The Great Gatsby, the new film by Baz Luhrmann

Yesterday I went to see The Great Gatsby, the new film by Baz Luhrmann.

Comparisons with the 1974 film are inevitable, but Leonardo di Caprio is incomparably a better actor than Robert Redford (who was wooden, staid and looked far too old despite being the same age then as Leonardo di Caprio is now).

The party scenes are spectacular.  Disappointed by the architecture - both the Buchanan mansion and the Gatsby mansion looked insubstantial.  The lighting was possible a little too excessive.

All works of art convey an ideology, either consciously or unconsciously, competently or incompetently.

Scott Fitzgerald's ideological messages are deeply encoded in the text - and in this film the text has been interpreted by Baz Luhrmann and reinterpreted by Leonardo di Caprio, Toby Maguire, Carey Mulligan etc.

However I think we can discern the underlying ideology of the film as being the old-fashioned cult of respectability.  The Buchanans are constantly on the move because Tom Buchanan's behaviour risks their reputation for being respectable.  Tom Buchanan in turn condemns the Gatsby parties as not being respectable (despite the presence of Senators).  Nick Carraway tries to leave Myrtle's flat because he suspects it would not be respectable to remain.  Gatsby is ultimately doomed because he is trying to formally take another man's wife instead of just having an affair with her (divorce was not respectable in the 1920s).  No-one attends the Gatsby funeral because of his fall from respectability.

Fitzgerald seems to be saying that without respectability society disintegrates.

I'd like to see the film again.

And when it is available on DVD I'd like to watch it with the sound off (and differently music playing).

Friends With Benefits

The Office film group, now down to just five people, went to see Friends With Benefits.

We don't choose the film until a majority vote when we get to the multiplex, which makes for some dud choices, but also some unexpected gems.

Friends With Benefits was an unexpected gem. 

Written by Keith Merryman, David A. Newman, Will Gluck and Harley Peyton.  Directed by Will Gluck.  Starring Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis.

Full of explicit anatomical references, the film seems to be about the absurdity of the carnal act.  The dialogue is funny, and the acting is well-timed.  Visually the New York sequences are superb (the Malibu ones less so, and in any case only extremely wealthy people can afford to live in Malibu).

The magazine offices were not messy enough.

On a cultural level the film achieves importance simply because of all the contemporary references it manages to pack into every shot.  In a way it is comparable to Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned (but with a happy ending, and without pushing the comparison too far).  The year 2011 looks glossy and glamorous in this film.

Terrence Malick's Tree of Life

I went to see Tree of Life at the Camden Odeon.


The film has received mixed reviews, and I was not sure what to expect. But I reasoned that any work that has won the Palme d'Or must be worth seeing. The front of house team at the Camden Odeon needs more training.

Long film, but completely entrancing. Impressionistic in style, the director Terrence Malick presents a sequence of moving images that are consistently beautiful. No sequential narrative - the film moves from present day to the Jurassic period, to 1950s Texas.

Performances are excellent - especially Brad Pitt, Fiona Shaw (small part but unmistakable), Jessica Chastain.

The subject of the film is disputed. There seems to be a general consensus among critics that the film is about "the meaning of life". Personally I think the film may be a more specific discussion about competing ideologies - the authoritarian father favours Darwinianism (only the strongest will survive) whereas the mother has a love-focussed philosophy (Larkin's view that all that ultimately remains of us is love).

Ultimately the Darwinian philosophy of the father failed, while the mother’s philosophy of love validated everything.

The film is symbolist in style, although the symbols are encoded in the work. For instance, the title Tree of Life probably refers to one of the two trees in the garden of Eden, which in turn reminds me of the story of the brothers Cain and Abel who were exiled "east of Eden", which then makes me think of the 1955 film East of Eden, directed by Elia Kazan. East of Eden was a 1950s retelling of the Cain and Abel story, which seems an elliptical reference back to Terrence Malick's Tree of Life.

The dinosaurs in the film are more problematic. Terrence Malick seems to be using the creation of the universe scenes to show that he endorses the science of evolution. Therefore the message I gain from the film is that Terrence Malick rejects Darwinian perpetual struggle, widely regarded as one of the mechanisms of evolution, in favour of evolution based on a mechanism of love and mercy.

