla Jean, all we need to see is the tiny vain gesture as he steps out of the house after the event — and he checks his expensive boots. I found this such a profoundly upsetting moment. This is not an open end as some have claimed. The Coens build relentlessly to this moment. Once she refuses to call the coin toss, she’s sealed her fate - Chigurh sees himself merely as an instrument of that fate with no choice himself. Checking the boots tells you everything about what has just happened.
Even worse, we now know that this was a bloody killing from what’s been set up before, and it’s not even a bloodless strangling. This is a fastidious killer who doesn’t like to make a mess with blood and certainly doesn’t want it on his boots (ostrich, according to the book). Her life is simply something he stepped in. Despite our hopes, he shows no mercy towards the woman who has lost her mother, whose husband is now dead (so revenge isn’t the motivation), and who now stands alone in the world. Chigurh is a juggernaut that rolls on with no sense of fairness, truth, justice and the rest of the malarky we’ve believed is our right since the the dawn of capitalism. He derives no pleasure, no satisfaction – he embodies the monstrousness of the bureaucrat. He is only doing his job. Like the cancer that killed Carla Jean's mother, Chigurh has one single pitiless function — to kill without sentiment.
We’ve seen a similar character in the Coen brothers’ movies before — the unstoppable evil force of destruction embodied by John Goodman’s Charlie Meadows in Barton Fink.
This scene has also led to tantrums in cyberspace, with some insisting that she wasn’t killed, and claims that Chigurh may well have shown mercy. To them I say: wake up, sunshine. What film have you been watching?
Let’s suppose that, as some critics would have preferred, the Coens had shown her murder. Think of any gory horror permutation of images we’ve already seen in the cinema. Close up of her face? His pleasure? Blood? Brutality? We’ve already seen depictions of violence in this very film. What would have been gained? More numbing images? Yeah yeah, we’ve seen it all before. This way it takes place in the head, not on the screen. That’s masterful. They’re trying to show us a new world dawning and requires a whole new vocabulary.
In answer to the charge of nihilism, I would say that to so thoroughly miss the point of what the Coens have achieved is nothing short of flat-out pitiful. Yes, Carla Jean Moss loses her life, but she wins the argument. Even when faced with her own extinction, she has choice. Chigurh takes her life, but not her soul.
The film is pessimistic, but not entirely so. Chigurh is, after all, wounded in another random accident, so he’s not all-powerful. Carla Jean remains defiant at the end. Even though she will be killed, she refuses to play his game and therefore she dies a heroine, refusing to beg for the mercy she knows will not be forthcoming.
Her initial attempts to reach his humanity and reason with him are rebuffed with warped logic predicated on Moss’s failure to return the money, getting himself killed instead.
“You don’t have to hurt me”.
“No. But I gave my word to your husband. He had the opportunity to save you but he used it to save himself.”
“You don’t have to do this.”
“People always say the same thing.”
He offers he the chance to win her life on the toss of the coins.
“This is the best I can do. Call it!”
"No, I ain’t gonna call it. The coins don’t have no say. It’s just you.”
Carla Jean keeps her dignity, is defiant to the end, and wins the moral victory by not playing his game. You may be in front of a fascist death squad but raising your fist declares victory of your spirit.
Hope for humanity continues in the boy who shows concern and offers his shirt out of kindness. Even if you personally fail against the predations of capitalism, as many are feeling, there’s still hope of the spirit and a new generation. Some things never die. It’s a wonderful positive message of hope and optimism to see us through one of the darkest passages of human history that’s getting darker by the minute.
If you’re still not convinced that this is at least partially a critique of capitalism, look at the way fate is settled – not with sticks or cards, but with coins. Could that be capitalism with its vice-like grip on our lives telling us through various ways that we ultimately have no power? As the human being and not the force, Chigurh suffers from hubris and even he is subordinate to chance - hence the crash at the end.
The Coens have taken a snapshot of where we are now and presented it to us in a way that doesn’t numb us like a lot of the cynical fare being served up, but shocks us into seeing where we are so that maybe we can do something about it. And in that respect it is to me a deeply humane film.
Sunday 9th March 2008
Lady of Letters: New Internationalist and SL Magazine
If you've been wondering where I've been these past few weeks, I'm pleased to tell you that I've been picked up by two publications with the view to my contributing to the gaiety of their readers.
