Kathryn Bigelow’s ex-husband James Cameron stated, when asked for a comment about her new film, that “I think that this could be the Platoon for the Iraq War”. While I do not necessarily agree with the comparison for reasons that will become apparent, I do think that it is an interesting one to draw. Underlying Cameron’s comment is the fact that Hurt Locker is one of only a few films about the Iraq War that attempt to look past the politics in order to focus upon the psychology of the individuals actually doing the fighting. This change of emphasis is harder to achieve than you might expect as film-makers are understandably reluctant to give the full Colonel Kurtz treatment to the people fighting a war that is still on-going. Indeed, Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah (2007) skirted around the issue of war’s dehumanising effect by showing the impact of the war not upon the individuals doing the fighting but rather upon their families. Similarly, David Simon’s TV adaptation of Evan Wright’s Generation Kill (2004) lacked bite by virtue of an unfortunate tendency to portray its soldiers as quirky but ultimately heroic individuals trapped in unpleasant situations by self-serving bosses and a corrupt system. Bigelow’s Hurt Locker does undeniably adopt a more direct approach to the psychology of war, it is just a pity that what intellectual content there is in the film is starved of oxygen by the elaborate set-pieces that form the bulk of the film’s running time.
Inglorious Basterds (2009) – Inglorious Narrative
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.
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.
von Trier’s Antichrist – Context
This weekend, I saw what I think is possibly the film of the year. Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) is a triumph of style, content, and artistic politics. It is such a complex and subtle film that I feel that I need more than one post to do it justice and so, this is the first in a series of posts about Antichrist. The first intalment is about the correct way to approach the film as a work of art.
REVIEW – Moon (2009)
Sometimes it isn’t easy to love the cinema. Increasingly, the greatest popular art form of the 20th Century has become a means of oppression : Every year, the summer blockbuster season lasts that little bit longer. The season of empty months. Months during which the few decent films that do make it into cinemas are instantly forced out by over-hyped sequels and works of distorted genre. Works so disjointed and violent in their imagery that they have come to resemble twisted parodies of the world we know. Works that do not seek to elevate our collective humanity but to pervert it by filling our poor throbbing skulls with whole new vistas of psychosis and paranoia. Vistas we can only escape from with the help of consumer products, the antics of boy wizards and bellicose robots. Vistas produced by a media-industrial complex that keeps us supine and malleable lest we realise the living hell that we have made of our collective existence. A collective existence so cruel and unhinged that were we to grasp its true nature for even a second we would all run screaming into the streets, tearing at our clothes and flesh in a hideous and brutal attempt to somehow get clean and free of a system that has crushed us beneath its heel for far too long.
But then a film comes along that seems to recognise all of this.
Ruthless Culture 