An ambitious film that aims to unite in a visual work the philosophies of science and religion.

Lady Gaga is the reincarnation of Akhenaton?

All Lady Gaga’s videos are interesting, but in the latest one for Born This Way there are some intriguing stylistic references. Which raises the question whether (in the creative drama of her video) Lady Gaga is the reincarnation of Akhenaton? Some examples:

Above: her bouffant hairstyle seems to resemble the khepresh or war crown of the Pharaohs (left Lady Gaga in an inverted double pyramid; right head of Akhenaton in the Louvre).

Above: Lady Gaga’s heavy blue eye make-up resembles the wall paintings of the Valley of the Kings.

Above: Lady Gaga is wearing something on her chin – is this meant to be the postiche or sacred beard that was a symbol of the Pharaohs? (left Lady Gaga; right statue of Akhenaton in the Cairo Museum, note that the postiche could be either long or short and was occasionally worn by female rulers).

Written by Lady Gaga, Executive Producer Vincent Herbert, Directed by Nick Knight, Choreography by Laurie Ann Gibson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV1FrqwZyKw

Note on images: all the pictures in this post are screen shots (and are small areas of the originals); page references supplied on request.

The film Howl

Above: recently I went to see the film Howl. It was on at the Renoir cinema in Brunswick Square which is one of my favourite movie theatres. Despite the brutalist architecture, and the resemblance to an air-raid bunker, I only have happy memories of this cinema (perhaps because they tend to show such good quality films).

Above: I was inspired to go and see the film after reading this article by Emma Brockes in a weekend colour supplement. A profile of the actor James Franco, the article made him sound an interesting personality - a competent actor, a writer, an intellectual studying for a PhD in English literature. He seems to be one of those people who can do everything well.

Above: the film was mixed media including animation, performance and drama. The best parts of the film are the sequences when James Franco (as Allen Ginsberg) is sitting in a study in a bright gold light and just speaking directly to the camera. The whole film could have consisted of these monologues and still be worth watching.

I'm (sort of) interested in the Beat writers mainly because Kerouac's On The Road was a revelation to me when I first read it. I'm not sure the poem Howl is as good as Kerouac's work. I have even visited the Cafe Reggio in New York to try to trace the vestiges of Kerouac's former presence.

The Emma Brockes article described James France as an actor, a student, a writer, a model, an artist, a post-modern performer etc.

It was a list that reminded me of the Flash Febreze Freshness commercial, one of the best ads on TV at the moment: http://www.tellyads.com/show_movie.php?filename=TA12561

L'Heure d'été (Summer Hours) on BBC4

Above: screenprint of a review of the film.

Last night I watched the 2008 film L'Heure d'été (Summer Hours) on BBC4. Directed by Olivier Assayas and starring Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling, Jérémie Renier. The film was expertly constructed, composed of many exquisite scenes, and extremely well acted.

Dealing with themes of memory, loyalty, family, possession, loss, and the meaning of art, the film was able to convey complex ideas through a relatively small number of seemingly-ordinary conversations. There were so many concepts being discussed that the work probably needs to be seen several times. The lighting of the film was exceptional.

It also seemed to me that the film was a metaphor for the decline of French culture - a melancholy home filled with beautiful objects increasingly seen as irrelevant by younger generations.

Out of the three distinctive European cultures France has maintained an impressive degree of cultural integrity, but it is increasingly hard work for individuals to live in that culture and still operate in the wider world. English culture has gone to the other extreme and has become so accessible that its cultural expressions (language, literature, systems of government, economic theories, ideas of justice, societal values etc) have become so widespread and universal that they are no longer recognised as specifically English. In terms of cultural stamina I'm not sure which strategy (assuming they are deliberate strategies) is going to perform better over the longer term.

Nick Love film The Business

Above: screenprint of a scene from the film.

One of the experiences of going to stay with friends is that you end up sitting on their sofa, in their living room, watching their DVDs. The Nick Love film The Business was not something I especially wanted to see, but I was really surprised at how good it was. In particular what a good actor Danny Dyer can be (usually I have only seen him briefly when flicking channels and wondering what “Real Football Factories” was about).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWx6L8Lpe9Q&feature=related



Above: screenprint of the music in the film.

