Musical Interlude

I can't listen to music with vocals while I'm writing. I guess the words bit of my brain is wired like a one-way radio and can only do traffic in or out. This week I've been leaning heavily on Hans Zimmer's scores for Inception and The Thin Red Line, which are both films in my all time top-something (I'd be more specific, but I'd only have to change it later).



Brilliant, but also ominous and brooding. So for a break yesterday I put on Zimmer's bouyant, shy love track from True Romance, You're So Cool.



And that reminded me of the best bit in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the unexpectedly emotional visit to the Art Institute Of Chicago. Moments of reflection and sadness are something that more recent zeitgeisty teen movies seem to have forgotten how to do. Or maybe with Barry Levinson and John Hughes the '80s was some kind of high watermark. Either way, this is one of my favourite scenes of forever.



The music is a cover of The Smiths' Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want by The Dream Academy. The original was used in Pretty In Pink, which John Hughes had made right before Ferris Bueller - the Art Institute scene had initially used a different track, and had come after the parade sequence in the movie, but it tested poorly until it was re-jigged and re-scored.

Location

Over the last year I've done two locations-based features for the Total Film website. The idea came from the site's editor Andy Lowe, and involves choosing a location from a film, then tracking it down in google maps and doing a side-by-side image comparison with a still from the film. When it goes right, the result is a really satsifying visual snap.

The first feature was built from a range of movies - famous locations and, for ease's sake, things I had in my DVD collection for screengrabbing. The second was timed to coincide with the 2010 London Film Festival, and features locations only from films shot in the capital.

They're really, really good fun to write, but take up a huge amount of time - I've spent hours virtually walking up and down streets looking for a particular doorway or underpass. And, because trawling around finding locations is inherently interesting, I often get sidetracked or end up finding more than one location per film.

More than anything it emphasised to me what an incredible piece of technology google streetview is. I'd find visual markers in a particular location - the flats behind Powders in My Beautiful Laundrette, for instance - and zoom, shift sideways, adjust the angle and explore the image. It's the Esper Machine, but real, and it's got the whole goddam world in it.

I'd like to do something more complicated than a straightforward comparison gallery if I get the chance. One thing I couldn't include in the feature was how with certain locations it's possible to move the 'camera' in google maps to mimic shots and seqeunces in films. So, here in King's Cross, you can pull the image of the St Pancras clocktower to the right to reveal Harry Palmer's office, as in the start of Billion Dollar Brain, moving from this:



to this:



Try it...


There are loads of other extended bits and pieces you could use it for - tours around a particular film, or movement within a scene. If I ever get time I may put some up here.

Nothing will come of nothing

A few days ago I re-watched Minority Report for the first time since I saw it at the cinema on release, and enjoyed it far more than I expected. The virtual touchscreen imagery has only become more compelling thanks to smartphone touchscreens (I'm assuming the Kinect controls for Sky Player on Xbox 360 will come with fingerless cyber-gloves and tortured memories of lost children) and I loved the icy visual look, the relentless plotting, and the fact that it's sci-fi done very well, which is pretty rare.

The viewing also reminded me of something else I'd thought at the time, having then recently read Truffaut's Hitchcock book, a series of interviews with Hitchcock conducted by the French director. My favourite part has always been when Hitchcock describes a scene he thought up for North By Northwest.

It occurred to me that we were moving in a northwesterly direction from New York, and one of the stops on the way was Detroit, where they make Ford automobiles. Have you ever seen an assembly line? They're absolutely fantastic. Anyway, I wanted to have a long dialogue scene between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers as they walk along the assembly line. They might, for instance, be talking about one of the foremen. Behind them a car is being assembled, piece by piece. Finally, the car they've seen being put together from a simple nut and bolt is complete, with gas and oil, and all ready to drive off the line. The two men look at it and say, "Isn't it wonderful?!" Then they open the door to the car and out drops a corpse!

Truffaut loves the idea, and calls it "a perfect example of nothing", but Hitchcock couldn't fit it into the film. But there's a scene in Minority Report which recalls the idea in a pretty direct if inverse way.



