Tag / review

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Red Riding : 1980 (2009)

On the 8th of March, the West Yorkshire Police Force received a letter purporting to be from the Yorkshire Ripper :

Dear Sir

I am sorry I cannot give my name for obvious reasons. I am the Ripper. I’ve been dubbed a maniac by the Press but not by you, you call me clever and I am. You and your mates haven’t a clue that photo in the paper gave me fits and that bit about killing myself, no chance. I’ve got things to do. My purpose to rid the streets of them sluts. My one regret is that young lassie McDonald, did not know cause changed routine that night. Up to number 8 now you say 7 but remember Preston ’75, get about you know. You were right I travel a bit. You probably look for me in Sunderland, don’t bother, I am not daft, just posted letter there on one of my trips. Not a bad place compared with Chapeltown and Manningham and other places. Warn whores to keep off streets cause I feel it coming on again.

Sorry about young lassie.

Yours respectfully

Jack the Ripper

Might write again later I not sure last one really deserved it. Whores getting younger each time. Old slut next time I hope. Huddersfield never again, too small close call last one.

The letters and tapes that followed were a hoax that sent the struggling West Yorkshire investigation into a tailspin, convincing several senior police officers that the Ripper was from Sunderland.  One particular way in which the letter hindered the investigation was by claiming responsibility for a murder in Preston in 1975.  A murder, it turned out, the Yorkshire Ripper was not actually responsible for.  James Marsh’s Red Riding : 1980, based on a novel by David Peace, considers what might have happened if certainly nefarious elements within the West Yorkshire Police Force had put Wearside Jack’s error to use for their own ends.

If Red Riding : 1974 is a film about the first bite at the apple of original sin then Red Riding : 1980 is the ensuing gag reflex.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Red Riding : 1974 (2009)

When the Red Riding trilogy was screened on Channel Four earlier this year it came very close to making me regret an action I have come to think of as the great cultural emancipation.  Five years ago, I unplugged the aerial from my TV, I cut the wire at the wall and forever freed myself from the great cognitive heat sink that is television.  It was a close run thing.  I was this close to buying a set-top aerial.  A few months later with the DVD version now safely in my hands, I am still sure that I made the right decision as Red Riding : 1974 is a film that demands revisiting.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW : Lakeview Terrace (2008)

VideoVista also has my review of Neil LaBute’s Lakeview Terrace.  As I explain in the review, the impression I was left with after watching this film was that I had just spent an hour and a half arguing with an idiot.  This is an impression I get whenever I watch a film by Neil LaBute.

Speaking of misfiring thrillers, I also reviewed Antonio Bido’s spectacularly patchy Watch Me When I Kill (1977).  Amusingly, the DVD includes a piece to camera by Bido himself in which he explains how few thrillers he has actually seen and how much he disliked the genre.  I’m reminded of the fact that, when he died, Stanley Kubrick had an entire library filled with the books he used while researching the films he worked on.  Hmm.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW : Manhunt (2008)

VideoVista have my review of Manhunt, the first film by Norwegian Horror wunderkind Patrik Syversen.

The film does not completely convince as it is more concerned with paying homage to great works from the past than it is with carving out new territory but Syversen shows a familiarity with the nuts and bolts of the genre that really suggests his next film could be something genuinely special.

Writing the review also inspired me to start researching a much longer piece.  So watch this space.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW : The Bothersome Man (2006)

In 1927 Bertrand Russell delivered a talk entitled “Why I am not a Christian”.  In this talk he rejected the logic of the arguments for the existence of God before moving on to issues such as Jesus’ moral character and whether or not he actually existed in the first place.  In the 80 or so years since Russell gave that talk, the question of whether or not to be a Christian has come more and more to resemble the question of whether or not it is rational to believe in God.  This focus distracts from the fact, acknowledged by Russell, that even if the proof of God’s existence were overwhelming, there would still be good reason for refusing to consider oneself a Christian.  For example, one can question the morality of Jesus’ teachings, the value of his various churches and whether ‘worship’ is really the kind of activity that civilised human beings should be engaged in at the beginning of the twenty first century.  One of the reasons why I am not a Christian is that heaven does not sound like the kind of place I would want to spend eternity.  Clearly, this is a thought that has also occurred to Jens Lien, the director of Den Brysomme Mannen, (2006) known outside of Norway as The Bothersome Man.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW : Hansel & Gretel (2007)

Videovista also have my review of Yim Pil-sung’s Hansel & Gretel.

Over the past month I have been reading and watching a lot of stuff that consciously plays around with pre-existing forms of imagery.  For example, Blindness (2008) seemed to address not just metaphorical blindness but also the idea of blindness as a metaphor.  I also sat through not only Stephen Moffat’s direction-less Jekyll (2007) but an equally uninspiring theatrical reworking of the original novella by James MacLaren entitled (somewhat unoriginally) Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

One of the main problems with Hansel & Gretel is that while it plays around with the idea of Hansel and Gretel, it really does not have anything to say.  It is a film that draws heavily from the del Toro tradition of stories about abandoned children and in bringing together those two traditions, all it really manages to do is make us realise that del Toro’s stories are hardly revolutionary.