The soundtrack of The Business is made up of 1980s classics. Is this the definitive list of 1980s music? If so, who chose it and what criteria did they use? (these are not just rhetorical questions – I am genuinely interested).

Morris: A Life With Bells On

Above: late last night I watched the film Morris: A Life With Bells On, which was on one of the satellite channels. Actually I only watched the first half of it as I went to bed at midnight. The film was already beginning to go downhill by then (it was two hours long).

The hour of the film I saw was good, well acted and suspending disbelief. After the first twenty minutes I realised it was based on the clash a hundred years ago between Violet Alford and Cecil Sharp over the "purity" of Morris dancing. Cecil Sharp insisted that only dances recorded from field trips were valid Morris dances, whereas Violet Alford wanted to be more experimental and develop new interpretations (unlike the film, the Cecil Sharp faction won).



Above: a blurred picture of Morris dancers I took earlier this year.

It is easy to mock Morris dancing, although satirists should be ashamed of picking on such an easy target. Violet Alford, for all her agitation, genuinely believed that the dances were a living link with the culture of the Old Stone Age. These possible Paleolithic orgins mean we should take the dances seriously and not jeer them out of existence.



Above: locally there is a Morris group that meets at the Bull. I have no intention of joining them, but I am glad they exist. I would be happy for groups like this to receive state support (rather than some of the elitist garbage the Arts Council tends to fund).



Above: the Bull is a perfect pub. From the archway I would guess it is an old coaching in (the coaches would go through to a yard behind where the horses could be stabled). Like most good places it's family-run.

Apocalypto

Above: the scene at the start of the chase where the prisoners are released into an arena for archery practice by the city-dwellers (apparently the blue paint is authentic and not a repeat of the Braveheart woad howler).

On Sunday I watched the 2006 film Apocalypto. It was on BBC2 from 11pm. I had been looking forward to the film, which I missed when it was in the cinema, but it was a disappointment.

The film is directed by Mel Gibson and written by Mel Gibson "working with" Farhad Safinia.

The movie shows the primeval forest-dwelling existence of a Mayan tribe in the year 1500. This tribe is savagely overwhelmed by city-dwelling Maya who live in a hierarchical and exploitative society and practice a blood-thirsty religion based on human sacrifice. One of the forest-dwelling Maya escapes from the city and after an extended chase sequence escapes his pursuers because they are stunned into inaction by the arrival of Europeans.

Subliminally the themes can be represented as: forest dwelling is good and city-dwelling is bad; life is a race which only the strongest and swiftest will survive; the ancient Maya were an evil society that needed to be curbed by the Europeans.

Mel Gibson's ubermensch ideology in this film is grossly offensive on a number of levels. Although his earlier film Braveheart can be dismissed as comical trash, Apocalypto represents a more sinister agenda. It is a celebration of the idea of natural selection applied to humanity.

The noble savages of the forest are shown as animals - eating offal raw, procreating children, asserting their ancestral rights to hunt the forest.

The evil savages of the city are shown as monsters - no attempt is made to understand the complex Mayan religion. In an obviously invented scene the chief monster-priest makes a Mussolini-style speech from the top of a pyramid (there is no evidence speeches were ever made in this way). In a farcical scene that could have been lifted from an Enid Blyton novel the city savages are cowed by a sudden eclipse (ignoring the fact that Mayan astronomers would have been able to predict eclipses well in advance).



On the evidence of the lingering sequences in this film, Mel Gibson enjoys scenes of sado-masochism, and has an obsession with male gluteal muscles.

The photography is poor (actually blurred in many places) and the music is bad.

The Painted Veil

Above: I nearly went to see The Painted Veil when it was showing in Leicester Square. But I was too tired, and thought I would go another day, and then never got round to it. I've regretted this ever since as it is a film that needs to be seen as projected film and on a large screen.

One of the films I saw over the Christmas holiday was The Painted Veil, directed by John Curran and starring Edward Norton and Naomi Watts. I think it was on Channel 4. It's a film I've long wanted to see (it was made in 2006).

Set in China in 1925, the film shows an imploding society on the edge of imperial annexation - the characters are carried in palanquins; pulled in rickshaws; experience resentful defiance by the humiliated Chinese (although ultimately it was imperial Japan that dominated, not the western powers).