It's still about impossibility, of course, but featuring Tom Cruise it's about a different kind - it's about stars and presence, rather than suspense and absence.

Was it deliberate? I hope so. There was another discussion about Hitchcock's influence on Spielberg recently, with Dreamworks sued over the similarities between 2007's Disturbia and the short story behind Rear Window. Hitch would probably have given him this one for free.

New shit has come to light

A while ago I wrote a post about Steven Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence and Minority Report, and how I'd always felt both films stumbled to thawed, happy conclusions after their natural ends had come and gone.

Just this week I had an interesting corrective email from Ed Stern, the lead writing brain behind dystopic videogame Brink and a man clearly very keen on Kubrick. He said:

Years back I went to a Q&A with Jan Harlan, Kubrick's brother in law and producer, and exec producer on AI. People were quite literally queuing up to snort at how Spielberg had botched the ending by making it all mushy, Godlight, long-deferred-but-finally-supplied-backlit-Son-Mother-hug-ish etc. And Harlan politely, patiently, insistently maintained that Spielberg made precisely and exactly the film that Kubrick had planned - not a line or shot or storyboard changed. But of course, if we'd seen it as a Kubrick-Kanon film, we'd think it was outrageously wry and biting and ironic or something, and not dismiss it as a schmaltzy corruption.

You know. Damn. As an observation on the two films my point still stands, but this certainly reveals the limitations of the auteurist shorthand ("Spielberg's films", "Spielberg's endings") I'm so used to applying to what is a collaborative process. Without getting totally insular or boring, it highlights a maddening aspect of discussing films academically or critically - that the production of any film is the result of hundreds if not thousands of shared decisions and creative coming-togethers, which makes the traditional vocabulary and author-centric approach of literary analysis problematic. It also makes writing about films without sliding into assumptions and make-believe inferences really hard.



None of which is news, and I've always enjoyed historical and industrial accounts of Hollywood as a way of avoiding this sort of writing. So I'm a little annoyed with myself for having fallen into the trap. Hey, I guess I thought Spielberg was a safe authorial bet. Who knew? (Ed knew).

The other thing Ed mentioned was Kubrick's never-made Napoleon project, which along with Killer's Kiss would've been the only original script he'd filmed. Which cheered me up, because the end of Killer's Kiss, with a chase across an abandoned industrial metropolis and an eerie fight in a mannequin workshop, is fantastic. And also, on youtube.

Films with men and shadows

As all the cool kids know, The Third Man is the best British film ever with the possible exceptions of Trainspotting, The 39 Steps, A Matter Of Life And Death, The Life Of Brian, and, you know, loads of others.

But it's definitely brilliant - for the wonderfully shady photography of cobble-streeted Vienna, for the pairing of Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles, and for a plot which weighs up the delicate balance of post-war politics and makes a face like a plumber with bad news.

I was so keen to find more cinema along the lines of the film's famous backstreets and sewer chase that last year I picked up director Carol Reed's Odd Man Out, a man on the run thriller with James Mason as an Irish republican paramilitary. And it was good - long, but with one very effective escape-through-the-city sequence, and, of course, James Mason.



The reason I mention all of this is that this week I watched another film with parallels to Reed's classic as I reviewed a new DVD release of Jacques Tourneur's Berlin Express. It was made the year before The Third Man - 1948 - and is set primarily in Germany rather than Austria. But the focus is the same, a preoccupation with the four-way power share between the victorious allies, and a warning about the undesirable types who might seek to benefit from the cracks in authority.

It's far less elegant than The Third Man, with each of the four central characters representing an allied country like some kind of diplomatic superhero squad, and the plot about protecting a Professor due to give a talk about the reunification of Germany not so much on the nose as inside the nose building a house and smoking a pipe.



But the footage of crumbling post-war Germany, and Frankfurt in particular, is striking and savage, and full of the same kind of shadows that Welles emerged from and slid through so effectively in Reed's film, giving en enjoyable sense of menace and loss to the film's final half hour.

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A quick edit, in case anyone wants to get hold of these on DVD.

