Gestalt Mash have just put up my second column providing alternative solutions to the mysteries in the BBC’s Holmes-inspired TV series Sherlock.
The column considers the possibility that dear old Sherlock may have fallen into the trap of Sinomania: Assuming that Chinese people possess super-human levels of competence. The concept of Sinomania draws upon this excellent article from the London Review of Books.
New website Gestalt Mash have just put up the first in a series of pieces I shall be writing for them entitled Sherlock’s Little Mistakes.
The piece is a commentary on the BBC’s recent Sherlock TV series and the idea behind it is to speculate ways in which Holmes might have been mistaken. In looking at the first episode in the series ‘A Study in Pink’ I considered the possibility that sometimes a suicide is just a suicide.
Videovista have my review of Ozgur Yildirim’s Chiko, a neat little German crime drama set amongst the Turkish immigrant population.
The film starts well by delving into the same un-glamorous vein of social realism as Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy but despite providing some interesting insights into the lives of second-generation Turkish immigrants in modern Germany, the film is let down by a histrionic and entirely unconvincing third act that lapses into poorly written melodrama.
Videovista have my review of the beautifully produced but appallingly written and conceived Kaiji: The Ultimate Gambler directed by Toya Sato.
The film is based on a manga and an anime TV series and it constitutes an entry into one of my most favoured of sub-genres: the gambling movie. Unfortunately, while the film’s first game works beautifully, the other games it comes up with are nowhere near as interesting and rely instead upon torrents of psychobabble and hysterical over-acting for their tension and drama. Add to this toxic melange a socially regressive metaphor about the heroism of always playing by society’s rules regardless of how unfair they are and you have a film that is not only dumb but also quasi-fascistic. Ugh.
There are so many different ways in which to see the world. Sometimes, the differences between perspectives are so vast that it seems impossible that such a range of divergent emotional responses could have been provoked by the same thing or place. A simple country lane can be a beautiful holiday spot for walkers, a barely tolerable distance from home for commuters and a symbol of economic under-development for an ambitious local councillor. There is only one world but it is perpetually made and destroyed by the act of looking upon it. Wisdom lies not in the beauty or definition of one’s vision of the world but rather in one’s capacity for understanding that our vision of the world is not the only one that exists. That other perspectives are out there and that they all have a value, even the ones that are profoundly ugly and especially the ones that hurt us when we entertain them.
The first book of Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles trilogy is a book that is weighted down by the multitude of ways of looking at the French city of Marseilles. Unlike other works of crime or historical fiction with an iconic location, it is not a book that attempts to capture the spirit of a particular place and time. Instead, the book argues for both the absolute necessity and utter impossibility of ever completely grasping all of the different ways in which to see a particular place or person. The book’s French title Total Kheops — lamentably released in English under the title Total Chaos — takes its name from a track on the first solo album by Kheops, the DJ of the Marseilles-based Rap outfit IAM. ‘Total Kheops’ refers to a situation of impossible complexity. Un bordel total. A complete cluster fuck.
Georges Gerfaut is a man very much like you or I : He works a mid-level office job that involves plenty of meetings and no manual labour. He has a wife and kids who put up with his little foibles. He loves West Coast Jazz. He drinks a little bit too much. Georges Gerfaut is a man very much like you or I. In fact, he could very well be you or I. Georges Gerfaut will soon kill three men.
One night, Gerfaut is driving home when he witnesses an accident. Gerfaut is concerned enough to take one of the survivors to hospital but not so concerned that he bothers to leave his name. Did he do the right thing? His wife is unsure, Gerfaut is not. Either way, two men approach Gerfaut while he is on holiday and attempt to strangle him. Then shoot him. Then blow him up. Without a second thought, Gerfaut takes flight. Leaving his wife and kids completely alone. He must kill the men who tried to murder him.
Originally published in French under the title Le Petit Bleu De La Cote Ouest, Three to Kill is Jean-Patrick Manchette’s seventh novel. Shamefully, it is also one of only two works by Manchette currently available in English. At a little over 130 pages, Three To Kill is a lean and minimalist work of behaviourist hard-boiled crime fiction. However, despite its relative brevity, Manchette’s novel is a work of considerable grace and challenging profundity as it seeks to answer the question of what Kurtz would have done with his life had Marlowe managed to bring him back to civilisation alive?
Videovista have my review of Thomas Clay’s second film Soi Cowboy.
I reviewed Clay’s first film The Great Ecstacy of Robert Carmichael (2005) for my old site but while I found the film incoherent at the time, I have since warmed to it significantly as my taste in films has evolved. In fact, I think it is a bold and distinctive piece of film-making (especially when you bear in mind that the director was in his mid-twenties when he made it).
