The Glidd of Glood Blog

My Scientology Movie - a review

 

If you were a business and your product was secrets, you probably wouldn’t be falling over yourself to talk to the press. You’d be even less likely to want to talk to a journalist who has a reputation for exposing humbug and 1.79 million Twitter followers, if you yourself have developed a reputation for questionable business practices.

So, in some respects it came as no surprise when, in the opening minutes of Louis Theroux’s My Scientology Movie which was shown on BBC last night, he informed us that the Church of Scientology had declined to cooperate with him in the making of the film. He would not be allowed to film within the Church and they would not give him interviews. They wanted nothing to do with him. This isn’t the most auspicious start for a documentary film. But then one imagines that documentary film-makers are used to this sort of thing. After all, if everyone just told you whatever you wanted to know, you’d barely need journalists to provide exposés. Getting around obstruction is the journalist’s stock in trade.

Louis was not to be outsmarted so easily. If you can’t get into the Church, what you can do instead is entice it to come to you and gain some sort of access that way. In Theroux’s case, although he didn’t admit to it, what this consisted of was to get the number 1 critic of the Church on board and stage re-enactments of some of the most notorious Scientology events. To create the re-enactments, you advertise for actors. By doing this all under the nose of the Scientology headquarters, you’d be bound to attract their attention and so it proved. At one point in the film, with the Church seemingly well-informed of what Theroux’s team was getting up to, he gleefully inquired “Do you think we have a mole?” It was a bit like a carp angler wondering whether there was a fish on the hook when his float has disappeared beneath the surface of the lake.

Just to make doubly sure, Theroux and his team drove past Scientology’s desert establishment repeatedly and stopped their car or cars in view of the video cameras with which the perimeter fence is festooned. This elicited the desired response. Scientology goons appeared for some “squirrel-busting”, in their jargon, which involves obtrusively filming anyone who they perceive to be a threat whilst a second goon berates the inquisitive person and tells them to go home or desist their interest in the Church. You can see umpteen examples of this bullying tactic in YouTube videos. If you are a lone or essentially powerless individual, it must be very unnerving, but in Theroux’s case it was just hilariously funny. Although the Scientology camera was a large, chunky-looking, professional affair, they were never going to be able to out-film the BBC. The BBC team just outgunned them, as it contained a cameraman, a bloke with a big microphone on a boom and a director, in addition to Theroux and his informant Marty Rathbun.

On one occasion the unfortunate and rather good-looking girl who showed up with a camera-toting colleague at Theroux’s makeshift studio was reduced to squatting on the pavement and smoking a nervous cigarette while Louis and his team attempted to get her to divulge some information. It made great TV.

Marty Rathbun was the erstwhile Scientology Inspector General or enforcer who has since turned grass, if not “supergrass”, as one of his former colleagues alleged that he still wasn’t telling all he knew. This is probably because he spent decades as Scientology’s chief bully, second only to the apparently psychotic supremo David Miscavige and must have done an awful lot of bullying in his time. He came across as an unpleasant individual and his relationship with Theroux was extremely frosty at times, with him calling Theroux a “fucking asshole” when the latter tried to point out that the “squirrel-busters” were perhaps employing techniques that he, Rathbun, had pioneered.

The basic business model of Scientology – and it should be viewed as a business, rather than anything else – is that Scientologists attend a complex set of courses, each costing considerable sums of money, on a ladder to enlightenment and power. What you don’t want, in these circumstances, is for people to let the cat out of the bag before the student has stumped up the cash. Unfortunately for the Church, in this internet age where information is freely available to anyone who wants to look for it, the Church’s more ridiculous esoteric beliefs – that we are all descended from aliens seeded in volcanoes, for instance – have been widely publicised. It would now be hard to want to part with thousands of $$ to be told that.

Scientology’s teachings seem to rely on confrontational methods where students learn to dominate and bully other people by shouting at them, berating and belittling them. As you might imagine, Marty Rathbun was well-versed in this. But Louis Theroux is the perfect investigator for such a task as he appears protected by a cloak of what appears to be almost autism. As many of his films show, he is comfortable in very uncomfortable situations, or at least more comfortable than the people he finds himself with. I hugely enjoyed one scene with him facing Rathbun, both of them staring intently at each other while a silence hung in the air like a stalling jumbo jet. Who would speak first to diffuse it, the ex-professional bully who had spent a career teaching these techniques, or the mild-mannered Englishman to whom they appeared to come naturally? It was Rathbun who blinked first.

I can’t say that I learned anything much in Louis Theroux’s film that I didn’t know already, but that was probably because I once spent a day reading everything I could find on the cult and looking at many videos including Alex Gibney’s film Going Clear which is reckoned to be the definitive work at this time. Scientology is a cult that inspires revulsion and perhaps fear, but Theroux has succeeded in giving it a comedy value that has been maybe ignored up to now. But then isn’t that what he manages to do with most of his subjects of enquiry?

 

So what's so funny about Harold Pinter?

I read a couple of Harold Pinter plays again a week or so ago. I read The Homecoming and then immediately read Betrayal. Pinter is my favourite playwright and those two plays, especially Betrayal, are among my very favourite Pinter plays. I’ve read them many times and know them almost by heart. I saw The Homecoming performed at the Oxford Playhouse in 1978 with Timothy West, Michael Kitchen and Gemma Jones amongst the cast. I also saw the film of Betrayal with Jeremy Irons, Ben Kingsley and Patricia Hodge when it came out in 1983. After I had read Betrayal again, I watched the film which is available in fairly dodgy quality on YouTube. I’d buy the DVD, but I’m not sure you can get it in Europe (surprisingly).

There is a lot to like in Pinter and undoubtedly one of those things is that his plays are extremely funny, but strangely, this is a quality that is always played down in any discussion of his work. It is by no means clear what his work was about and Pinter wasn’t inclined to enlighten us. There are themes, clearly, such as power plays, the use of language to dominate people, deliberate ambivalence and the inability to really know anything. But what exactly was he trying to say in his art? Who really knows, and it is by no means proven that he did, but it didn’t stop him winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. This makes Pinter a serious literary figure and seems to prevent critics from saying just how amusing the plays are. You wouldn’t call them comedies exactly, but I still think they are closer to comedy than tragedy. They contain a continuous sequence of laughs.