The Third Man is available on a decent R2 DVD here, or an even better Blu-ray here, with a commentary track from Steven Soderbergh (whose second film, Kafka, is a strange mix of The Third Man and Welles' excellent version of The Trial).

Odd Man Out is available on R2 DVD with a few extras here.

Berlin Express is available as a barebones disc from here.

Plane Old Reviews

Hello and welcome to some very short reviews I'm writing about things I've seen in the last week. In the last few days I have been mostly in the sky or playing a game at Sony's Santa Monica studios, but before leaving I watched Tim Burton's latest couple of films for a DVD & Blu-ray Review feature, and then a bunch of stuff on the plane. I also saw half of All The Pretty Horses on HBO in my hotel room, but shan't write about that becase a) I fell asleep half way through and b) it was proper horse wang, from what I saw.

The Corpse Bride
Signficantly less precious and 'Strange Emily' than I had feared. Not really sure why I ever worry about Burton's films - I've enjoyed basically everything he's done, even Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (there's a bit in Pee-Wee which is reference to The Bicycle Thieves and it's TOTALLY AMAZING). So this was like Nightmare Before Christmas except with fewer songs and more romance and a maggot that looked liked Peter Lorre. It's 3.5 out of 5.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street
This and Corpse Bride are, I realised as I was writing the Burton feature this week, the only two of the director's films I'd not seen at the cinema, since I was old enough to go see his films at the cinema. I'd just moved to Bath and all the music probably put me off. Which is stupid - the songs are, predictably, brilliant, and Depp-as-Todd's hair is like a magical waxy ice cream. Very bloody, lots of foggy cobbled London streets, and even Sacha Baron Cohen wasn't a complete inside-out pig of a songist. 4 out of 5.

The Informant!
Plane movie number one. I really like Steven Soderbergh rather a lot. I think. Maybe I just find his films interesting, or maybe even just fruitful to write about academically. Forgot that last sentence, it makes me sound like a moron. But the point is he's someone I tend to think I like more than the actual watching of films bears out. Like, I don't really get the fuss behind sex, lies. It's smart and okay. But I think both Soderbergh and Spike Lee are right, Do The Right Thing should've won everything that year. Kafka is okay, King Of The Hill like a well-dressed yawn, The Underneath like a blue cardboard box, Schizopolis excellent but incomprehensible, Gray's Anatomy pretty boring, Out Of Sight like a sexy tanned forearm (this is good, in the measure of things), The Limey like a fucking time travelling uncle who KICKS ASS (also good), Erin Brokovich fun and smart, Traffic a bit weighty but dramatic with five 'D's, Solaris like a purple balloon (not good), Ocean's Eleven like one of those silver balloons with George Clooney's face on (very good) and all the rest. Wow, he's done loads. The Informant! wasn't amazing. Nice touches - the voice-over that obsesses over trivialities rather than driving the narrative, Damon with just the right measure of irony to be funny and watchable - but it was stretched at nearly two hours, wasn't as snappy as it needed to be and never really punctured it's own facade to get to the emotion underneath. Clooney's Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind was similar and better. 2.5 out of 5.

Zombieland
Plane movie number two. Kicked ass. Included a pretty lady, Bill Murray, and zombies. Very little to dislike. 3.5 out of 5.

Surrogates
Plane movie number three. I like Bruce Willis and I like things that rip off Phillip K Dick, so I was all set to really enjoy this daft 'humans are confined to their apartments while controlling beautiful robot counterparts in the real world' thriller. Aside from the Willis-bot's alarming hair (the kind of blond Mr Whippy side-parting you think might suddenly open its eyes at any moment) the opening is full of nice touches - the robomen calling non-avatars 'meatbags' in a flesh-snobbery way, suggestions of emotional detachment, peeks at superhuman powers. Then it just kinda collapses like a bad cake or a heavily drugged giraffe. Everything unfolds very directly, and it ends. 2 out of 5.