The first is the New Internationalist which has taken me on as a columnist for their quarterly supplement, The Action ("Campaign news and events - supermarkets, Burma, penguins"). Check out my debut column in the March issue where I get punchy about China Panic in the year of the Beijing Olympics. "China - leading the world in toy manufacturing." Take that how you will ...
The second is the English language Chinese glossy, SL Magazine. I'm their Gurl Abaht Tahn, taking in the sights of the British capital from my own unique perspective as inside outsider. And anything else that takes my fancy.
As you'd expect, I will be full, frank and fearless in my observations. My integrity is sacrosanct. Jewels, holidays, expensive dinners, Johnny Depp - chuck them all at me and watch me remain true to my principles. No, please, do test me. G'wan, I dares ya!
Seduce me with a supermarket sweep at Cyberdog. Tempt me with your foul finery. Offer me Swarovski crystal and I shall point out that they make gunsights for evil imperialist forces. Gift me with diamonds and I'll tie you up, jam your eyes open and make you watch Blood Diamond. Snowdrift my mantelpiece with a blizzard of invitations to the swankiest of events or the finest products and you'll find me steadfast in my incorruptibility.
But I'm warning you, one hint of free Creme de la Mer samples and I'm a goner.
So, in advance, pay heed to everything I write on all topics other than the fabulosity of the aforementioned wondercreme. For in that I reserve the right to be as venal as any other journo with their junkets and bulging goody-bags full of corporate baksheesh.
Remember - I cannot be bought, only rented. For skin products.
Coming soon ...
No Country For Old Men, guest posts from Babeuf on The Wicker Man, sticking the shiv into The King And I and other orientalism.
Sunday 3rd February 2008
Movie watch: 55 Days At Peking
I suppose I should be breaking out the Mao Tai and celebrating in style as this glorious annus mirabilis of the Beijing Olympics is, so I'm told, my year.
And about time, too. After a lifetime of invisibility and stuck with a status somewhere between ninja manicurist and evil opium warlord, British Born and Anglo Chinese like me are set to be in yer face for the whole of 2008.
This means the TV schedulers, lazy and stoopid, falling over themselves to make the most of this ready-made theme, and dusting off the archives for repeat heaven. Yes, an hour after you've seen one, you'll be wanting another.
Already this week we've had the rarely aired Love Is A Many Splendoured Thing from the book by Han Suyin, and today, at nearly three hours but feeling like the entire eight weeks, 55 Days At Peking, a cold-war era jingoistic wet dream starring skullhead Charlton Heston, he of the "cold dead hand" and hero of the US gun lobby.
As there'll be lots of this rubbish coming thick and fast with no taste and discrimination exercised (oh, okay, lots of discrimination but not exactly the way I wished) you'll be needing a bit of orientation (har, har) around the subject.
Cometh the hour, cometh the blog - I guess that's me, then.
So ...
55 Days At Peking, directed by Nicholas Ray who should've known better and was sacked from the job for his pains. (And briefly seen in a cameo role as the wheelchair-bound American ambassador.)
Set in 1900, 55 Days purports to tell the story of the Boxer Rebellion, when indiginous Chinese made a last effort to get the rapacious foreign powers out of their own country. Eleven imperialist nations occupied major chunks of China with 13 out of 18 Chinese provinces under foreign control. The diplomats found themselves holed up in the Peking legation compound awaiting relief by their armies with nothing but Chuck Heston's US Major Lewis, David Niven's Sir Arthur Robertson, and Ava Gardner's Baroness Natasha Ivanoff (as the romantic interest) between them and the Yellow nightmare.
Now I know that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, but it is interesting to unpack the process by which a noble aim is turned into an evil act, and heroes made villains.
The only background you get to the rebellion is when the opening narration tells us that 100 million Chinese are hungry and that the famine is fanning the winds of discontent. Nothing else. Nothing about the British Opium Wars from 1839 when, as top dog in the imperialist pack, Britain transformed what had been an upper class vice in China into a nationwide calamity when they forced China to import cheap Bengal opium to offset the crippling balance of trade, with such august institutions as the Midlands Bank (now HSBC) and the East India Trade Company helping to bring China to its knees.
The perfectly fair statement by sinister wily Prince Tuan (Robert Helpmann) that, if the Chinese Boxer rebels destroy the foreign forces, it shows that China is no longer helpless; "It will be the beginning of freedom," is turned on its head.