When asked what his plays were about, Pinter famously said “The weasel under the cocktail cabinet”. This was probably just a meaningless phrase uttered out of exasperation, not that it prevented umpteen critics analysing it and looking for the symbolic meaning behind the words – just as they had been doing with his drama. Was the cocktail cabinet a symbol for the bourgeoisie? Was the weasel a divisive character upsetting the status quo? Or was it just an amusing and absurd image of a small British mammal in an incongruous place under a piece of modern furniture? I suspect the latter. I think that Pinter’s mind couldn’t help conjuring surreal images which were inherently amusing but which were symbolic of nothing much.

By sheer coincidence, I learned a few days after my re-reading the plays that BBC Radio 4 was to broadcast a radio version of Betrayal at the weekend so I made sure that I didn’t miss it. For those who don’t know, Betrayal dramatizes an affair that a literary agent has with his best friend’s wife. This friend is a publisher. The play is acted as a series of flashbacks going from the present, when the affair is over, to its very beginning some seven years earlier. Consequently, the audience always knows more than the characters about what is to happen subsequently. It’s a very clever dramatic device and presents all sorts of comic possibilities. It’s quite reasonable to think that Pinter wasn’t trying to present infidelity and the betrayal of one’s friendships as something funny. It’s not, in itself, an amusing subject. But then again, if life is absurd, one could find comedy in pretty much anything and I think that Pinter was closer to this viewpoint than to others.

Still, it seems that not everyone, but any means, agrees with me. Gaynor Macfarlane’s radio version of Betrayal was devoid of any humour at all. It appears that this was a BBC rerun originally broadcast 5 years ago in 2012. I’m not a classical music buff, so I am reasonably unfamiliar with multiple recordings of famous works, each with a different interpretation of the music. Nonetheless, I do have a cassette recording of Mozart’s Requiem which is the one used for the Amadeus soundtrack. When I bought my own vinyl Requiem, it was an entirely different recording which I have never much enjoyed listening to. It just sounds “wrong” to me. Tempos change, intonation is different, some instruments are more prevalent than others on the different recordings, some less so. I couldn’t possibly say which of the two, if either, is closer to how Mozart intended the music to be played. Perhaps some other recording that I have never heard is infinitely superior. But there you are.

So, I have to say that Gaynor Macfarlane’s interpretation of Pinter’s play was something of a disappointment. I can’t fault the actors, in the same way as you wouldn’t fault the orchestra for playing a version of a classical work that you found unsatisfying. The actors are surely just doing what the director is telling them to do in the same way as musicians follow the conductor. But judging from this, Macfarlane has somehow missed what the play is about. The scenes changed to the accompaniment of doomy depressing music, just in case the listener was in any doubt that this was a play we could all be miserable about. What could possibly be amusing in watching the end of an affair where the couple has nothing much more to say to each other, and a friendship that has been ruined through betrayal? Andrew Scott as Jerry constantly annoyed me by rushing his lines, leaving no space to appreciate the dialogue of the other character. His intonation was also, to my ears, all wrong. But as I say, this must be as Macfarlane wanted it.

So, what evidence can I offer to suggest that Betrayal, as well as Pinter’s other plays, are in fact intended to have a significant comic element? Could it be that I just have a warped sense of humour and can find a laugh in things that aren’t meant to be funny? After all, when I saw The Homecoming, the only other person laughing in the theatre was my brother. But then we share the same sense of humour and the rest of the audience was overwhelmingly composed of old-age pensioners, for some reason. It was a matinée.

Well, take this line: Jerry the agent has gone around to see his friend Robert the publisher because he thinks that Robert’s wife Emma has just told her husband about her affair with him. What is already funny is that Robert has in fact known for years, so the entire scene is a joke at Jerry’s expense. But after the two men talk over the situation, Robert says to Jerry:

“Have you read any good books lately?”

It is inconceivable, in a play where the two male characters are a publisher and a literary agent, that Pinter would have included this line – a cliché for breaking the ice in uncomfortable or non-existent conversations – were he not trying to create a comic effect. It’s a killer line and extremely funny. Nonetheless, in the Macfarlane radio production, this dialogue is related in the same tone as if Robert had asked Jerry if he had heard about the latest IRA atrocity. It strikes me that if you don’t get this, one of the most obvious jokes in the play, then you likely to be deaf to all the others. In which case, you must be missing the entire tone of the play which is a masterpiece of comic timing.

There is nothing much to be gained in pointing out all the other jokes. They are contained in the rhythm of the dialogue. But I do particularly like the “Casey” running joke. Casey is a successful writer whom we never meet but who is referenced constantly throughout the play like a leitmotif. He is a squash partner, an excuse for a trip to America, and it appears, Emma’s new lover. He is also the subject of the following piece of dialogue:

JERRY: I was having tea with Casey

EMMA: Where?

JERRY: Just around the corner

EMMA: I thought he lived in… Hampstead or somewhere.

ROBERT: You’re out of date.

EMMA: Am I?

JERRY: He’s left Susannah. He’s living alone round the corner.

EMMA: Oh.

ROBERT: Writing a novel about a man who leaves his wife and three children and goes to live alone on the other side of London to write a novel about a man who leaves his wife and three children –

EMMA: I hope it’s better than the last one.

ROBERT: The last one? Ah, the last one. Wasn’t that the one about the man who lived in a big house in Hampstead with his wife and three children and is writing a novel about - ?

If you don’t find this funny, there is little hope for you. There is also little hope for all the Pinter critics who just pretend that this comedy doesn’t even exist in his work or who feel that it is, at best, incidental to his drama. So, Gaynor McFarlane’s radio Betrayal was an entirely humourless affair but that didn’t stop it being appreciated by at least one critic who thought it was brilliant. Elizabeth Mahoney, writing in the Guardian, tells us that it was “exquisitely directed”, so you have to assume that she didn’t think it was meant to be funny.

The Homecoming is also highly amusing, unless, it appears, you were an OAP in the latter part of the 1970s. For example, in this piece of dialogue, Lenny the, we presume, pimp seems to have designs upon his sister-in-law who has just arrived unexpectedly with her husband in the middle of the night:

He goes to the sideboard, pours from a jug into a glass, takes the glass to RUTH.

