Cinema

I guess it would be fun to have a best-of-2007 thread. The trouble is, of course, that it turns out when you look closely that many of the things that you thought came out in 2007 actually came out earlier. But I’m going to ignore that, if paperback came out in 2007 (for example) that’s good enough for me. So here goes – an entirely perverse personal selection (nominate your own in any category you like in comments).

Film: Das Leben der Anderen. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s portrait of East Germany under the thumb of the Stasi. Not released in the US and the UK until 2007, so it counts.

Novel: David Peace, The Damned United. (Paperback in 2007). No doubt utterly incomprehensible to anyone who wasn’t around in England at the time, this is a novelised day-by-day account of Brian Clough’s short tenure at Leeds United, as seen from inside Clough’s brandy-sodden head. Utterly brilliant.

Biography: “The Man Who Went into the West: The Life of R.S.Thomas”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1845132505?ie=UTF8&tag=junius-21&link_code=as3&camp=2506&creative=9298&creativeASIN=1845132505 , by Byron Rogers. I blogged about it “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/09/03/the-man-who-went-into-the-west/ .

Team: “Bristol RFC”:http://www.bristolrugby.co.uk/index.php , the relegation favourites who ended up in the Guinness Premiership play-offs. (OK, so I’m biased.)

CD: “Gram Parsons Archive vol. 1”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FGram-Parsons-Archive-Vol-1%2Fdp%2FB000W1V8DU%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1198179063%26sr%3D1-1&tag=junius-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 . Two CD’s of Flying Burrito Brothers performances from 1969 that have been sitting in the Grateful Dead archive ever since. Great performances and unmissable, if you like that kind of thing (which I do).

Blog: “The Encyclopedia of Decency”:http://decentpedia.blogspot.com/, or Decentpedia. Whilst some of us had wasted hours of our time in serious engagement with the “decent left”, Malky Muscular, the Decentpedia’s proprietor, managed to deflate them with highly effective ridicule.

Blog post: Any one of Errol Morris’s “discussions”:http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg-part-one/ of photographic authenticity at “Zoom”:http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/ .

Time-sink of the year: “Facebook”:http://www.face.book.com .

Project of the year: Project 365, over at “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com , into which Eszter inveigled me, and which gave me a lot of fun.

I’d love to be able to nominate a philosophical paper or book of the year, but I can’t think of anything that’s really knocked me out.

Last weekend I went to a preview of The Golden Compass, the New Line film of Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights, fully prepared to love it. The trailers were terrific, and the casting of Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig was inspired. I’d heard Pullman’s insistence that cutting out all references to the Magisterium as a religious authority didn’t matter, because the Magisterium represented totalitarianism in all its forms. I didn’t buy it, but thought the film could still be worthwhile. Oh dear.
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A few months ago, Nina at Infinite Thought offered an appreciation of the difference between the playfulness of vintage European porn films (from roughly 1905 to 1930) and the more industrialized contemporary product:

The first thing you notice is the sheer level of silliness on show: sex isn’t just a succession of grim orgasms and the parading of physical prowess, but something closer to slapstick and vaudeville. Men pretend to be statues of fauns for curious women to tickle; two seamstresses fall into a fit of giggles as their over-excited boss falls off the bed; a bawdy waitress serves a series of sexually-inspired meals to a man dressed as a musketeer before joining him for ‘dessert’. This kind of theatrical role-play pre-empts many of the clichés of contemporary pornography, of course: nuns, school-mistresses, the ‘peeping tom’ motif, and so on. But the beauty of these early short films lies in the details, the laughter of its participants and the sheer variety of the bodies on parade: the unconventionally attractive mingle with the genuinely pretty; large posteriors squish overjoyed little men. The fact that the rules of pornographic film-making haven’t yet been formally established, as well as the rudimentary nature of the film equipment, means that often the filming cuts off before any sort of climax, which only adds to the amateurish, unstructured, anarchic charm of it all.

At Quick Study, I’ve posted a short response to another recent Infinite Thought item developing this line of reflection.

It has prompted a discussion touching — so far — on Sade, Steven Marcus, and the days when everybody in a pornographic novel would recharge their orgy batteries by stopping to listen to a lecture on Enlightenment philosophy.

If this sounds like it might float your boat, stop by. Quick Study is my personal blog, and I’ve been averse to pushing here at Crooked Timber, but what the hell….Diffidence gets you no traffic. (But the start of the semester sure did; it seems that freshmen Google the words “quick study” in an effort to increase the amount of time they can spend getting wasted.)