This laudable objective is undermined by the constant reminder that these heathens, being subhuman and degenerate, have no right to the same treasured rights as you and me. OK, maybe not me, 'cause I'm a sinister wily oriental, but you get my drift.
So off we go on a trip showing us exactly how lowly and undeserving the antagonists are. We know that one of the themes of the film is what makes a person "whole" and what is incomplete; what is human and what is Other. To the injured Mancunian squaddie lying in the makeshift hospital, the prospect of losing his leg terrifies him as the worst thing in the world: "I don't want to live as half a man," he begs.
And here they are, surrounded and about to be swamped by such half-men.
To the Chinese of this world, life is not valued except in cash terms; a Chinese life is worth 20 dollars, while the tortured English priest is priced at 40 dollars. Interestingly, the priest is strapped crucifix-style to a water wheel by sinister wily Chinese Boxers (this is Christian values under assault by pagan scum, after all), and plunged into the water until he drowns. Not like waterboarding, then, as used by the CIA.
The sinister pitiless Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, played by Flora Robson, orders two lots of unjust executions. General Yung Lo (Leo Genn) attempts to halt the first in his best British thesp accent, the execution of a Chinese Colonel who has tried to impose order on Prince Tuan's favoured Boxers. Despite his superior argument, having a somewhat rational western mind to go with his perfect diction, she insists the victim be executed for the petty "crime" of making them quarrel.
The second incident is a mass beheading of Boxers who have just carried out the killing of the German minister at the behest of fiendish Prince Tuan. They may be ours, but even our friends are expendible. The Dowager Empress tells Sir Arthur, "Chinese justice is swift and thorough." To which he replies, "Where's the guilt - those who wield the sword, or those who give the command?" because the British care about these things, and Sir Arthur, such a delicate civilised soul, is shocked despite being a military man. (Ask Craig Murray, former ambassador to Uzbekistan until he tried to put these principles into practice.)
Of course the Brits never carried out executions and massacres, did they? Amritsar is a whole 19 years in the future, and they ruled Empire with kid gloves. Yeah, right.
The Brits have much to teach: "China is learning new arts of peace from the West." And then watch how Sir Arthur's oily charm delivers a threat as a compliment. Having contemptuously kicked away the cushion on which he is expected to kneel in the Imperial court, he tells the Dowager Empress, "China's greatest virtue is her patience. ... If not, then the blood of millions will be shed."
He continues; "I have come here with the Truth." Being a heathen, she tells him, "We reject your truth," and orders them all to leave the country. Ooh, now we're not even occupying the same world of perception. We ain't in Kansas any more.
Meanwhile, as the Boxers are marauding, "killing every white man" and Chinese Christians in numbers that I am guessing would be dwarfed if Britain plunges the country into a major armed conflict, the westerners are humanised and made compassionate and worthy of compassion at every opportunity. Ye gods, how different these big-nose white devil invaders are. They care about the enemy as well as their own side, they introspect, they question themselves, they have God on their side.
Major Lewis urges his men to treat the Chinese as human; "Pay your money and don't expect any free samples."
In turn, Major Lewis is reprimanded by Sir Arthur for the death of the Boxer - who was about to shoot Lewis dead.
Fearful that her injured son - the little innocent Tommy - is somewhere in "An enormous, empty Chinese limbo," Lady Sarah Robertson crumples while her man grapples with the Big Questions; Whose ambitions is he serving? Who gains? How many children must die? Well may he ask. Sir Arthur's rather anodyne conclusion is, "The pain is not yours alone," and he is rewarded with the observation by his wife that "Only an honest man would ask such a question." These are, after all, the marks of the civilised man.
And these civilised men have no defences against the barbarism waiting outside the compound except for their books piled and squeezed into makeshift barricades.
"Don't go through there, Ma'am," the young soldier advises the Baroness just before he is cruelly cut down by a sniper. "There are Chinese on the other side." There are, actually, Chinese on both sides, but who's counting?
All the representatives of the foreign powers are thus depicted as human, rounded, full with an inner life. Even the bloody Japanese officer, Colonel Shiba, is played by a proper Japanese actor (the "delicious", according to some, Juzo Itami) who happens to be dashingly attractive unlike the wily sinister Chinese. Did the filmmakers not understand Japanese history in China? Good grief!
