Category / Crime

by Jonathan M

Cold Weather (2010) – The Eyes of the Sensitive Observer

Cold Weather is an experiment that does not quite work but which is all the more beautiful for its failure.

Aaron Katz is one of several young American filmmakers to be tarred with the Mumblecore brush. Neither a genre nor a movement, ‘Mumblecore’ refers to one of those rare and beautiful moments when a group of creative artists with similar tastes and interests come together and begin to learn from each other’s methods and respond to each other’s ideas thereby creating a series of works with a similar set of aesthetic priorities. While these aesthetics are still evolving, it is possible to see in the work of such directors as Andrew Bujalsky (2002’s Funny Ha Ha), Lynn Shelton (2009’s Humpday) and the Duplass brothers (2008’s Baghead) the development of a cinematic style that has been heavily influenced by the films of John Cassavetes, Mike Leigh and Maurice Pialat.

Mumblecore films tend to be made with small budgets, small crews and small casts composed of largely non-professional actors working from and improvising around a more or less pre-written script. The non-professional nature of the actors and the improvisational aspects of the dialogue along with the tendency to frame character development in such a way that the audience has to draw its own inferences about the characters means that Mumblecore films frequently feel remarkably rough, realistic, unpolished and spontaneous. Mumblecore films invariably feel as though they simply ‘happen’; a stylistic tic also that owes quite a lot to the tendency to use 20-something actors and unglamorous settings that make it look as though the films might have been made in the director’s spare time.

 Cold Weather is an attempt to move Mumblecore outside of its comfort zone by taking the aesthetics of spontaneous authenticity and fusing them with those of a cinematic genre that is defined by its careful plotting and its use of directorial technique to create a sense of tension. While this Mumblecore thriller never feels like more than the sum of its parts, it is difficult not to love a film that so perfectly understands the allure of a good mystery.

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by Jonathan M

The Hunter (2010) – America Unter Alles

Every morning, when I turn on the radio and hear of yet another wave of revolutionary uprisings or demonstrations in the Middle East and North Africa, I invariably think that such events are long overdue. But what causes a popular uprising? What makes such a thing overdue?

In the West, we have an ageing and apathetic population ruled over by a largely corrupt political class who have little or no interest in rocking the boat. However, though archly conservative and hugely selfish, the mindset of the political classes broadly mirrors the attitudes of the ageing population they claim to represent and so, despite the odd march and protest, a revolution is not likely to take place any time soon. However, in the Arab World, the picture is startlingly different.

In the Middle East and North Africa, a similarly corrupt, conservative and selfish political class is currently in power. However, unlike the West, the population of the Arab World is not conservative and apathetic but young, vibrant and idealistic. For a while now, the older political class has managed to keep the young in line by making lavish promises and allowing them to blow off steam by whipping up anti-US and anti-Israeli sentiment (despite their vocal outrage, Israeli atrocities have been a political godsend to the autocracies of the Arab world). When these fail to work, the ageing political classes use Western weapons and truncheons to put down the protestors while screaming about ‘foreign influence’. However, as the news reveals to us every morning, this tactic is rapidly starting to fail and the youth of the Arab World are starting to demand representation in the political classes of the countries they inhabit.

What makes this wave of uprisings feel overdue is the fact that they are largely the product of demographic weight.  The political algebra is quite clear:

Insufficient social and political mobility + high birth rate = revolution

But where does the truth of this equation come from? Where do revolutions start? Iranian director Rafi Pitts’ The Hunter suggests that, while revolutions begin with unhappy people, they seldom end that way as political issues have a tendency to outlive the people who first draw attention to them.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Sons of Anarchy: Season 1

Videovista has my review of series one of Kurt Sutter’s Sons of Anarchy.

Though nominally a ‘review’, the piece is really more of an essay about the creation of genre expectations through aesthetic framing. In particular, I argue that Mad Men apes the art house aesthetic and narrative styles in order to create an impression of intelligence whereas Sons of Anarchy looks as dumb as a bag of hammers despite being actually quite a clever and involved piece of writing. Dig:

Sons Of Anarchy is about the attempt to recreate a state of nature in the modern world. It examines families, tribes, organisations and states and looks at how distrust, individualism and selfishness have not only rotted out all of these institutions but also made it almost impossible for us to return to a state in which we do work together and trust each other as equal, free individuals. Sons Of Anarchy speaks to the very heart of human politics and it does so not by using long-takes and awkward silences to hint at the deep inner lives of middle-class professionals, it does so by having a load of hairy tattooed men shoot machine-guns at each other.

by Jonathan M

Neds (2010) – Don’t Let You Get the Best of You

David Simon has a lot to answer for.