LENNY: Here you are. I bet you could do with this.

RUTH: What is it?

LENNY: Water.

She takes it, sips, places the glass on a small table by her chair.

The joke is in the subversion of our, and Ruth’s, expectations. We all expect it to be something alcoholic. Lenny then goes on to relate a story of snow-clearing which culminates in his casual violence to an old lady after telling her to shove an iron mangle, that he was trying to move into a different room for her, up her arse. Are we supposed to be shocked by his language, or his story of giving her “a short-arm jab to the belly” before hopping on a bus? Far more likely, I think, Pinter was probably having a good chortle when he wrote this, and expected his audience to share his amusement, which I certainly did. Perhaps the OAPs with whom I saw the production identified with the old lady. Lenny goes on:

LENNY: Excuse me, shall I take this ashtray out of your way?

RUTH: It’s not in my way.

LENNY: It seems to be in the way of your glass. The glass was about to fall. Or the ashtray. I’m rather worried about the carpet. It’s not me, it’s my father. He’s obsessed with order and clarity. He doesn’t like mess. So, as I don’t believe you’re smoking at the moment, I’m sure you won’t object if I move the ashtray.

He does so.

LENNY: And now, perhaps, I’ll relieve you of your glass.

RUTH: I haven’t quite finished.

LENNY: You’ve consumed quite enough, in my opinion.

RUTH: No I haven’t.

LENNY: Quite sufficient, in my own opinion.

RUTH: Not in mine, Leonard.

The joke once again, is that the Lenny treats the glass of water as if it were something considerably stronger. The incongruity between the language he employs and the actual contents of the glass is what makes the dialogue funny. Now, I suppose you could analyse this to death and ignore the fact that Pinter has written a joke and go into long explanations about the impossibility of knowing, or the use of language to dominate or whatever else you want to talk about. There may be all sorts of undercurrents of meaning, of course. But I still think that Pinter’s primary intention was to be funny when he wrote the dialogue, or at the very least, it was a major consideration. And it is also interesting that Ruth doesn’t point out that it’s just a glass of water, as this would somewhat spoil the joke.

I am now re-reading No Man’s Land. I very much regret that I never got to see the production with Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir John Gielgud as two of the four actors. In fact, I have never seen it at all, more’s the pity. But according to the Daily Mail, I’m not missing anything. This is Quentin Lett’s review. He doesn’t seem to make much of the highly amusing dialogue and continual jokes, though it’s only fair to say that you wouldn’t really read the Daily Mail if you wanted literary criticism:

It seems that lines like the following just have no interest for him:

SPOONER: I looked up once into my mother’s face. What I saw there was nothing less than pure malevolence. I was fortunate to escape with my life. You will want to know what I had done to provoke such hatred in my own mother.

HIRST: You’d pissed yourself.

SPOONER: Quite right. How old do you think I was at the time?

HIRST: Twenty-eight.

SPOONER: Quite right. However, I left home soon after.

Whether or not you find this funny, you surely can’t imagine that Pinter didn’t write it for laughs. Why else would he have written it? That isn’t to say that Pinter can just be reduced to comedy, but his work was, like any theatre, about entertainment and one of the best ways of providing that is to make people laugh. I find his plays hilarious and have little time for po-faced critics who seem impervious to his jokes.

Which brings us to the second play that was on the BBC Radio 4 double bill with Betrayal. This was Keeping In Touch by Joan Bakewell, to my knowledge her only attempt at a play. The story is that she was Pinter’s mistress when he was married to Vivien Merchant and that Betrayal is really all about their relationship. She was peeved when she saw it, knowing that Pinter had used his first-hand experience of adultery to write it. I’m not sure how much anyone else knew at the time about their relationship. Nonetheless, that Pinter should have used their relationship to create a work of art annoyed her so she felt she would present “her side of the story” by writing her own play about adultery. From listening to Keeping In Touch I started to understand how Pinter was a Nobel prize-winning playwright whilst Bakewell was a journalist. Her play wasn’t uninteresting, but it wasn’t funny, nor could I work out what it was trying to say, if anything. It seemed more like 30 or 45 minutes of forgettable radio drama. It contained none of Pinter’s jokes, his sense of dialogue, nor his clever flashback technique. But then, I suspect Pinter wrote Betrayal out of need to turn experience into art and because he had learned something, whereas I suspect Bakewell wrote her play just as a reaction to Pinter writing his. Would you expect it to be any good? I suppose it might have been a poor rendition of her script, in the same way as this version of Betraya was, but being unfamiliar with Bakewell’s play, I can’t really comment. What I imagine to really be the case is that Keeping In Touch just doesn’t have any particular merits.

 

 

 

Ill Manors – a film review

 I happened upon this film on the BBC a couple of nights ago. It was released in 2012. It’s a crime drama, centred around drug-dealing in Forest Gate in the East End of London and is unremittingly gritty and depressing. If you want to read the entire story (inadvisable if you plan on seeing the film) you will find it here on Wikipedia.

The film examines the intertwining threads of the six principal characters in a short timeframe. Initially, this is quite disconcerting as it is hard to see how these little bits of story relate to one another and there are various flashbacks filling in some backstory which also require an effort on the part of the viewer to make sense of. But gradually as the film progresses, the narrative strands become a lot clearer.

The film was directed by Ben Drew as his first feature-length film, and also financed largely by him. This is remarkable, as he is also a rapper under the name Plan B and provides the music for his own film. Having written the script, he wanted to direct it but with no credentials, unsurprisingly his request fell on deaf ears. You have to admire someone who won’t take no for an answer, raised the finance and directed it anyway. You have to admire them all the more when the finished article is as compulsive viewing and thought-provoking as Ill Manors is.

The characters in the film are small-time drug dealers, school kids and gang members caught up in a spiral of violence, crack abuse and prostitution. It doesn’t sound a great deal of fun and it isn’t. Some commentators have criticised the film as some wannabe Guy Ritchie or Quentin Tarantino fare but as far as I am concerned, they have entirely missed the point. Yes, there is violence aplenty but in Tarantino’s work there seems to be a fascination with violence of an almost slapstick variety. The name Pulp Fiction he gave to his most famous film only underlines his attitude towards his material. Tarantino is about entertainment and amusement; you aren’t supposed to take it seriously. Ritchie is also firmly in the comedy business. His films are not social commentary but are gangland entertainment.