There are good Chinese, though, represented by the mixed race Teresa, a pretty eleven year old daughter of a US captain and a Chinese woman, now dead. Teresa has been deposited in a Chinese orphanage for the duration, where she seems to have no relation to her peers, but pines for her white daddy who has promised to take her back "home" to Illinois. She lives for his rare appearances in Peking but, unbeknown to her, Daddy is having second thoughts. He tells Major Lewis, "They'd treat her like a freak back home." Lewis agrees; she is "better off with her own kind, " even though she has no mother.
When Captain Marshall - her father - dies, Major Lewis is transformed from a soldier merely doing his job into the father of the spirit of the new post-imperial China as embodied by Teresa; the good, free, non-threatening Chinese spawned by our side (again, not me, but, you know ...). As the priest tells Lewis, "The only language a child understands - love. Every man is the father of every child."
Only two years before making this film, Heston was again transformed, this time in El Cid, from man into myth, when his cold dead corpse is strapped to his horse and sent flying through the enemy, scattering them and winning Spain from the swarthy heathen scum. Chuck's good at these roles.
So, there you have it. China as a pretty loveable malleable child in need of rescue by the paternal force of US imperialism. At the end, as Lewis is riding out of the city at the head of his troops, he bends down to Teresa: "Here, take my hand". And she rides off on the back of his horse - presumably into a future where she'll learn fast, trounce him at manufacturing, and poison his dogs and his kids with tainted pet-food, toothpaste and leaded toys. Heh, heh! And serves him right.
Don't ask me about the Ava Gardner/Baroness Natasha Ivanoff storyline with its diamond necklace MacGuffin thread that goes nowhere. The budding romance between her and the Major is strangely underdeveloped with more passion occurring between ol' granite-jaw and Sir Arthur, than with her. (Appropriate, though, as the British Foreign Office has always had the experience and the brutality to keep one of the biggest empires afloat and has played a leading backroom role in US adventures. Don't forget Britain's little lesson with the dodgy dossier and Niger uranium when the nature of the US/British relationship came to light.)
As soon as she admits to shagging a Chinese General you know she's doomed. And, indeed, she dies from a Boxer bullet while performing heroics and bringing opiates for the wounded and fruit for the children. How’s this for classic dialogue?
“I want the drugs and a wagonload of fruit for the children.”
Hmm, recreation and roughage - just my sort of heroine. Or heroin. Which is why it was an eleven year old girl on the back of the Major's horse and not the glamorous transgressive Baroness. The tabloids would have a field day - unpack that, Rebecca Wade!
On one level, 55 Days is just another siege movie. It could have been cowboys against Indians, or plantation owners versus African tribes. Here it's brave white soldiers versus the yellow hordes and their fiendish wave attacks representing the hostile Other.
On another, it's a 1963 Cold War epic set on dehumanising an ideological enemy in crude terms.
It boggles my fine mind to think that as recently as 1963, when this ponderous bit of colonialist propaganda was made, Hollywood was still putting western actors in yellow-face and epicanthic eyelids.
In the villains' corner, Flora Robson, who has one of the biggest schnozzles in cinematic history, is the cunning and sinister Dowager Empress, Chinese not being best known for noses the size of Beachy Head. Arch fiend Prince Tuan is played by the ballet maestro Robert Helpmann with an accent ... what the hell was that accent? A eunochoidal RADA twang via Widow Twanky.
However, the more human the character (read - sympathetic to the cause of the white westerners), the less their vowels were in an uproar. Hence, Leo Genn's General Yung Lo, who wants to curb the Boxers, is allowed to thesp away like a Saturday matinee in Leatherhead.
Finally, that opium.
The doctor struggles to look after the wounded with no alcohol, iodine or painkillers. They are "back in the dark ages".
The Doctor Han tells the Baroness, now working selflessly as his nurse, "We are in the land of opium and there are no opiates."
Perhaps he should have asked his dealer. I would have tried Sir Arthur, myself. He looks like a man who knows.
Channel 5 followed 55 Days with a Jackie Chan movie. This was not adequate compensation.
A big thank you to Babeuf for enduring this pomp-fest with me and who will have a thing or two to say about The King And I ...
Wednesday 16th January 2008
James Marsters of the Universe: Torchwood returns
This is what telly would look like if you gave an infinite number of internet sex-pests an infinite number of keyboards.