There was a time, around the turn of the millennium, when big institutions had their day in the sun: In foreign affairs, people began to look to the United Nations as a venue for resolving political conflicts while independent NGOs were seen not only as fonts of specialised knowledge but as self-less agents for change and charity.  In domestic affairs, the backlash against the Thatcherite era of cuts and privatisations gained political substance as people began to demand proper investment in schools and hospitals.  In the UK at least, this unexpected belief in the power of institutions to change the world swept the Labour party into power with a mandate for an ‘ethical foreign policy’ and massive investment in public services.  For a while, people believed.  People felt the institutional sun on their up-turned faces.

But then, as these things inevitably do, the wheel began to turn.

It is hard to tell when precisely it was that the rot began to creep into cultural representations of social institutions but it was pretty obvious when the roof fell in.  Over the course of five short series, David Simon’s HBO series The Wire took a crowbar to the knees of pretty much every large social institution in America: The police, organised labour, politics, the media, schools and even criminal gangs.  Nobody escaped Simon’s forensic wrath.  According to The Wire, no institution could be trusted to deliver social change because institutions rely upon human agents who are invariably both too self-serving and too short sighted to act in the interests of society as a whole.

Change, we were told, simply could not come from above.

If The Wire’s brutal analysis constituted the crest of a wave of disillusionment then Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters (2002) was undeniably a distant but powerful off shore surge that contributed to the bathymetric sway.  The film focuses upon Ireland’s infamous Magdalene asylums, institutions run by the Catholic Church with parental consent that effectively pressed young women into slavery in order to ‘protect’ them and others from their fallen morality. Over the course of 119 minutes, The Magdalene Sisters wages a viciously effective assault on the notion that charitable institutions could ever be anything other than venues for misguided authoritarianism and the psychological and physical abuse of vulnerable people.

But what of the individual in all of this?

If it is unacceptable to suggest that the poor are simply lazy and that the vulnerable are simply weak, then surely it is just as unpalatable to suggest that the poor and vulnerable are nothing but the passive victims of misguided social institutions?  If may well be reductive and simplistic to place all of one’s faith for social renewal in large institutions but it is just as simplistic to paint these institutions as nothing more than part of an unjust and exploitative system.  People are individuals.  People have choice.  People have agency.  A more sophisticated representation of the ills of our society would allow for this.  It would acknowledge the responsibilities that we have to ourselves.

Peter Mullan’s latest film Neds (Non-educated Delinquents) attempts to examine both sides of the coin.  Set in 1970s Scotland, the film depicts a social landscape bristling with institutions that are quick to open their arms to working class children but just as quick to turn their backs on these same children if they fail to follow the (largely unwritten) rules.  However, while Mullan does a brilliant job of depicting the fickle and irrational nature of big institutions, his film’s real power comes from a willingness to recognise that we play a large part in our own downfall and salvation.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Deadly Outlaw Rekka (2002)

Back around the turn of the millennium, Takashi Miike was the poster-boy for a new brand of cinephilia.  A cinephilia that used DVDs to traverse cultural boundaries in search of more sex, more violence and more extreme imagery.  Since then, Miike and his film seem to have fallen into relative obscurity, victims of a maturing DVD market and the director’s own refusal to abide by traditional genre boundaries.  However, as my Videovista review of Deadly Outlaw Rekka shows, there’s life in the old dog yet.

Deadly Outlaw Rekka is about a culture clash within the Yakuza.  A culture clash between the gangsters who see themselves as business men and the gangsters who cling to the old ways.  Ways of honour and blood.

by Jonathan M

The Hollow Men – Negative Space and Characterisation in Existentialist Fiction

There are times when our critical vocabulary is all too shallow.  There are times when our critical vocabulary becomes so deep as to be impenetrable.  There are also times when our critical vocabulary is reduced to the status of the mantra; sentences and judgments, once meaningful, loose their potency through endless repetition.  First they move from insight to cliché and then they move from cliché to mantra.  Endlessly repeated.  Endlessly meaningless.

One such mantra is the assessment that a writer is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at characterisation.  These sorts of evaluations pop up in all forms of criticism and yet they are seldom unpacked.  What makes a good character?  What makes a bad character?  When does a writer cross from one category to another?  What takes place when a writer fails to engage in ‘good’ characterisation?  Literary theory is frustratingly evasive on this question, all too often ‘good characterisation’ is defined in terms that offer little penetration and little insight beyond the obvious synonyms.  Consider, for example, the famous distinction drawn by E. M. Forster in his collection of lectures Aspects of the Novel (1927) :

The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is a flat pretending to be round. It has the incalculability of life about it—life within the pages of a book.