Drew’s film on the other hand, whilst perhaps borrowing some stylistic devices from Tarantino or Ritchie, is an almost entirely humourless exercise. The closest it gets to comedy is depicting the lengths that some members of society’s underclass will go to be reimbursed for a missing mobile phone. But when this involves pimping out some unfortunate prostitute multiple times in an evening for £20 in cafés and chip shops, it’s not very funny at all and it almost certainly wasn’t meant to be.

What it depicts is a society, common to all criminal underclasses, where respect, money and violence are deeply intertwined. The game is about making money by dealing – which is perhaps the only way you are likely to make it if you have no job and no job prospects. To make money, you have to command respect. To get respect, you have to indulge in constant casual violence. This will start with fists, move on to knives and end with guns and murder. After a while, if you have enough respect, you can get people to commit violence on your behalf.

What marks out the most successful people in this game is their casual attitude towards inflicting pain and suffering and ultimately death on anyone who stands in the way of them achieving their financial objectives. It’s a little like working in an abattoir where people have to be completely emotionally detached from removing life from living creatures.

There is a series on French TV which examines real-life, sordid criminal murder cases. In one of this week’s, a young man asked a friend to help him commit a murder. The friend immediately acquiesced, without asking who was to be killed, or why his mate wanted them dead. He apparently said, simply enough, that for him it was a job like any other and he was happy to help out a friend. As it turned out, his friend wanted to kill his mother, but it made no difference at all. It transpired that the helpful killer was a Colombian who had been brought up in the street without a family, where life is cheap and loyalty to your friends stands in for loyalty to a family.

So in Ill Manors there are flashbacks to the protagonists as kids in a children’s home, the inference being that a loveless and often brutalised childhood just breeds more lovelessness and brutality. Prostitutes have unwanted children who will be placed in social care and who will grow up to be drug dealers, drug users and prostitutes themselves. The alarming thing about this thesis is just how true it seems to be as the media is constantly full of child abusers who had themselves been abused when young. The film also rings very true in terms of location, dialogue and characterisation. Drew employed a mixture of people he knew with no acting experience from his own life growing up in Forest Gate, as well as some professional actors.  Knife crime and gang membership among the young in Britain’s inner cities seems to be a significant problem. Ill Manors shows you the reality beyond the headlines. This is what knife crime and gang membership are like on a daily basis only a few miles from Chelsea and Kensington.

In this interview with the Guardian, Drew points out that to obtain status within his peer group, it was important to have the right training shoes. This might seem extremely facile, but I remember the first time I ever encountered training shoes. It was at primary school in about 1968. There was a kid in our class who was extremely gifted at football and one day he showed up at school with brand new Adidas training shoes. This was a time when we were all wearing plimsolls and training shoes were unheard of as far as I was concerned. Training for what? Even in 1972 at my secondary school, we did our cross-country runs in plimsolls, with no cushioning at all. The jogging boom hadn’t been invented. In any case, Paul Warmsley’s training shoes caused a sensation and he had even more status as a result than he already had from being good at football.

Spool forward a few decades and society lives almost entirely within a consumerist bubble. You are what you own. Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” has been replaced with “I consume, therefore I am” but more poignantly for many, “I don’t consume (because I can’t afford to) therefore I am not”. If you don’t have the right training shoes or phone, you just aren’t worth anything at all. This state of affairs was surely one of the motors for the looting that took place in the London riots of 2011, a subject that Drew originally wanted to make into a film. You might not need a 50 inch TV to enjoy television, but you might need one to obtain some kudos in your peer group.

There have also been criticisms about the level of coincidence in Drew’s film, especially in the plot devices towards the end of it and indeed at the melodramatic turn it takes as one of the main characters seems to experience some kind of redemption. Both these criticisms seem to me to be entirely unwarranted. If you want to see entire fictional works based on unlikely coincidences, you need look no further than the novels of Thomas Hardy. But this is fiction where experience is of course artfully organised. It’s a story, with a narrative structure, not the inchoate hodge-podge of real life. As for the melodrama jibe, it seems to me that without the possibility of redemption for the characters – and it is only a hint – then the film is just even more unbearably bleak. Drew or Plan B offers a redemption from this milieu himself, of course, but then how many people in it have the intelligence, the talent and the artistic drive to reinvent themselves as he has done? Naturally, not many. Had the film offered redemption to one of its characters through discovering rap and becoming a talented film director, well, we wouldn’t have believed that for a moment, would we?

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty - beautifully shot whimsy

I’ve barely been out of the house for a week with a cold, and today it has been raining heavily most of the time; one of those days where the cloud is so low it’s fog. So clearly time to go to the cinema.

I ended up seeing The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, the new Ben Stiller movie. I can’t say I’m a huge Ben Stiller fan. It’s not that I don’t like him, but I don’t massively appreciate him either. Also, I knew nothing about the film, but it was in English and starting just at the time I wanted a film to. My verdict is a positive one, though; I really enjoyed it.

The film is essentially a comedy, something which seems to have eluded many reviewers who have become all po-faced about it. Ben Stiller, who also directs, plays a nobody, Walter Mitty, who works for Life Magazine handling negatives. The magazine is in the process of being sold off and re-org’d and is due to release one final issue. The cover of this soon-to-be-published magazine is meant to be a shot from a famous Life photographer, but the negative cannot be found. Unfortunately it is Mitty’s responsibility to come up with it, a point that is frequently laboured by the ridiculous, bearded change-manager played to great comic effect by Adam Scott. Stiller’s character also has the hots for a co-worker played by Kristen Wiig and happily, she also seems very keen on him. This seems curious, as Mitty is the sort of colourless person who insists on wearing a tie with a short-sleeved shirt, which is the sartorial equivalent of wearing a “nerd” badge and having “no-hoper” plastered across your forehead.