Soi Cowboy is a much tamer affair. In fact, it seems to serve primarily as a vehicle for the director to ‘pay his dues’ and prove that he is a ‘good cultural citizen’ who has watched all the greats and assimilated their ideas and techniques. This strikes me as quite depressing as Robert Carmichael was not the film of a director who needed to prove himself. It is also sad that art house cinema has reached a point where it can be reduced to a set of techniques and formulae that can be reproduced on demand. As I suggested in my pieces about La Moustache (2005) and Valhalla Rising (2009), this represents the ossification of an artistic tradition into a genre.
My pieces about Soi Cowboy, Valhalla Rising and La Moustache contain quite a bit of irritation about this process of ossification but then I read something that helped me shed some new light on my own thinking…
The 1990s were dark days for the British Film industry. Yes, films were being made. Yes, excellent films were being made : Reputations were formed, new territory was broken and new talent was uncovered. But all of this was going on despite a frankly bizarre obsession with what can only be called ‘geezer films’ : These were cheaply produced and heavily hyped crime dramas littered with cockney accents and pointless violence intended to replicate Guy Ritchie’s success at cashing in on the rediscovery of the crime film in the wake of the rise of Quentin Tarantino. At its best, the genre produced films like Paul McGuigan’s Gangster No. 1 (2000) and Mike Hodges’ Croupier (1997). Intelligent and psychological films that harkened back to classic British crime films of yore such as John MacKenzie’s The Long Good Friday (1980) and Mike Hodges’ Get Carter (1971). At its worst, the genre gave us sweary, lairy films like Edward Thomas’ Rancid Aluminium (2000) and Kevin Allen’s Twin Town (1997). Right smack bang in the middle of these two trends was Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast (2000). Sexy Beast is a film that attempts to explore the psychology of an old lag forced out of retirement by a criminal fraternity that sees him as little more than a skill-set. It is also a film that found an audience thanks largely to its more accessible aspects such as Ben Kingsley swearing and Ray Winstone making a fool of himself in a tiny pair of red speedos. 44 Inch Chest marks the return of some of the creative talent behind Sexy Beast — most notably Ray Winstone and Ian McShane who practically reprise their roles from Sexy Beast — in a script penned by the same writing team of Louis Mellis and David Scinto. The result is a film that shares all of Sexy Beast’s theatrical intensity and sculptured vulgarity but adds to it a psychologically fractured intelligence brought to bear on a single question : What would you do to the man who fucked your wife?
Videovista have my review of F. Gary Gray’s genuinely lamentable Law Abiding Citizen.
I hated this film. I hated it not because it is intensely stupid – some stupid films can be great fun – but because it is an intensely stupid film that tries to pretend that it is insightful and politically engaged. This is the cinematic equivalent of the Tea Party : Fascistic chest-pounding and bellowing masquerading as debate.
One of the themes I keep returning to in my writings about film and literature is the tension that exists within us between the individual and the collective : On one hand, we all want to be true to ourselves and to express ourselves to the fullest without giving in to external pressures or allowing other people to take advantage of us. On the other, we are also deeply sociable creatures who yearn for human contact and the joys of sharing our successes and failures with friends and loved ones. While these two sets of desires are not mutually exclusive, they can interfere with each other. Resolving this interference pattern is not only central to our day-to-day existences, but also our political system.
Or is it?
It is extremely easy to fall into the pattern of seeing everything as a tension between two diametrically opposed extremes : Good and evil, capitalism and socialism, law and chaos, religion and atheism, nature and nurture, mysticism and rationalism, us and them. However, the simple fact that this kind of pattern can be applied to pretty much anything does not necessarily entail that it is picking up on some profound fact about the world. In fact, I would argue that it is a shallow and empty hermeneutic whose very shallowness explains its seemingly universal application. This kind of shallow analytical framework does pose significant dangers.
Indeed, assuming that our original balancing act is not just an empty truism then how certain are we that it is a universal fact about human life? While the desire to balance the needs of individual expression with those of social integration is one of the most common ways of thinking about life in the West in the 21st Century, it is by no means clear that this motif enjoys the same popularity elsewhere in the world. Do members of isolated Amazonian tribes worry about hypocritically trying to ‘fit in’? In his book Black Mass : Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007), John Gray suggests that a tendency to assume that all political cultures are the same as ours is one of the regrettable short-comings of Western liberalism. It is, he argues, the kind of unwarranted assumption about other people that leads to blood-shed as when we encounter people who are not like us, it is all too easy to move from incomprehension to hostility.
Fei Xie’s Black Snow (Ben Ming Nian) is an interesting test case for the applicability of our dichotomy : Made in China in the late 1980s, the film initially presents itself as a rather generic art house film in which an alienated and isolated individual battles to re-engage with a society he long-ago turned his back on. However, Fei Xie’s approach to this challenge reveals a political culture with a very different set of attitudes to ours.
Ruthless Culture 