So a ‘round’ character is convincing while a ‘flat’ character is not.  This advances us precious little.  What makes some characters more convincing than others?  Which techniques reliably produce rounded characters?

One place to find inspiration is the visual arts.  One of the most important concepts to the analysis of visual composition is the idea of negative space.  Negative space can be described as the space that exists around the foregrounded object, but it can also be quite a bit more.  Indeed, when an untrained photographer takes a picture of something, they tend to see everything that is not a part of that something as mere background.  However, by focussing solely on the object itself, unskilled artists will frequently produce a picture that seems somehow wrong.  Aesthetically imbalanced.  Strangely ugly.  Frequently, this is because of a lack of attention to the space surrounding the foregrounded object.  Indeed, in order to force their students to take negative space into account, composition teachers will frequently ask them to draw not the object itself but the space surrounding that object.  It is only by balancing the use of positive space with the use of negative space that elegant composition can be achieved.

This principle also applies to characterisation.

 

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Fallen Sparrow (1943)

“To shoot people, sweetheart!”

And with those words… my heart soared with joy.

Richard Wallace’s The Fallen Sparrow is very much an overlooked gem.  One of a series of novels by Dorothy B. Hughes that were adapted for the screen during the hey-day of the film noir, The Fallen Sparrow is a demented psychological thriller in which a tortured veteran of the Spanish Civil War cuts a swathe through New York high society as he attempts to solve the (possible) murder of the man who helped him escape the clutches of the Gestapo.  As the veteran moves from reconnecting with his old friends and into a world of sinister academics and crusading noblemen, the lines between reality and delusion blur and then finally disappear.  Boasting a fantastic script and some rather surprising performances, The Fallen Sparrow deserves its place in cinema history.

Videovista have my review.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Seven-Ups (1973)

Did you enjoy Steve McQueen in Bullitt?  How about Gene Hackman in The French Connection?  Well… believe it or not the producer of both of those films went on to direct a film of his own.  A film with many of the same advisors and technical assistants.  The result?  A Big Dumb Stylish 1970s Car Chase Movie but, unlike Bullitt and The French Connection, The Seven-Ups is nothing else than a Big Dumb Stylish 1970s Car Chase Movie.

Videovista have my review.

by Jonathan M

Police, Adjective (2009) – Nobody wants Realism. Not Really.

In his excellent extended essay What Ever Happened to Modernism? (2010), Gabriel Josipovici provides a spirited reading of Cevantes’ Don Quixote.  Quixote, argues Josipovici, is not merely the first modern novel, it is also the first post-modern novel as within the novel’s various framing devices lies the recognition that there is something profoundly false about the form of the novel.  A falseness that can never quite be expunged, regardless of  how full-throated an author’s commitment to realism might be :

“Don Quixote’s madness dramatises for us the hidden madness in every realist novel, the fact that the hero of every such novel is given a name merely in order to persuade us of his reality, and that he has giants created for him to do battle with and Dulcineas for him to fall in love with simply to satisfy the demands of the narrative.  And it dramatises the way we are readers collude in this game because we want, for the duration of our reading, to be part of a realised world, a world full of meaning and adventure, an enchanted world” [p. 34]

No genre has so proudly worn its commitment to realism as the police procedural.  From TV series such as The Wire through to books such as Izzo’s Total Kheops (1995), McBain’s 87th Precinct series and Simenon’s Inspector Maigret novels.  The police procedural does not merely seek to entertain by providing us with a mystery that the protagonists can gamely unravel, it also seeks to reflect the reality not only of the books’ settings but also of the job of solving crimes and being a policeman.  However, as Josipovici wisely points out, there is a tension here.  David Simon’s The Wire beautifully captured the political realities of contemporary America, but is it not just a little bit handy that one of the police officers should have chosen to go and get a job teaching thereby allowing the series to devote an entire series to the problems of America’s schooling?  Similarly, Izzo’s Total Kheops does a wonderful job of communicating the texture and character of the town of Marseilles, but is it not convenient that the book’s protagonist listens to cutting-edge hip hop while drinking local wines and eating immaculately cooked locally-sourced produce rather than humming along to Johnny Halliday whilst enjoying a burger and a coke?

Clearly, the police procedural’s commitment to realism is in desperate need of being challenged and deconstructed.  Corneliu Porumboiu’s Poliţist, Adjectiv scratches that itch.  With long and delicately manicured finger nails.

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by Jonathan M

Sherlock’s Little Mistakes 3 – The Great Game

The excellent Gestalt Mash have my third TV Mystery column Sherlock’s Little Mistakes 3 – The Great Game.

This time, the column considers not only Holmes’ Christ-like desire to impose order upon the world but also what might happen if God’s motives were not Lovecraftian in their impenetrable Otherness.