However, in thinking about this film and Blindness I could not help but wonder whether there isn’t some kind of bell curve for reinventions.  Fail to do enough and your story comes across as hackneyed but do too much and the story gets lost or, as in the case of Blindness, the metaphor effectively becomes so flexible that it becomes effectively meaningless, thereby leaving the writer looking like a pretentious pseud.

On a completely unrelated subject, this month’s Videovista also featured my review of the old TV mini-series Escape from Sobibor (1987), which, if nothing else, shows how films such as Schindler’s List have helped make mainstream media a good deal less squeamish about the Holocaust than it used to be.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW : The Warlords (2007)

This month’s issue of Videovista has recently gone up and it contains my review of Peter Chan’s The Warlords (2007).  It is not a bad film at all and it draws attention to two interesting characteristics about contemporary Chinese cinema.

Firstly, that while Chinese films are lagging behind the West in matters of digital jiggery-pokery, they have acess to material resources such as sets and extras that render a lot of these techniques largely moot.  For example, I suspect that had The Warlords‘ battle scenes been shot for an American film, the armies would have been mostly digital and, as a result, much much larger.  After all, why have a few dozen ships when you can have thousands?  I call this the Troy Effect.

You can also see the impressive material infrastructure of Chinese cinema on display in Alexi Tan’s Blood Brothers (2007) ,which I also reviewed for Videovista.  The film’s opening scenes are set in the Chinese country-side and instead of a few internal shots and maybe some location work, the film benefits from having been shot on what apears to be the kind of vast back-lot that Hollywood has long since transformed into theme parks.

Secondly, both films are set at times in Chinese history when there was a good deal of foreign involvement in China’s internal affairs.  Indeed, Blood Brothers is set in 1930s Shanghai, which hosted a large British ex-pat community including J. G. Ballard.  Similarly, The Warlords is set in the aftermath of the Opium Wars, the wars between China in Britain that not only netted Britain Hong Kong but which opened China up to foreign trade and cultural influence.  However, despite this both films are completely free of British characters and Western faces.

Since the apologetics of Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002), it has become tempting to see all Chinese cultural exports as exercises in nationalist propaganda and the degree of cultural re-appropriation going on in both films invite us to consider them in this very light.  However, this strikes me as a rather egocentric vision of Chinese cinema.  Not every film (or song) is about the West or even for Western consumption.  As a result, it seems more reasonable to see this kind of historical airbrushing as being an expression not of ideological projection but of yielding to popular tastes.  So just as American audiences prefer to think that their country won the Second World War single-handed, I suspect that most the Chinese audience would react badly to films that remind them of their country’s quasi-colonial status.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW : He Died with His Eyes Open (1984) by Derek Raymond

In order to grasp the devastating beauty of Derek Raymond’s He Died with His Eyes Open (1984), it is first necessary to grasp the devastating beauty of another text; Conrad’s altogether more famous Heart of Darkness (1899).  Conrad’s book ends with one of the most memorable soliloquies in British literature :

“Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror — of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision — he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:

‘The horror! The horror!’”

As one of the most commented upon texts in academic literary criticism, this passage has been found to contain endless meanings but one particular meaning has clawed its way up out of the Darwinian jungle of ideas with greater panache and ferocity than the others.  The most common interpretation of that final line is that Kurtz has somehow seen the savage, devouring emptiness that lurks at the heart of existence.  A heart of darkness that can only truly be grasped by the mad or the inspired who can free themselves of the comforting fictions that animate our day-to-day lives.  For Queen.  For Country.  For Myself.  For Love.  All fictions.  One reason for the popularity of this interpretation is that it echoes the themes of meaninglessness that pervade existentialism, that most popular of Post-War philosophical postures.

Noir crime fiction is seen by some as a form of populist agitprop for existentialism.  While Camus and Sartre took over the left bank, it was the Noir writers who were on sale in every news-agent.  It is only natural to read Raymond’s book as a continuation of this de facto intellectual alliance, but I would argue that Raymond’s take on existentialism is almost diametrically opposed to that of Sartre, Camus, Kafka or Marcel.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW : Blindness (2008)

Based upon the 1995 novel Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira (literally Essay on Blindness) by the Portuguese Nobel-laureate Jose Saramago, Fernando Meirelles’ adaptation of Blindness serves to demonstrate the conceptual limitations of the allegory as a narrative device.  Where the book was an allegory about allegories, the film aims for the allegorical only to collapse into a film about the relationships between characters who were only ever supposed to be symbols.

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by Jonathan M

Che vs. There Will Be Blood – The Risks of Experimentation

Much like the writers and directors that we poor scorn upon for their predictability, critics are ultimately a lazy breed.  Some critics, thanks to greater levels of insight and more erudition have a larger conceptual toolbox than others, but no matter how loaded down you become with diagnostic tools, you are still going to reach for some more frequently than you reach for others.  If a film is a character study then you write about psychology.  If a film is about the cinematography then you talk about the visual and emotional impact.  If the film is about the plot, you write about pacing and narrative structure.  Write about enough books and films and you start to get a pretty clear idea of how to tackle certain types of work.  However, there are times when you encounter a film or a book that is unlike anything you have encountered before.  A work which, no matter how cynical or lazy you might be, has you repeating Roy Scheider’s line from Jaws (1975) : “We’re gonna need a bigger boat”.

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