Videovista have my review of Remi Bezancon’s Le Premier Jour Du Reste De Ta Vie.
Well directed, the film also employs quite a neat structural trick of focusing only upon five key days in the lives of a middle-class French family. However, despite the odd nice moment, The First Day of the Rest of your Life is an astoundingly unoriginal film dealing only in the boldest and most familiar of cinematic emotions. Dreadful.
Videovista have my review of Richard Kelly’s The Box.
From the director of Donnie Darko comes a weirdly iconoclastic film based upon a Richard Matheson short story. Initially, the film structures itself around a moral thought experiment asking us to consider whether we would kill someone we do not know for $1,000,000. However, then the film opens up into a science fiction conspiracy theory that is one part Alan J. Pakula to one part Arthur C. Clarke. Not entirely convincing partly because the ideas it contains are so utterly weird, but I did enjoy the rather brutal satire of Christianity as a sinister alien conspiracy.
Videovista have my review of Duncan Wood’s The Bargee.
Given that the film stars Harry H. Corbett, Ronnie Barker and Eric Sykes you might expect this to be a knock-about 1960s British comedy and, to a certain extent, it is. However, the writers of the film were Ray Galton and Alan Simpson who made their name with Steptoe and Son, a sitcom best remembered for its social realism and its confrontation of the British class system. The Bargee is very much a film in this tradition as beneath the rather lightweight comedy lurks a drama about the final working months of the British canal network and the culture of canal workers and lock keepers that depended upon it. Ultimately flawed, the film is still a fascinating look at a now extinct culture.
Walking around your town, prison yard or agricultural commune, you may have noticed strange stickers clinging to lampposts or the sides of buildings. You may have noticed them in several places and then been surprised when you kept seeing them again. These strange images – like Shepard Fairey’s “Andre The Giant Has A Posse” sticker campaign and Invader’s Space Invader-inspired “Invader” mosaics – are examples of Street Art. An underground art movement whose chief accomplishment seems to have been to prompt millions of bemused passers by to snort dismissively and ask ‘what’s the point of that then?’ But of course, this is an entirely legitimate question.
At a time when artists garner more critical attention by cutting up dead animals and sticking elephant dung to canvases, questions surrounding the purpose of art and the dividing line between the artistic and the non-artistic have never been more pressing : Is it supposed to be decorative? Is it supposed to make us think? Is it supposed to shock us? Are traditional art forms more useful than these modern forms? Is it supposed to make us ask questions like these?
The problem in part is that there is no clear frame of reference that allows us to begin answering these questions and even if there were, artists would go out of their way to deconstruct it : Art is decorative. Art is inspiring. Art is beautiful. Art is meaningful : Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail.
Street Art’s reliance upon mass production and recycled imagery makes it particularly prone to these kinds of questions. In fact, these kinds of questions seem to be the motivating force behind Banksy’s documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop (2009), but as we shall see it is not only stickers on walls that invite these kinds of questions as once you start asking them, it is difficult to stop.
Do you get on with your family? Think about it before you answer. I don’t mean ‘do you squabble?’ or ‘do you talk to your family?’. I mean do you really get on with them? I ask because this is quite a common question but, upon reflection, I am not really sure how to answer it. There are many ways in which you can ‘get on’ with people and not all of them are good. Ideally, ‘getting on’ with someone would mean accepting them for who they are and being accepted in return. But the truth is a little bit more complex than that because all too often we play roles. Maybe we refuse to bring up old grievances with relatives at Christmas is order to ensure that everyone has a nice time. Maybe we don’t mention that we don’t have a boyfriend because, actually, we prefer girls. Maybe we let our parents and our families believe things about us that are not true. Because it makes our lives easier. Because it makes them happier. So I ask again : Do you get on with your family?
Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel’s third film La Mujer Sin Cabeza is about a woman who gets on with her family. She gets on with her family by accepting the role that she has forced upon her and, in return, she is protected. Protected from the repercussions of her actions. Protected from herself. The Headless Woman is a haunting portrayal of a woman who is suddenly estranged from her own life and who comes to realise the true price she pays for the privileged existence she has lead.
Videovista have my review of Dom Rotheroe’s British family drama Exhibit A.
Exhibit A is the kind of film that, at a stroke, entirely justifies all the hours I have spent watching and reviewing straight-to-DVD releases. It is an intensely real and emotionally harrowing exploration of a family in crisis with some lovely performances and a script that is tighter than a duck’s arse. However, what really makes Exhibit A and exceptional film is the fact that it uses the increasingly elderly saw of pretending to be found footage shot using a camcorder, but applies it to mundane events rather than supernatural ones. If a bit of jerky camera-work and a few glitches are enough to make a crushingly formulaic monster film like Cloverfield appear special, imagine the effect those quirks might have on a well constructed family drama. A joy.
Videovista have my review of Christian Alvart’s Science Fiction Horror film Pandorum.
This was a terrible film to watch but an interesting film to write about as its action sequences have some quite interesting technical flaws and because its overburdened narrative demonstrates one of the more depressing tendencies in Horror film-making, particularly when that Horror takes place in a Science Fictional setting.