Thank Who that someone at the BBC remembered to administer a big dose of Ritalin to Russell T Grant's team for the new Torchwood, turning the hysteria down to "screeching" from 11, which is where the dial was stuck throughout season one.
I still had to check the script wasn't by Julian Clary, though, what with the rogue Time Agent, played to great media fanfare by the lovely James Marsters of Buffy fame, embodying sex 'n' death and having to utter lines like, "Mine's smaller but it lasts longer", speculating on Captain Jack's "tourist entrance", and in the strangest mano-a-mano fuck-fight since a naked Alan Bates and Ollie Reed pummelled themselves silly in "Women In Love", arguing over who had been the "wife" in a two-week romance that felt life five years due to a space-time-continuum rift wormhole thingy. (Heh, heh, she said, "wormhole".)
Make no mistake: this was bitchslapping on a Grande Dame scale.
I was glad to see they've given up trying to turn Owen into a sex-stud. Among all these pretty people, Owen's sole function seems to be that of the plainer variety of male porno-flick stars (the tubby hirsute Ron Jeremy being a case in point, so I am told); to show their punters that ugly guys can get laid, too.
It may have had all the sexual tension of a Donald McGill seaside postcard (we British do saucy so much better than sex) but with at least the makings of a coherent plotline, it was followable. One of the climaxes (oh gawd!), when they were about to be blown up was marred by James asking, "Anyone fancy an orgy?". Subsequently moved to take a vow of celibacy by the relentless shoving down my throat (stoppit!) of the writer's single-entendres, I managed to tune out the smut flying thick and fast (oh, Jeez!) and enjoy pretty James in his pirate get-up.
Naming and shaming, the script was by Chris Chibnall; direction by Ashley Way.
See why I need Celine and Julie Go Boating?
Sunday 13th January 2008
Me and subtitled movies
Passive? Dumbed-down? Moi? I was pulled up short yesterday, when I realised my viewing life is jam-packed with Big Brother, its offshoots, and high-end/high-concept DVD drama sets (American). The last movie I saw at a cinema was a CGI cartoon - Beowulf. Ooh, dragons. The last subtitled film I saw and enjoyed immensely, without major martial arts stuff happening, was the the amazing Pan's Labyrinth directed by Guillermo Del Toro. And before that, a massive span of ten years since I saw the wonderful Ridicule which has a high old time dissing English "humour" and showing us how period drama should be made.
A new friend, let's call him "Babe", attempting to save my immortal soul from my cultural nose-dive along with the rest of the nation, presented me with a DVD of Celine and Julie Go Boating, a French film made in 1974 and directed by Jaques Rivette - in French! I mean, it's not in English or even American. I bet no-one gets shot or says "fuck" and "shit" every thirty seconds. Just the occasional "merde" which sounds so much classier - I suppose that's why our ancestors chose Anglo-Saxon, 'cause we rough types at the edge of the continent needed the catharsis and Romance is too romantic.
At three and a half hours, it's a terrifying ordeal for a girl like I to contemplate. The last marathon viewing I did was the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. And my mind even wandered with that. (Although I challenge anyone to follow the convolutions of the third movie. And if they did, kindly post bullet points here.)
But I've looked it up (on the net, natch!) and I see it's influenced Desperately Seeking Susan, and I reckon I can spot a bit of Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures in there, possibly the best female folie a deux movie evah!
So fellow culture-vulture Louise and I are planning an afternoon and evening (three and a half hours - remember?) of Celine and Julie.
As it's a lo-o-o-ong movie, I reckon it'll require an early start, and plenty provisions - it's gonna be a lengthy ride. It'll probably go like this:
Convene 1pm - have something to eat. Then movie.
1.45pm - something to eat to accompany the movie.
2.30pm - something to eat. Possibly Sara Lee cheesecake eaten straight from the freezer to allay subtitle anxiety. More movie.
3.15pm - we'll be feeling a bit peckish so something to eat plus film. Break open the crisps for a snack - must keep blood sugar up. Need fat to stay warm.
3.50pm - my eyes will be getting tired from reading the subtitles so some chocolate to freshen them up.
4.30pm - well, that's coming up for teatime, innit? Something to munch and watch the movie. Maybe cakes. People before profiteroles!
With breaks and reveries and checking up on the blogs we'll be hitting the halfway mark about now, so a little more refreshment and more movie.