The film is quite big on allegory and is typically Hollywood moralistic. But it is clearly meant to be a piece of lightweight entertainment, so that’s all fine. Stiller’s character works for Life but doesn’t have one – which is probably as close as the film gets to irony. The theme of the film is all about embracing life, and making sure you get out and live it. Mitty is prone to zoning out in heroic daydreams which provide exciting and improbable action sequences. Their incongruity creates comic moments. Mitty, spurred on by his crush for Cheryl, decides (in as much as it is a conscious decision) to go in search of the legendary photographer Sean O’Connell (a great cameo from Sean Penn) to find out where the missing negative is. This takes him to Greenland, Iceland and the Himalayas. As his life becomes more interesting, there is a blurring between it and his daydreams, until his daydreams have no more reason to exist as his experiences are sufficiently interesting. Of course, none of the film is believable, but then comedies don’t have to be believable.

There is also a parallel between the iconic photography for which Life was famous and the way the film is shot. The cinematography is particularly beautiful and if it won the The Secret Life an Oscar, it would in no way be unmerited. I suspect that this has also confused reviewers: you have a lightweight comedy, albeit with a message, but very self-conscious cinematography worthy of an art-film. It could be considered an unlikely juxtaposition.

Stiller’s performance is very low-key which works well in this sort of whimsical comedy, which, while it has laugh-out-loud moments, in the main amuses quietly. It doesn’t try too hard. The film makes the point that work and adult life leads people to conform to corporate professional existence. As a youth, Mitty sported a Mohican and was something of a skilled skateboarder before he was moulded into featureless greyness. His unlikely experiences lead to an awakening of his true self.

What you are left with is an unpretentious film which is beautiful to watch and which leaves you feeling positive and warm inside. It doesn’t say anything original, but it is genuine big-screen entertainment, which makes a change from some of the supposedly great dramas I have paid to see recently which ultimately weren’t, no matter how well they have hoodwinked the critics. You come away from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty strangely optimistic and uplifted and with a momentarily increased zest for life. Not bad for a rainy Saturday.

Captain Phillips - Propaganda pirates off the Somali coast

 

I have come away from watching Captain Phillips completely incensed. That appears to be the effect that spending 2 hours in the company of Somali pirates has on you. As you will read anywhere, this is a film of true events, relating the highjacking of a freighter off the Somali coast and the subsequent kidnapping of the captain, played masterfully by Tom Hanks, in one of the ship’s lifeboats.

First the good stuff. The acting is absolutely superb and all reviewers seem to have covered Hanks with well-deserved plaudits. He is totally credible in the role and the audience is bound to identify with him completely – the regular professional sea captain with the house and family in New England who never wanted to have guns put to his head. But to give the film any kind of tension, the Somali pirates also have to be convincing in their roles – and they are, utterly. This band of amateur actors produce compelling performances to such an extent that it is very hard for a non-African, or at any rate non-Somali, audience to see the subterfuge. They are all barked orders, gun-toting swagger, bulging eyes. You can’t see them acting, so it is easy to imagine that they aren’t, that Somalis are pretty much all like this. After all, how many Somalis do you know?

Going by Rotten Tomatoes once again, reviews of this film seem to be massively favourable (critics 93% positive, cinema goers 92% positive), but it always worth bearing in mind that these reviews are principally American ones and this is yet another umpteenth film from the Hollywood cannon where it is America versus the world and there can be no doubt that America is the good guy and anyone else is therefore, ipso facto, the bad guy. After watching the film, I really can see no reason to be so positive about it.

We have admitted that the acting is superb, but there is quite a lot about the film that isn’t. For a start, there’s the plot or story line. Here it is: An American freighter is hijacked by Somali pirates, the captain is taken prisoner in one of the ship’s lifeboats and the entire American navy turn up in force to save the day, in the same manner as the cavalry in a cowboy film. That’s it. We get a little bit of exposition so that we can be in no doubt that Capt. Phillips is an American everyman, and that the Somali pirates are all working for a Somali mafia-like gang, but they are hardly reluctant pirates. The tension stems from just how nasty the pirates are going to be to the crew, but the outcome is never in any real doubt.

If you have ever spent any time motoring across the empty sea in a small boat (or even a large one) you will be aware of just how boring it can be. When this happens inside a fibreglass lifeboat with no view of the outside world, it is even more claustrophobic and tedious. Sadly much of the film takes place in this environment, but there is no real development here, no witty dialogue and it is unremittingly boring for the audience.

The best way to see this film (well, the best way is not to see it) is as a pure piece of American propaganda. By the end, the US has enlisted skydiving Navy SEALs, a couple of destroyers and a huge quantity of guns to pursue the hapless lifeboat. If there is anything to be learnt from the film it is that you could employ one or two people from a security company with guns to sail on a freighter worth hundreds of millions of dollars and your piracy problem would cease to exist. This simple solution makes the whole scenario irritating, even if it is what happens, or has happened, in real life. As a propaganda film it works very well. By the end you loathe anyone who even looks like a Somali, and feel all warm and fuzzy towards the armed might of the US which is doing its best to keep the evil in the world at bay. This probably works splendidly for an American audience, but for anyone else, it is all a little too glib.

Realism is added to the film by a lot of hand-held shaky camera work, but this is also annoying on the big screen and likely to induce seasickness. Do you really want to see a two hour long YouTube video?

Capitain Phillips seems to belong to the same vein as Argo, which was a better film, but was still pretty workaday stuff. Once again, the clever Americans outwit the Third World which is unjust and evil; once again it is an embellished story of true events. Once again, we don’t learn very much. Argo won three Oscars.

There are a few good reasons to go and see a film. It might make you laugh, frightened, entertained, or wiser. I am struggling to see where Captain Phillips scores here. Argo at least provided some entertainment value.

Two nights ago, Disgrace was shown on the TV, in the middle of the night. This is a film starring John Malkovich which takes place in South Africa and is an adaptation of the Booker prize-winning novel by Nobel laureate JM Coetzee. It relates the story of an arrogant English Literature professor who seduces one of his Asian students, is disgraced and goes to ground on his daughter’s scrubby smallholding in the middle of nowhere. The whites are also attacked by heartless, violent, black youths, but the outcomes are far more ambiguous, far more surprising than in either of the two American films. Disgrace has a depth to it which is totally lacking in Captain Phillips or Argo, and is compulsive viewing. More to the point, it leaves many uncomfortable things to ponder days afterwards. It is unremittingly bleak – perhaps this is why it hasn’t been so popular with the viewing public, which, as a rule, favours less taxing fare. Well worth getting out on DVD, seeing as it was in cinemas a few years ago. Argo would be worth seeing if it came to a TV near you, but Captain Phillips? There really would have to be nothing else on that night.