The use of colour, and the photography of the beautiful and unusual (to me) landscapes, is excellent. The piano music stayed in the mind hours after the film finished. The subtleties and ironies of Somerset Maugham's plot were engrossing.

Edward Norton was exactly right for the lead part, especially the slight weakness he has around the mouth, which added so much to his characterisation. He is a compelling actor. I had to look up his biography to check he was not British, so realistic was his accent.

Music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMK_f8NihIY&feature=related

Steve McQueen's Hunger

Earlier this week (Tuesday) I watched the feature film Hunger on Channel 4. Directed by Steve McQueen, it had good reviews when it came out in 2008. The film is a study of the 1981 IRA hunger strike.

Although it had some exceptional moments, ultimately I found the film disappointing. I was hoping it would help to explain (even in a small way) what happened in Northern Ireland during the period 1968 to 1997. Unfortunately Steve McQueen seems to have settled for a work of propaganda.

I suppose I have worked in advertising too long, so that I know instantly when I am being sold to.

For instance, in a film that was effectively about bodies, we saw a shower scene which displayed the naked flabby bodies of the prison warders (a Union Jack keyring establishing that they were Unionists). A little later we saw the naked superbly-toned bodies of the IRA prisoners. This is, I'm afraid, dishonest characterisation.

In the film's powerful focal scene Bobby Sands and a Roman Catholic priest take it in turns to soliloquise (they are hardly talking to each other) the sunlight from the window behind them creating a beautiful golden nimbus around each of their heads. This is rubbishy cheap symbolism. Effective rubbish, but rubbish nevertheless.

More interesting (because more subtle) was the end scene. At the culmination of his hunger strike we saw Bobby Sands on the point of death - the bathos of sunlight on the prison bed, the crows calling, Bobby Sands seeing his 12-year-old self waiting for him to expire. The mysticism and references to the Death of Cu Chulainn were well done, although possibly owing a debt to Rosemary Sutcliff.

The film hinted at the probable narcissism of the hunger strikers, but left this unexplored. The scenes of violence were unconvincing (if you turned the sound down you could see how stylised they were). The film's emphasis on bodily excretions (tears, blood, ordure) reminded me of the medieval obsession with relics.

In the commercial breaks the bleak hunger strike was alternated with Jamie Oliver cheerfully advertising Sainsbury's range of Christmas food.

The White Ribbon

On Thursday I went to see The White Ribbon (Die Weisse Band) at the Arts Picturehouse cinema in Cambridge. The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. All the reviews I have read about this film have praised it excessively.

Directed by Michael Haneke, the story is set in a north German village on the eve of the First World War. Everything about the film is superbly done. Although it is two and a half hours long, as soon as the film finished I wanted to see it again.

Visually very beautiful, the black and white scenes of Biedermeier interiors and bucolic landscapes are worth careful study in themselves (when it comes out on DVD I will probably watch it through without the sound).

The violent incidents in the story are more effective for never being explicitly shown.

The narrative attempts to locate the origins of totalitarianism in the stifling rigidity of pre-First World War society. There are various symbolic references to later events (the wearing of armbands, the contempt for established institutions, the persecution of those who do not fit in etc). The issue of whether the children are rebelling against society, or enforcing conformity to it, is deliberately left unanswered.

If we accept that the twenty years before the outbreak of the Great War represent the apogee of rational "civilisation" with its reverence to the higher culture of the mind (as opposed to the later cultivation of emotional and physical sensations) Haneke is possibly asking questions about the value of inhibitions. The people in the village are completely inhibited - actually inhibited by layers of clothes, object-filled rooms, lack of transport; mentally inhibited by self-discipline, codes of behaviour, implied obligations to each other; socially inhibited by the complex and brutally-enforced hierarchy they find themselves in.

Is the violence necessary to maintain these inhibitions (the actual beatings, the mental cruelties, the threat of destitution) justified to sustain a stable secure community? Or is the violence necessary to rebel against these inhibitions (the persecutions, the burnings, the destruction) justified to bring this social construct down? You can see it both ways.