Carriers
Plane movie number four. This is a low budget post-mega virus thriller with a car full of people (one of whom is Chris Pine being exactly .34 times as charming as Captain Kirk) trying to get to the beach or something. They meet Chrisopther Meloni and, freaked out by the fact his acting cock is twice as big as theirs and his daughter has the virus, they do drama for a bit before travelling together. Then they abandon him and the girl and I stopped watching because it was too manipulative and because thanks to his giant acting cock I liked Christopher Meloni loads more than any of the stupid younger stupider cast. I fast-forwarded to the end: Pine dies because he's a knob, so does his missus, but his nerdy brother and his lady friend get to the beach. Presumably they starve shortly after. 1 out of 5.

State Of Play
Watched this on the way back before falling to sleep. I sleep terribly on planes and at one point during probably mild turbulance I woke up shouting "Oh Jesus no!" a bit like Edward Woodward at the end of The Wicker Man. Clearly, it was fine. State Of Play was good fun in a twisty, overly-compact kind of way. The 'invesigative journalism good/murdering corporations bad' stick was quite meat and they beat me with it hard, like I'm pretty gay for that kind of liberalism so all good. 3 out of 5 the end.

In dreams

So my one a day run lasted not very many days until work descended. But it was fun work - on Sunday a fun thing for Total Film online, and on Monday playing the excellent, Lynch and Fincher-influenced Heavy Rain.

And after Heavy Rain I'm in the mood for some Lynch, so how about two of my favourite scenes of his. They're from his two best films, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Dr (yes they are), and they're connected in terms of ideas.

Lynch's films often include scenes featuring sites of performance - mini-theatrical stages, spotlights, curtains. He seems fascinated by the aesthetics of stage, the craft of wood and material to manufacture a space for experience and expression. Think the Radiator Lady in Eraserhead, Merrick's humiliation in Elephant Man, Julee Cruise's incredible moment in Twin Peaks. And also think of Dean Stockwell miming to Roy Orbison in the glow of a lamp-lit microphone in Blue Velvet.

The scene is electric: Stockwell's louche lounge act - frills, collar and pale, pale skin - and Hopper's barely-suppressed malice, eased temporarily by miming, mantra-like, along with the mime. The fixation on performance (or, here, lack of it) recurs later, when Hopper watches Isabella Rossellini sing Blue Velvet onstage while rubbing a square of actual blue velvet cut from her gown - the performance reduced to a physical object (which ties in to what I was saying before about audiences reconceiving their relationship with films and by extension music in the wake of videos). Then there's Mulholland Dr.

The Club Silencio sequence in Mulholland Dr is a contorted remake of the Stockwell scene. Again there's Roy Orbison - the song is Crying, this time, only now it's sung (or rather acted) by Rebekah Del Rio in Spanish translation. Again the scene is about mime, and as a consequence about authenticity and emotional investment in performance. I remember the first time I watched the film, in Sheffield in 2001, I felt distressed and almost cheated when Del Rio collapses. The combination of image and sound is so compelling and emotional it's hard not to feel duped when the illusion is broken, even though the creepy dude with the moustache is telling you throughout that there is no band. I don't attach any specific meaning to the scene (I think the great joy of Mulholland Dr is that is teases tangible meaning without ever surrendering it), although it's probably significant that the revelation of Del Rio's performance is the point at which the Hollywood Cinderella narrative that the film has followed unravels and twists into something darker.

One last thing - after Twin Peaks Lynch did a TV series called Hotel Room for HBO. The show itself isn't brilliant - each of the three existing episodes features a standalone drama in a hotel suite. But I've always thought the show's introductory credit sequence, narrated by Lynch, is fantastic. He sets up the hotel room as one of these sites of performance, a space for things to unfold and for stories to be told. It's really effective. Shame the stories themselves didn't quite deliver. Ach - the youtube link's been deleted, so you'll have to make do with the word themselves. Imagine Lynch saying this to images of Manhattan building works from the 1930s:

"For a millennium the space for the hotel room existed – undefined. Mankind captured it and gave it shape and passed through. And sometimes when passing through, brushing up against the secret names of truth."

EDIT: Youtube link is currently back up.