Inception - bang goes your dream

You look at the Tomatometer – the barometer of what Rotten Tomatoes.com has to say about a film, and which is rarely wrong – and you are sure you are in for a treat. With 86% of positive reviews and 93% of cinemagoers enjoying it, Inception must be little short of a masterpiece. I was disappointed to miss it on release, but there were just too many good films to see at that time to see them all in a theatre. Not to worry: three years later I can settle down to watch it on the box.

The film kicks off with Leonardo Di Caprio waking up on a beach soaked to the skin. There are a couple of children on the beach too. Seconds later, he is in the company of some Chinese gentleman in a Chinese house. In no time at all, he is on a train. The scene changes are punctuated with explosions, people running about with guns, buildings collapsing and general mayhem. Di Caprio is also leaving a woman he doesn’t trust, by abseiling down a building – as you do. But a couple of minutes later she pops up again and shoots someone in the foot. I haven’t got a clue what is going on and check that I really have started this film at the beginning, which I have, as it feels as though I missed the first hour or so. Its incomprehensibility is not helped by an almost inaudible dialogue and a raging portentous and pretentious score which manages to drown out everything but the explosions.

After 10 minutes of total confusion, finding the action completely gratuitous and unable to register any excitement for characters who may as well be laboratory rats for all we know about them, I ponder seriously giving the rest of Inception a miss. Alas, spurred on by all those positive reviews, I feel sure that all will be revealed and that I will soon be basking in the glow of true understanding. 

And it is partly explained. All the weird action sequences are in fact a dream (yes, that old chestnut). Di Caprio is a guy who, together with his team, inhabits people’s dreams for nefarious purposes, ostensibly to steal ideas. The plot of the film consists essentially of wouldn’t it be great to invade someone’s dreams to plant an idea instead? This is the inception of the title. Fair enough, it’s a reasonable science fiction premise. There are bits of heavy-handed dialogue to make sure that we are all up to speed, which is just as well as we certainly weren’t for the first quarter hour or so.

Most of the film is thus Di Caprio and friends scooting about in the dreams of a completely uninteresting cardboard scion of some super wealthy evil businessman who is about to expire (and then does). Dreams can take many forms, but for Christopher Nolan, they all involve guns, explosions, car chases, and an army of unidentified baddies who wish to endanger the health of the heroes. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with action films per se, but they are invariably B movies as action and special effects stand in for characterisation and plot. And here Inception is no exception. It’s like watching The A Team, or some totally forgettable Mission Impossible film, dolled up in pseudo Freudian mumbo jumbo and caked in CGI.

Back in the 50s or even early 60s, you could have all sorts of interesting films in which guns didn’t even figure. You could also have thrillers in which guns didn’t figure much. Not these days. These days, you can barely find a Hollywood film in which there isn’t an entire arsenal of gleaming weaponry and a civil war’s worth of explosions. I can’t help feeling that Hollywood is convinced that the attention span of the average teen cinemagoer is now so hopelessly short that unless something goes boom! every ten seconds or so, they will all switch off. It has the opposite effect on me. Inception is all action, all utterly pointless action. Where the Wachowsky bros also examined the theme of fiction and reality and the control of that reality, and peppered the Matrix films with liberal sprinklings of stylised violence (and not a few guns…), the result was undeniably stylish and innovative – and interesting. Inception is like a poor man’s Matrix. The guns and mayhem are just irrelevant and totally superfluous and make you think of the naffer James Bond films. This is what happens when you give someone far more budget to make a film than they could possibly need.

Of course, the great thing about setting your film in a dream if you are a film director is that nothing has to make sense and anything can happen. Nolan indulges himself to the full here. Not much makes sense and most things do happen. But we are miles away from the genius of a Terry Gilliam.

So, redeeming features? Marion Cotillard as Di Caprio’s wife spins a good theme, appearing as she does just when she is least required, dogging Di Caprio’s every oneiric step. In some respects, the mystery surrounding their relationship is the real plot in the film. And there is a great CGI sequence in Paris with buildings folding in on themselves and inverted dimensions which is impressive and strangely beautiful and really does seem dreamlike. Strangely enough, it’s about the only dream sequence that doesn’t seem to involve firearms.

When all is said and done, I have no idea why critics and audience have been so taken in by Inception. Could it be that its somewhat facile questions concerning dreams and reality and the nature of the unconscious are taken as profound by people who idea of profundity is the depth of a paddling pool? For me though, if you really want to examine these questions, you don’t have to do it to a sound track of emptying magazines, car smashes and grenades. There are plenty of films that say nothing but which are hugely entertaining. Inception thinks it’s saying something but manages to be hugely boring.

The Master fails to gain mastery over the viewing public

How can a film this well-made be this dull? Seemingly, this is the only question that The Master poses. There is a fairly easy answer to it, though: it’s because there is no story, no real plot.

The synopsis of The Master is quite easy to write: A WW2 navy vet arrives back in the good old US of A. He is an alcoholic and not remotely particular about what he drinks; from torpedo engine fluid to photographic chemicals or paint thinners – anything can be turned into a cocktail. Quite apart from the drinking, he is clearly deranged or damaged in some way. Is this post-traumatic stress disorder? It may be, but the film doesn’t bother to address the issue or answer this question. Joaquin Phoenix gives a surely Oscar-winning performance as the shambling, stooped Freddie Quell. The only difficulty with his portrayal is that Freddie is deeply unlikeable. He becomes a drifter, works as a department store photographer and a cabbage picker before stowing away on a boat which turns out to be something of a guru cruise. None of this so far leads the audience any further than it leads Freddie. He appears shifty, momentarily violent, totally untrustworthy, but also laconic and air-headed. If we are meant to be viewing him as a patient, then it is one with whom we soon lose patience.