Videovista have my review of Gerard Oury’s seminal French Resistance comedy La Grande Vadrouille (also known as Don’t Look Now – We’re Being Shot At).
My review is as much an appraisal of the film as it is a discussion of the film’s place in French cultural history. I remember growing up, my Swiss friends (who are at least partially French culturally speaking due to the presence of French TV channels in the French-speaking part of Switzerland) would speak warmly of this film and quote from it but, looking back at it now, I’m struck that it really isn’t anything more than a broad family action-comedy. It’s certainly not the funniest thing that De Funes ever made.
John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian (1982) is one of the most ferociously Godless films ever made.
In one early scene Conan discusses theology with his companion Subotei the archer. Conan speaks fondly of his warrior god Crom, stressing his power and roundly mocking his friend’s simple-minded animism (“Crom laughs at your four winds. Laughs from his mountain”). Subotei listens politely to Conan’s tirade and then points out that Conan’s god may well be powerful but in order to wield his power from his mountain he must walk beneath the sky, thereby making himself subject to Subotei’s divine winds and sky. This suggestion that organised religion is arguably inferior to a pantheistic respect for nature sets the tone for a script that relentlessly takes pot-shots at the idea of a divinely ordered universe.
Indeed, the film’s main bad guys are the leaders of an aggressively expanding snake cult. A cult that reveals itself to be little more than a retirement home for ageing barbarian raiders. Raiders who have figured out that, rather than riding around the landscape threatening people into giving up their goods, it is much easier to simply set up a temple and wait for people to surrender their money of their own accord. Not content with suggesting organised religion is nothing but a rogue’s retirement fund, Conan the Barbarian also goes out of its way to mock the icons of real world religions. For example, we have the infamous scene in which Conan is crucified on the Tree of Woe. But rather than allowing himself to die and for god to resurrect him like Jesus or Aslan, Conan refuses to accept his fate and so he eats a vulture and then gets his friends to make a pact with dark forces in order to bring him back from the dead. Similarly, the ‘Riddle of Steel’ comes across as a mockery of a Zen koan as not only is there an answer but the answer is that the source of all power in the world is not steel or magic or the gods but humanity.
Even when Conan does pray to Crom he admits that he has no tongue for it and his prayer is less an act of supplication or veneration but a threat and an ultimatum : Grant me victory or to hell with you! Of course, Conan is granted his revenge but Crom’s presence is conspicuously absent from the battle. Crom, much like all non-existent deities, is evidently the kind of god who helps those who help themselves.
This sense of godlessness is arguably also present in the source material for Conan the Barbarian, the writings of Robert E. Howard and so it is delightful to see the same muscular atheism appear in a film featuring another of Howard’s creations : Solomon Kane. Michael J. Bassett’s Solomon Kane addresses the issue of God’s apparent absence head-on by asking whether, in a world where God does not exist but the Devil clearly does, is it ever possible for humanity to achieve redemption?
You don’t understand me. Nobody does.
When the dust has settled, the books have been closed and the time has come to write the intellectual history of the later stages of the twentieth Century, Historians will speak of two separate schools of thought. Born on opposite sides of the world and yet joined at the hip.
From America, we have the cult of the individual, born of political ideology, carefully nurtured by a fledgling advertising industry and sanctified by a generation of psychologists, therapists, counsellors and psychoanalysts. This school of thought stresses the importance and the potential of the individual in the face of endless pressure from the faceless masses. Masses, of course, composed of equally heroic individuals. In such a climate an act of individualisation, no matter how insignificant or trifling, is heroic. What brand of coffee do you buy? Are you a Mac or a PC? Did you take in the BFI’s Ozu retrospective instead of going to see Avatar? Under this world-view, the individual is not merely a building block of a larger society, he is an irreducible force. A spiritual, political, moral and commercial monad.
From Europe, we have the phenomenology of self. The Second World War swept away all certainties, even those of the Enlightenment. There was a need to return to source. To build again. Where better to start than Descartes’ maxim? The ultimate philosophical slogan : I think therefore I am. We cannot trust old certainties, all that we know is that we are and that we think. But where the Enlightenment used this as foundation stone for the construction of a new world of knowledge, the post-War philosophers took it as a boundary. A limit. An end. And so emerged a need to fetishise the cogito. To stress the importance of the subjective not only to philosophy but to our conceptions of self. Under this school of thought, we are imprisoned within the walls of our own subjectivies. Not only alone but utterly distant from those around us. Our experiences and feelings suddenly so different to people of the same class, the same up-bringing and the same education that we might as well be speaking a different language. Other people are utterly alien. As Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation demonstrates, we can now sit in a crowded Japanese bar and be utterly alone.
So you see… nobody understands me. Or you. Not really.
Tom Ford’s mesmerising debut A Single Man – an adaptation of a 1964 novel by Christopher Isherwood – is an examination of this school of thought. Its title refers not only to the marital status of its protagonist, but also to the pervasive idea that our psychological states are somehow unique and that this uniqueness separates us from other people. The reality, of course, could not be further from the truth.
Ruthless Culture 