By the end we'll be wanting dinner so we'll need a meal of some description. Perhaps a light roast. (Not in the Scottish politician/English footballer sense, I hasten to add.) And a bit later something hot to keep Louise warm for the journey home. My mother used to heat a brick in the oven and shove it in a sack when I had to go out into the cold and horrid. So we can do that.
All in all, I'm expecting a fab day's entertainment.
Friday 11th January 2008
How to get rich: Tony Blair calls in his debts
The wages of sin is money in the bank if you're a former Prime Minister.
I'm so incandescent I could light up north London after hearing the news that Blair has been given a $1 million per year job at JPMorgan, a US bank worth $1.5 trillion that has profited directly from the Iraq war. This blood money is on top of property deals, lecture circuits and book advances. Let's face it, it has never been in Blair's interest to jaw-jaw instead of war-war. Every cold destructive step he's taken has brought him and his greedy freeloading wife closer to the ranks of the super-rich whose lifestyles they so obviously covet.
I've been saying Blair's bought and paid for for ages. He's lied, toadied and brown-nosed his way to a fortune by way of war after war, and there are plenty of Daddy Warbucks out there grateful for overflowing coffers thanks to Tony.
Is it right that a British Labour Prime Minister should profit from his tenure in this way? He is set to become the richest PM in recent history.
The one thing that would get me cheering MP George Galloway to the rafters is if he did something useful like drag that grinning monster into court for war crimes.
To get Blair a $1 million per year job, it's cost the UK £10 billlion to date, over a thousand dead and injured British soldiers, and over a million dead Iraqis. Is it any wonder so many young people don't feel this is a world fit to live in?
STOP PRESS: JPMorgan has won the bid to run the new Trade Bank of Iraq, the consortium of 13 banks from 13 countries set up by the US in July which will have access to Iraqi oil and trade. Which countries benefit? Think of the governments that sent forces to aid the Allied war and that'll give you a clue.
Wednesday 9th January 2008
Hollywood loses balls, actors find theirs: Golden Globes cancelled
Is that poor wee bairn, solidarity, raising its orphan head over in the City of Angels? Astoundingly, actors are refusing to cross the striking writers' picket lines, meaning no designer frocks on loan, no goody bags and no awards ceremony as this year's Golden Globes is cancelled.
Instead, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the organisation that owns the Golden Globes Awards, will be announcing the winners at a Beverley Hilton press conference on Sunday when the event was scheduled to take place.
Being so used to posties and tube workers who defend their rights and their service against rapacious carpet-bagging privatisers being trashed in the media here in the UK, it quite brings a tear to my eye to see some fairly pampered talent sacrificing their spot in the limelight in support of the hard-working writers who think all this stuff up in the first place.
It's amazing that four lousy cents on a DVD is all it would take to make the writers happy and end the strike. But the studios seem intent on breaking the Writers Guild of America. Still, it could be worse. They could have a government bringing in draconian anti-strike legislation like Labour is attempting to do here. I still remember the slogan: only a slave may not withdraw their labour. And here's Labour demanding we call them "massa".
Call me an old romantic but I'll always be the starlet who slept with the writer - good luck guys.
Support is coming from all over as self-interest is superceded by principles. Joss Whedon, who gave the world Buffy The Vampire Slayer, is one of our generation's finest writers whose influence is felt in Britain from the Dr Who stable to Eastenders. He has many projects in the pipeline and yet he's encouraging his legion of fans to support the strike and take pizza and chocolate to the picket lines. Comfort as well as nutrients - now that's what I call a protest!
"None of the writers – or anyone – I’ve spoken to have ever heard of fans organizing and supporting a strike the way you guys have. Supporting our right not to entertain you. Seriously, that’s rare."
George Clooney denies masterminding the latest militancy, but scores a labour movement hat-trick by being a member of the actors', writers' and directors' unions. Wadda guy. Shame about his taking the Nestle shilling.
It's hard to think of the equivalent happening here.
Thankfully, this household is always a good ten years behind the current technology - I will miss the cathode ray tube - so we are never caught out buying the Wrong Stuff. I'm still hanging onto my favourite videos 'cause I don't entirely trust those shiny little discs. Assuming we survive the dystopian downturn headed our way, we'll probably be ready for our first plasma screen the day civilisation finally crumbles to dust. But at least there'll be writers to write about it.
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