On the boat we meet Lancaster Dodd, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who is supposedly based on L. Ron Hubbard, he of Scientology infamy. Dodd seems to regard Freddie as a challenge: will he be able to establish mastery over this broken individual? He is surrounded, as any self-respecting guru is, by a troop of well-heeled sycophants. Freddie isn’t really the sycophantic type, but Dodd, you sense, feels he could be useful as his own personal stormtrooper. He never expressly encourages Freddie’s violent urges to defend The Cause (aka Dianetics if you will), but he doesn’t do much to prevent them either.

And so we are presented with scene after interminable scene, each dragging on longer than the last as the director Paul Thomas Anderson scrutinises his characters like a scientist with a rat experiment. The observations are not particularly enthralling and the results confused. Dodd is not so much revealed to be a charlatan; he clearly was from the very beginning. His discourse is mind-numbingly dull, as is that of any real-life guru, as he craps on about “processing” – an interrogation technique designed to break down his subjects, or alludes to “trillions of years of past lives”. Hoffman is brilliantly convincing as Dodd, being smarmily nice to everyone one minute, or shouting them down with expletive-filled tirades at the next as he establishes dominance over them like a silver-backed gorilla.

Despite being a part of this lovey-dovey family, Freddie fails to fit in; he’s too damaged for that. The end.

For that is really all the film has to say. Freddie is one of those basket cases that put you off any idea of a career in the social services. Dodd is one of those well-documented guru types that make you run a mile whenever anyone accosts you in the street with the promise of a free psychological test. But you knew all of that anyway. At the end of the film, Freddie is still an alcoholic nutter, and Dodd is still a thriving guru.

The film is beautifully shot and lit. The acting is absolutely superb. But the film has no pace, little in the way of drama, no characters for the audience to identify with, no surprises or real plot development. However you want to look at it, it is deeply flawed. As a viewing experience, it is quite remarkably dull. I don’t remember being quite so bored at the cinema since watching the truly dire Ironweed with Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, which, oddly enough, also features top-notch actors.

Cults, gurus, great actors – seemingly all the ingredients were there to make a riveting film, but no matter what Rotten Tomatoes would have you believe – and normally they are pretty accurate – their 85% of positive reviews add up to over two hours of wasted time. It really does look like a case of the Emperors new clothes. Disappointing.

 

Wall Street - Money Never Sleeps: snore

I don’t know that I’ve ever walked out of a film that I had paid good money to go and see. I got perilously close to it watching Kevin Costner’s Waterworld, one of the most tedious films that has ever been. After the interval (you nearly always get an interval in Switzerland so that they can sell you more ice-cream and popcorn), I debated going back in and finally did. The second half was less boring than the first, but only marginally so.

The return of Gordon Gecko in Wall Street – Money Never Sleeps, however, is also truly soporific. That is a strange title to have chosen for such a dull film. It even makes you wonder whether there isn’t some studio executive in Hollywood with a sense of irony, as the title does lay the film open to quips, which haven’t been missed by some commentators, that although money never sleeps, the audience probably will. 

Make no mistake, this is a deeply and undeniably boring film. There are several reasons for going seeing a film on the big screen. The best, is that cinematographically, you need a wide screen to get a sense of the scale of the action. You might be able to look at Apocalypse Now on your iPhone, but there really isn’t any point. Then there can be films in which the darkness of the cinema, and the proximity of other people, can add to the tension. David Lynch’s Eraserhead, perhaps the most frightening film of all time, could fit into this category. But there are other films, and the new Wall Street is one of them, where the big screen adds nothing. There is no tension and you might as well be looking at it on your TV or laptop. Or better still, not waste your time looking at it at all.

The action in Wall Street – Money Never Sleeps, such as there is any (there isn’t, much) centres around the relationship between a Jake, a Wall Street trader played by Shia LaBoeuf, and his girlfriend Winnie, played by Carey Mulligan, who fortuitously happens to be Gordon Gecko’s (Michael Douglas’) daughter. This could be an interesting scenario – or at least not intrinsically tedious – if these characters were remotely interesting. They aren’t.

How did Shia LaBoeuf ever become Hollywood hot stuff, given the competition in that town? He is slight, puny and bland-looking and, if this performance is anything to go by, entirely lacking in charisma or passion. If Oliver Stone’s intention was to show Wall Street bankers as bland, unexceptional and uninteresting people (probably all true) then he succeeds spectacularly here. But if this was his intention, why show them at all or make a film about them? LaBoeuf, though, is brilliantly matched by his girlfriend who is the quintessential “chieuse”, a word that is hard to translate but indicates a girl who is rarely happy, a wet-blanket and a complete pain in the arse. Winnie Gecko is all these things, and a lefty website writer to boot. What is she doing with Jake? Who knows. They are like chalk and cheese with clearly nothing in common apart from their lack of spark. These are people who, if they lived in the flat across the landing from you, you would never invite round for a drink. Carey Mulligan’s acting is brilliant, assuming that she is not at all like her character. But I have no proof of this. Were she wildly alluring, then you might have some interest in Winnie Gecko, but the gamine haircut completely eliminates this possibility as far as I am concerned, meaning that I have no interest whatsoever in spending a couple of hours in her company. Jake and Winnie’s relationship is thus of total indifference to the audience. If you have based your film on the premise that it contains dramatic tension, it’s about as solidly anchored as a Bangladeshi hut.

And Michael Douglas’ Gecko? Not bad. Chastened by his time inside, Gecko is now a prophet crying in the wilderness about the absurdities of the financial system. Or is he? Nasty guy, turned nice guy, turned nasty then nice, the character is actually more nuanced than he was in the first film. Douglas got an Oscar for that one, you will recall, which I always thought a travesty, seeing as he was playing a caricature, which, for a professional actor, can’t be that difficult. I wouldn’t give him an Oscar for this one either, but it’s a decent bit of acting. In any case, he isn’t going to have any difficulties shining in the company of such tarnished “co-stars”.

And the plot? Put it this way: if you understand nothing about share dealing, markets and financial trading, you are going to have a hard time knowing what is going on. Do you really know what shorting a stock is and how it works? Do you even care? And if you do know about it, then the film’s superficial razzmatazz will just seem like another day at the office, devoid of any tension at all. The real life story of Lehman Bros and its megalomaniac CEO would have been a lot more interesting than this fiction, very loosely inspired by the recent financial melt down.

