I feel, in the words of Malcolm X as though I have been bamboozled, led astray and run amok. I refer, of course, to the trailer for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2009). When it first filtered out at the beginning of the summer, the Guardian devoted a blog post to it referring to it as one of the worst trailers ever made and it was difficult to disagree with that assessment at the time. Having just got rid of a government who resorted to arguing semantics when addressing allegations of torture, it seemed tasteless in the extreme to produce a film that seemed to be all about torture. Torture not as a necessity to save lives but torture as an expression of basic natural justice. Torture as funny and entertaining. The trailer even included Eli Roth, one of the founding fathers of the so-called ‘torture porn’ sub-genre. However, the film I saw is not about torture and it certainly isn’t about cartoonish violence and stylised action. It is a film about talking. Just talking. And therein lies its greatest successes as well as its greatest shortcomings.
Month / August 2009
REVIEW – Orphan (2009)
I went to see Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan over the weekend and found it to be a huge amount of fun. Firstly, because it has a script that is properly character-based and secondly, because it reminds me enormously of an old favourite : Curtis Hanson’s The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992).
THE ZONE has my review.
BG 18 – The Iron Cage of Fantasy : World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, Fable II
Futurismic have the 18th edition of my Blasphemous Geometries video game column.
It was an interesting column to write as it marks the first piece of sustained thinking I have done on the Fantasy genre in a little while. I was pleased to note that while my politics seem to be drifting leftwards, my attitude towards escapism has mellowed hugely. There was a time when I considered escapism to be a cowardly and childish retreat from the real world, but my views on it have changed markedly.
‘Fuck you Pay me’ – Money and the Arts
A few months ago, The Guardian’s pet right-wing columnist Simon Jenkins wrote a piece about funding for the arts. In his piece, Jenkins attacks the government for spending billions on high-end pieces of capital investment while the cut and thrust of British cultural life is mostly self-sustaining and subject to the laws of the marketplace. Jenkins wants us to take away from his piece that British cultural life does not need state funding but what I take away from it is the fact that the government has failed to focus on the right thing. A cultural life is not necessarily one based upon consumption of high-end artistic products such as the output of the Royal Opera House (which recently received a £2.4M recession bail out), but one based upon creation and participation. Which would benefit the most people? £2.4M so that the Royal Opera House can continue charging £60 instead of £80 for seats with only partial views of the stage or £2.4M for small theatre companies, amateur opera productions and magazines drawing attention to both? Culture is something that is there to be participated in. A healthy amateur scene not only gives future professionals a means of perfecting their crafts, it also makes it easier for people to try their hand at art and engage with it in a way other than through consumption.
The problem is that while scenes (whether they are theatrical, operatic, musical, artistic or anything else) are funded largely by good will, they do frequently depend upon people who demand rather more concrete remuneration than good will and social capital. These demands create over-heads. The higher the over-heads on artistic production, the greater the drain on good will. This leads to higher ticket prices, expensive membership subscriptions and greater and greater demands upon those people who are willing to contribute for the good of the scene. These demands are part of an attitude that can only be described as “Fuck you Pay Me”.
Mesrine : Killer Instinct (2008) – Only I Exist… and I’m Great
To a greater or less extent, we are all solipsists. We live our lives trapped in a prison of pure subjectivity, profoundly alienated not only from the real world but from the subjective experiences of other people. We assume that people think like us and that the external world is out there for us to perceive and interact with but we don’t know. Not in the same way that we know whether or not we are thinking or feeling pain. We infer, we assume, we project, we deduce, but we do not know. That which is out there is not as real as that which is in here. We all possess this instinct. An instinct that has inspired countless philosophical schools from classical scepticism through empiricism and the the socialised idealism of post-modernity. It also explains why the dominant currency of the humanities is phenomenological; feelings, emotions, beliefs and the self. To creative people in thrall to the solipsistic instinct, these mental constructs seem far more real and far more accessible than facts about the real world and so they are accorded more importance. An excellent example of the privileged position of the phenomenological is the form of the autobiography.
Most autobiographies do not try to invoke impersonal forces or neurological causality in their attempts to explain the author’s decisions or apparent personality quirks. Instead, most autobiographies are stories. Stories in which the author is the protagonist while the real people they encountered in their life become extras, side-kicks, love-interests and villains. These are the kinds of stories that we all tell ourselves when we think about our place in the world.
Jean-Francois Richet’s L’Instinct de Mort (2008) is perhaps the most formally honest screen adaptation of an autobiography you are ever likely to see. The film’s representation of the life of famed French criminal Jacques Mesrine fully embraces the solipsism of both the autobiography and its psychopathic protagonist by showing us a world in which Mesrine is the hero while everyone else is just set dressing.
Art House to Slaughter House – The Evolution of the French Horror Film
Videovista also have my extended essay on the history of French Horror film. Ostensibly a “10 Best…” list, I tried to explain how the current wave of French Horror films draw upon cinematical antecedents ranging from the gothic and exploitation to the properly art house. I have been slowly working on this for a couple of months but it is only in the last week or so that I managed to fashion a proper historical narative. Worth taking a look at if you’re interested in my views on films such as :
- The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)
- Spirits of the Dead (1968)
- Female Vampire (1973)
- Les Diaboliques (1955)
- The Tenant (1976)
- Eyes without a Face (1960)
- Switchblade Romance (2003)
- Them (2006)
- Inside (2007)
- Martyrs (2008)
REVIEW – John from Cincinnati (2007)
My review of the cancelled HBO series John from Cincinnati is up at Videovista.
It is not a flawless piece of television by any means but I simply adore the writing. The series is written by David Milch of Deadwood fame and it shares the same Shakespearean qualities and sand-box approach to narrative. It was also great fun to write about.
Ruthless Culture 