Josh Glenn has a great little slideshow for you, in the Boston Globe. His worthy theme: Winsor McCay’s classic early comic strip, “Dream of a Rarebit Fiend” [1904-1913]. (McCay is more famous for Little Nemo. You’ve certainly heard of that one.) The occasion: a lavish new edition, The Complete Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, all the strips reprinted for the first time at full size; edited and annotated by some fanatic by the name of Ullrich Merkl. Here’s the book page. You can download substantial samples (PDF). Looks nice, though pricey. (Older editions [amazon] are in print as well.)

As I was saying: Josh’s little slideshow – with voiceover – documents the influence of “Rarebit Fiend” on five later films: L’Age D’Or, King Kong, Dumbo, Mary Poppins, Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I guess Glenn is taking his cue from Merkl’s work. I deem it well worth 3 minutes and 31 seconds of your time.

Speaking of the shift from print cartooning to film, Winsor McCay, if you don’t know, is pretty much the God-Grandfather of the animated cartoon. He was one of the very first (the very first?), and hand-drew every damn frame, apparently. (With an occasional assistant.) And he did these vaudeville tours in which he lectured and interacted with the films. Obviously the joke is to synchronize your patter with the film itself. YouTube has it all: “Little Nemo” (1911) (but you have to wait until, like, 8:30 minutes in for the actual animation to start.) “Gertie the Dinosaur” (1914); and “Gertie on Tour” (1921); “How a Mosquito Operates” (1912); and some other stuff, too. Gertie the Dinosaur has the distinction of being the first made-for-animation character, I believe.

Last but not least, Josh Glenn himself has a fun new book out: Taking Things Seriously [amazon] – I’ll get around to reviewing that one. Basically, he invited people to submit their objects. And so they did.

Quiet around here. I’ll try to amuse you.

I love Daniel Pinkwater. I feel there is something lost in all this playlisted, Netflixed, on-demand hoo-ha you call Modernity. There needs to be an element of randomized, cinematic, B-listiness. So I bought all these sketchy multi-DVD sets and, every couple weeks, Belle and I ‘snark out’, picking a disc literally at random. (First a random cartoon.) Mostly it’s worked out, until we actually drew Wild Women of Wongo from the deck. We’re too old for that stuff. Now, mostly, we go for SnarkPlatinum or SnarkSelect options (but I won’t bore you with my elaborate randomization system.)

Last week’s pick was "Illegal" (1955), starring Edward G. Robinson, plus bonus DeForest Kelley, Jayne Mansfield, and Henry Kulky action. The tag is simply false: " He was a guy who marked 100 men for death – until a blonde called ‘Angel’ O’Hara marked him for life!" Nothing of the sort happens.

I like the way they used to use quotation marks in the title itself.

But wait. If the title is "Illegal", shouldn’t I have to refer to it as "’Illegal’"?

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Many years ago … it must have been ten years, I watched “Patrick Keiller”:http://www.rca.ac.uk/pages/research/patrick_keiller_234.html ‘s pseudo-documentary “Robinson in Space”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120028/ on TV. It stayed with me, though, frustratingly, I forgot the title and therefore from time to time rummaged around my collection of old videotapes trying to find “that film”. The other day I was visiting my son and it turned out that his flatmate had the DVD of Robinson together with its precursor “London”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110377/ (in “a set issued by the BFI”:http://www.bfi.org.uk/booksvideo/video/catalogue/index.php/page/item_view/code/425 ) , so I borrowed them and watched again. They are curious works: very quiet and somewhat mannered. Against a backdrop of national decline (how the Zeitgeist — though not the reality — has changed in ten years!) Charged with investigating the “Problem of England”, Robinson and his companion (the narrator) tour a combination of literary sites, docks, prisons and so forth whilst the viewer is treated to a deadpan recitation of facts about history, politics, import-export statistics and other trivia — including that England is the leading producer of rubber sheeting of the type necessary for S&M orgies. (The quietness combined with the sequence of images and literary allusions has a slightly Sebaldesque flavour.) The journey (or journeys) supposedly retrace the steps of Daniel Defoe’s _Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain_ .Keiller depicts a land without public space or political virtue but one where beauty and morality take second place to turning a profit. Recommended.

David Denby didn’t like “Sicko” very much. In the New Yorker, he writes:

“Hauling off seriously ill people to a military base where they won’t receive treatment is a dumb prank.”

Okay – I’m not the biggest Michael Moore fan in the world, and I can see how this might rub some people the wrong way.

“Why not tell us what really happened on the trip – for instance, what part Cuban officials played in receiving the American patients?”

Actually, that might not be a bad idea.

“Moore winds up treating the audience the same way that, he says, powerful people treat the weak in America – as dopes easily satisfied with fairy tales and bland reassurances.”

Seems harsh – this is clearly supposed to be a piece of entertaining propaganda – but, again, I can see the point.

“A shift to the left, or, at least, to the center, has overtaken Michael Moore, yielding an irony more striking than any he turns up: the changes in political consciousness that Moore himself has helped produce have rendered his latest film almost superfluous.”