The fact is, that audiences are coming to this film with a certain mindset. That mindset probably sees bankers and traders as parasites on society who get rich at the expense of genuine working people. Does this film do anything to dispel that view? No. Do you really want to spend a couple of hours worrying about whether they will lose their jobs or their bonuses, or make another ill-gotten million? No. Right then, no need to go and see the film, because there isn’t anything else.

The only interest I found in the film (slight at that) was the marketing angle. Product placement is king here, with Johnnie Walker Blue Label prominently displayed (how much did Diageo pay for that?) and the world’s coolest motorcycle brand Ducati also featuring heavily. Actually, I couldn’t help having a chuckle to see Jake giving his girlfriend Winnie a lift into work on the back of the Streetfighter. If you read my review of this bike, you would know that the last conveyance you would choose to run your girlfriend into work, subsequent to a pretty major tiff, would be this one, unless you never wanted to see her again. There is also a farcical “ride-off” between Jake, mounted on the mouthwatering Ducati Desmosedici vs his new reptilian banker mentor, mounted on A.N. Other motorcycle (which seemingly doesn’t appear to need headlights). Jake has already warned the slimy James Bretton (Josh Brolin), that even were he to devote the rest of his life to riding a bike, he could never achieve the Valentino Rossi-like heights of Jake’s motorcycling ability. Tough words, the truth of which are unlikely to be decided by a quick squirt on a damp, leaf-strewn forest road, which is what they do. Why not get on a track if they really wanted to find out? This is pretty typical of Hollywood. If you know anything about either banking or motorcycling, you aren’t going to be impressed, but for the less informed, maybe it works.

My advice: start from the premise that it doesn’t and go and see something else.

 

Edge of Darkness - Mel does goodies and baddies. Again.

 I went to see the new Mel Gibson film on Sunday, Edge of Darkness (sounds like a Bruce Springsteen track). Talk about a spontaneous purchase. I had finished at the gym and fancied seeing a film, but had no idea what was on. So I just rocked up to the cinema and decided to see the first film showing in English that was about to start and which I didn’t have any negative preconceptions about. Edge of Darkness fitted the bill as I didn’t know what it was about, who was in it, who directed it or even what sort of film it was. I was pleased to see, as the opening credits appeared, that it has been partially financed by the BBC, so I assumed it wouldn’t be rubbish.

 

As it turned out, I thought it was excellent, but my opinion doesn’t seem to be shared by the cognoscenti. The tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes.com gives it a miserable 59%, which means a pretty poor film. In other words, only 59% of reviews are favourable. Hardly a classic then.

 

So what is it about? Well, you can’t say it is wildly original, I’ll grant you that. A rather lined and sandpaper-faced Mel Gibson plays a Boston detective who lives all alone in an unprepossessing flat and whose day is brightened up by his only daughter’s visit. At least it would have been, had she not started to vomit, bleed from the nose and then to cap it all, got blown away by a shotgun on Mel’s doorstep as they set out for a doctor or hospital to get her seen to. She manages to die a great, “I wanted to tell you…..aaaugh…” death. Mystery. So we have a dramatic situation and an intrigue. Drama is made of this.

 

The rest of the film is all to do with uncovering unscrupulous nuclear companies, dodgy senators, shadowy hitmen and frightened activists. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before. But what I enjoyed was the overriding sense of poetic justice. The bad guys are all bad (with one exception) and Mel is all good. Consequently, as he storms through the film in a poor mood seeking justice for his daughter’s death and not overly bothered about using the legal profession to get it, the audience is rooting for him. Wipe the bastards out Mel! Go on – let ‘em have it! And he does. Shadowy corporations, corrupt government – dontcha just hate them? What better way to tell them what you think of them than via the barrel of a handgun?

 

Pace is assured by unexpected (and often violent) sequences being suddenly hurled at you when you were least expecting them. This is guaranteed to make sure you don’t fall asleep. And you can’t help identifying with Mel, who seems to be good guy with a crap life.

 

There is one character, Jedburgh, played by Ray Winstone (he looked familiar, but I’ve never heard of him) who almost makes the film. For a start, he’s a cockney geezer – and it is always fun to see a geezer in an American film. It’s not often that they juxtapose their thugs with ours. Not only is he highly amusing, he is the only character who is not black and white. Apparently a Mr. Fixit for the CIA – ie, he makes inconvenient people disappear and the like – he seems to have a soft spot for Mel whom he has clearly been tasked with rubbing out. Jedburgh philosophises and drinks wine with Mel while smoking cigars. If he’s a hitman, he seems to be taking a long time about it.

 

So there you have it. Edifying? Not really. Original? I hardly think so. Big screen entertainment, certainly, although to be honest, this is not the sort of film that is going to suffer a great deal from being seen on your TV via DVD with a pizza. Maybe you should just get it out of the video club. But 59%? That’s a bit harsh.

40 years after Jacques Cousteau - Océans

I’ve just been to see Océans.

You wouldn’t call it a documentary. There is barely any dialogue and no explanation of what is going on. What it is, is about two hours of the most spectacular and beautiful film you will ever see of life in the oceans.

The same team have already made Microcosmos – about the insect world, and Le Peuple Migrateur which is all about birds. I missed both of those. I don’t know that I want to look at bugs for a couple of hours, but I was sorry to miss Le Peuple Migrateur. Both were reputedly amazing.

It’s bound to come to the UK (surely?) and you don’t want to miss it. This is “big screen entertainment” – a DVD is not going to give you the same effect.

I almost blubbed when the walrus cuddled the baby walrus (sweet!) and the saddest moment was a shark being thrown back into the water, alive, with all its fins cut off, and plummeting to the bottom. Devastating. Interestingly, there is a disclaimer at the end saying that no animals were hurt and that any fishing footage was a reconstruction. Well, that is one lifelike rubber shark is all I can say.

The film is 95% astonishing footage and 5% reminding you that Man is fucking everything up, or just about to. When you fly over an ocean, it takes for hours, even at jet speeds. They seem just too big for us to be able to destroy. Wrong. I think I may have to get involved with saving whales/dolphins/sharks. It may be a cliché of the environmental lobby, but they keep dwindling and nothing concrete seems to happen. I think I’ll kick off with a rant to the Japanese (I’m sure the Chinese won’t even listen). Shark’s fin soup anyone? Non merci.