The film's depiction of Wilhelmine Germany reminded me of the semi-autobiogrpahical novels of Sybille Bedford.

Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise

Above: a couple of weeks ago I went to see the film Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise. I saw it at the Odean, Leicester Square (which seemed shabby and in need of renovation). Fairly long film but the acting was good and I was not distracted by the accents (which had been a complaint of the critics).

In particular I thought Tom Cruise's performance was incredible - totally believable.

Above: the subject of Valkyrie is well known, but the film was fascinating in the way it demonstrated how a small group of determined people can organise and carry out a coup (failed in this case). This film also treated the Germans (some of them) sympathetically, which indicates a change in attitudes - for my parent's generation there was no such thing as a good German, and all the Germans were evil sadists forever tainted by the crimes they had committed. I was disappointed there was no exploration of the influence Stefan George had on von Stauffenberg - one of several examples where poetry has challenged oppresive power (and in this case came close to killing it off).

Stefan George: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_George

Good Night and Good Luck

Last night I saw (on BBC2) the feature film Good Night and Good Luck. I have long meant to see this, as it has had such good reviews. I wish I had seen it on the big screen at a cinema as it was such a well made film with many details that were lost on television.

Good Night and Good Luck was made in colour film corrected to look like black and white stock, and used the framing device of an awards ceremony (this structure reminded me of All About Eve). Although the scenes take place in a succession of interiors, there is no sense of claustrophobia. The distillation of the locations adds to the intensity of the drama.

I was trying to think who in the British media today would be able to take on a McCarthy figure in the same way that Ed Murrow did. Leaving aside individuals such as Jeremy Paxman and John Humphries (who are both in a different category) I think it is possibly Andrew Marr. But there are many other individuals who collectively safeguard democracy and freedom of speech - Andrew Rawnsley at The Observer, David Mannion at ITV News, Veronica Wadley at the London Evening Standard (especially if you consider the way she confronted Ken Livingstone who was/is a political bully in the style of McCarthy), Adam Boulton at Sky News, Peter Wright at the Mail on Sunday, and Matthew d’Ancona at the Spectator.

Troy on Channel 4

During the week I watched the 2004 feature film Troy on Channel 4. Actually I just watched the first half of the film since I had to go to work the next day. I was very impressed with the film, although the dialogue was poor – eventually I just turned the sound off since I am very familiar with the Illiad (allowing for the obvious departures from Homer). The architecture of Illium was a bit too Minoan to be credible, but otherwise this was a magnificent interpretation. The subtext of the film was the apotheosis of mortal men into immortal heroes. For the record, I took the side of the Trojans (a futile gesture since the outcome is already known).

Heroes are important in Western culture because they allow ordinary citizens of a state to identify in a personal way with the national “story” (just as readers of a novel will identify with a book’s hero or heroine). If heroes do not personalise the national “myth” then national identity becomes remote and the population does not feel involved (humans are unable to view the world from any perspective except a personal one). In the last two decades heroes have been replaced by celebrities (who make no claims to be virtuous or self-sacrificing).

Above: Welsh rugby international Gavin Henson fulfills all the mythological criteria for a hero – setting out on a quest (restoring the reputation of Welsh rugby), passing a crucial test (maintaining a top level of fitness) and marrying a princess (his relationship with celebrity singer Charlotte Church). In these image conscious times he also looks the part of a hero (although The Guardian sneers at his Wave & Groom hair gel, fake tan and alternating silver and gold rugby boots). And in a twist worthy of all the usual hero monomyths he has been abandoned by the gods (the little tin gods that comprise the Welsh selectors) and dropped from the Welsh national side in the Six Nations tournament because of serious flaws (poor form, tabloid scandals and upsetting his team-mates with an indiscreet autobiography) that ironically elevate him to the status of tragic-hero (and thus will invite even more attention from the tabloid press since tragic-heroes sell).

The book Death Of A Hero relates to a Greek sculpture in the Getty Museum in Malibu. The ancient Greeks identified the political importance of hero cults, predominantly in defining what was virtuous in their society and providing a role model, particularly to young people. Heroes were especially important at times of social unrest or threats to the integrity of the nation.

Carnegie’s view: http://www.carnegiehero.org/heroFund.php
Carlyle’s view: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1091