Er, how’s that again? In polls, a majority are in favor of universal health care, so there’s no need to build grass-roots pressure anymore? Same for getting out of Iraq, I suppose.

Over the next five days, the Guardian is publishing “their list of the top 1000 films ever”:http://film.guardian.co.uk/1000films/0,,2108487,00.html , in alphabetical order. Naturally, being the Guardian, they manage to screw up before getting past “A” through the shocking omission of “All About Eve”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042192/ , without which no such list can be taken seriously. I’m sure our commenters will spot other similar outrages as the week unfolds.

The Hollywood Reporter, uh, reports:

Haitian auteur Raoul Peck will direct “Karl Marx,” tracing the young adventures of the German philosopher and revolutionary, producer Jacques Bidou said Thursday.

The picture will cover the period 1830-1848, including Marx’s time in Paris before being expelled to Brussels and culminating with the publication of the Communist Manifesto. “Marx was considered a young genius at the time, but it was also a period marked by the birth of a great movement in thinking,” Bidou said.

The story also will encompass Marx’s love for his aristocratic wife Jenny von Westphalen, and his friendship with Friedrich Engels, with whom he co-authored the Manifesto.

No cast is yet attached, but Bidou said the principal characters will necessarily be young….

Well, yes, that is probably true, given that Marx was 12 years old in 1830.
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Went to see Shane Meadows’s much-hyped-by-the-critics “This is England”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480025/ last night. What a piss-poor film it is. Poorly acted, poorly scripted, and hardly redeemed by some really clunking cinematography. The film would be kind of ok as a drama offering on BBC2 (or BBC4) but insightful socio-historical document it isn’t. The action all takes place on a bog-standard depressing-concrete housing estate with the standard row of depressing-concrete shops (plus free-standing Pakistani newsagents) and — for those who don’t know — gravitates around the tensions within early-80s skinhead culture between two-tone ska fans and racist knuckleheads. Young boy with father-killed-in-the-Falklands (Shaun) gravitates to the cool(ish) multiracial ska crowd but then becomes seduced by boastful-but-insecure racist psychopath Combo, the movie then plods along to its predictable violent “climax”. Thatcher and the Falklands lurk predictably in the background. Redeeming features? The National Front meeting in the pub isn’t badly observed, but, in truth, it can’t have been all that hard to set up a little cameo involving dopey skinheads, tatooed bikers and fat Nazis in bad suits. TiE goes a long way to showing that, just so long as you make a film with a certain kind of subject matter, critics will give you a good write-up. Sit at home and watch old episodes of _Shameless_ or rent a copy of _La Haine_ : both are better acted and both offer more insight into their subject-matters than _This is England_.

There’s been just about nothing in the Anglophone media about the controversy surrounding Volker Schlöndorff’s new film “Strajk: die Heldin von Danzig”:http://www.strajk-derfilm.de/ which deals with the birth of Poland’s Solidarity movement and is loosely based on the role of Anna Walentynowicz in the union. Walentynowicz is outraged at Schlöndorff’s movie which portrays her as illiterate and the shipyard workers as, among other things, hard drinkers. She’s threatening legal action. There’s some coverage “here”:http://www.signandsight.com/intodaysfeuilletons/1232.html , “here”:http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2377595,00.html and “here”:http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aVmHZrXT7C6g&refer=muse . I’d be interested to read comments from Polish or German readers about how the row is being reported in those countries.

A bemused follow-up to my Frankenstein post. Here’s what you get tangled in, trying to edit this stuff into shape (plus YouTube goodies!). [click to continue…]

Last night Belle and I watched a classic war flick – 12 O’Clock High [wikipedia], with Gregory Peck as the stoical General Savage. It contains extensive and rather impressive real combat footage: formations of flying fortresses vs. German fighters with lots of planes going down in smoke and flames and frantic little stick figures trying to bail out safely, with apparently mixed results. Then dropping of bombs and large explosions. It suddenly struck me that it’s sort of weird to use real war footage in Hollywood entertainments.

I flew into Prague a couple of days ago; before boarding my flight, I spent a little time in the Dulles Borders browsing. I was a bit surprised to see a big display in the impulse buy area beside the cash register for “Snakes on a Plane.” Seems like a fairly odd marketing strategy to me – I don’t imagine that it’s likely to be the kind of movie that many people would want to watch on a plane, or even buy on the spur of the moment just before getting on a plane. The fun of watching people trying to deal with poisonous snakes in a confined space would pall quite quickly, I imagine, if you were in that confined space while watching it. I asked the asst. manager at the register how many he’d sold; he said none so far, but it was the first day it was on display. Not that I have any great wisdom to impart on this or anything, but just thought it was a little odd.