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COVER ILLUSTRATION BY Paul Willoughby WORDS BY Matt Bochenski
“VOLVER... CON LA FRENTE MARCHITA LA NIEVE DEL TIEMPO LA ACLARO EN MI CIEN” 003
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Chapter One.
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In which we discuss Volver.
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RELEASED 25 August DIRECTED BY Pedro Almodóvar STARRING Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Dueñas, Yohana Cobo
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Pedro almodovar’s Volver is a richly evocative tapestry of heartbreak and forgiveness that could be his best ďŹ lm yet.
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“Th is
is a man’s world,” he sings, but James Brown didn’t sweep the dust from his own gravestone. “This is a man’s man’s man’s world,” he sings, but James Brown didn’t hear the howling of the East Wind that drives people insane. “This is a man’s world,” he sings, but James Brown knows it wouldn’t mean nothing, nothing, not one little thing without a woman or a girl. Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver is a woman’s world to the quick. They cook and cluck and kiss and, as the occasion demands, they kill. It means ‘coming back’ in English. It means coming back to La Mancha, to comedy, to religion, relationships and sex. It means coming back to Carmen Maura after 17 years lost in the bitterness. It means coming back, so how is Volver so fresh, so inventive, so utterly alive with the joys of cinema? ▼
007
In Madrid, Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) lives with her young daughter, Paula (Yohana Cobo) and her husband, Paco, in a tiny apartment. She works two jobs, menial ones, her hair teased into a bombshell of floor-scrubbing chic, and it soon becomes clear that she’s the matriarch of a broken family. Paco slumps on a sofa drinking beer, grabbing sly eyefuls of his teenage daughter. In the bedroom he’s all clumsy come-ons, happy to crack one off while his wife cries herself to sleep. Raimunda’s sister, Sole (Lola Dueñas), runs an illegal salon from the flat where she lives alone, abandoned by her husband two years before. Here the local women gather to bitch about soap operas and receive monstrously outré hair-dos. She is older than Raimunda, but timid – a forlorn figure who misses her parents, killed in a fire in La Mancha sparked by the gusts of that East Wind.
Whe re Madrid is a city without character, its faceless sprawl and dusty car parks glimpsed through the windows of drab houses, La Mancha is an icon of deep Spain. In the capital, trash TV creates a modern mythology of better living, but in the countryside old ghosts still walk the streets. Though it has a toe dipped in the twenty-first century (Cervantes’ windmills are sleek new turbines) the character of the place is little changed in 400 years. This is the land of the dead, where women tend their gravestones like a doorstep and death is a threshold kept as spotless as any other. Why not, in a town where the final frontier swings back and forth like a saloon door? In La Mancha, their Aunt Paula has died. At the funeral, where the whole village has gathered (a coven of black-clad battle axes flapping fans and fat dry lips at Sole), there are rumours that their mother, Irene, reappeared to Paula as a ghost to help her through the last few months of her life. A neighbour, Agustina, has heard her voice. Sole will be visited by this spirit – a bump in the night from the inside of her boot – who has unfinished business to set straight, but Raimunda has other concerns: her husband has made a mess of the kitchen and there’s serious mopping to be done. There’s nothing in the good wife’s handbook about removing bloodstains from the floor. A knife in the chest isn’t your average family crisis, but attempting to rape your daughter isn’t the average display of fatherly affection. ▼
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009
Volver is a film cut like glass. It refracts the gaze of the cinema screen, sending it spinning across genres like shafts of crisscrossing light. It’s as canny a movie as you’ll ever see, a film that chatters in your ear with craftiness, but it’s so beautifully made, so delicately poised between art and artfulness that it achieves a naturalness – a grace that gives its zig-zagging emotional cadences an easy rhythm. That the film slips so dizzyingly from comedy to farce to tragedy, often in the same scene (Paco’s death is a mini masterclass of dexterous genre hopping that twists and turns about the edge of a knife) is due to the performances. Almodóvar has said that he brandishes actors like weapons; well if that’s so, Penélope Cruz is his nuclear button. If anything, Volver is Cruz’s bitter rebuke to
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Hollywood – to Woman On Top and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, to the whole TomKat, A list, Brangelina bollocks of it all. Raimunda has a sultry, kitchen sink sexuality that strains the fabric of the screen just as her breasts billow dangerously over the edges of those plunging necklines. Cruz is the proud possessor of massive tits, and Almodóvar is fascinated by them. Twice other characters comment on them, while the director stares goggle-eyed overhead as she washes up, gold chains lost in an abyssal cleavage. But in classic Almodóvar style there’s a warning note. He returns to this shot as Raimunda scrubs the blood from the knife that killed her husband, lingering on the transgressive proximity between eroticism and domestic rituals.
s It’
the small details that make her – the ragged handkerchief whipped from her bra, or the fact that she drives her older sister’s car. She’s a towering, terrifying monument to femininity, an effortless multi-tasker who shops and cooks and digs unmarked graves while breaking only the most serene of sweats. She’s Commander-in-Chief of the tribe of women, pressganging the neighbourhood into a restaurant scheme in one of those brilliantly false movie moments that Almodóvar excels at. But that’s not the whole story, either. As the films builds, a subtle shift takes place, and what seemed sexy and modern as Raimunda strutted down the street suddenly looks trashy and narcissistic. Who does she think she is with her strappy sandals and emotional steamrolling? What hypocrisy to say, “Don’t complicate other people’s lives,” to Agustina, after paying a hooker to help her bury her husband. What selfishness when Agustina is dying of cancer, to refuse her last wish – to find Irene’s ghost and ask after Agustina’s own mother who disappeared the same day as that fatal fire. What arrogance to deny it when she hears of the affair that Agustina’s mother and her own father were conducting. “My mother wouldn’t allow it,” is all she’ll snap. ▼
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Raimunda is forgiven in a jackhammer final act, a reunion with Irene anchored by an exquisitely dark emotional pay off. It’s a sinister hint of the cycles of violence and transgression at the root of village life, and it’s also one more damning indictment of the men who have ruined these women’s lives. The men of La Mancha are almost entirely absent – sour memories and whispered secrets the only trace of their passing. In a rare intrusion, they stare out of the screen like a herd of ostriches, or a gaggle of schoolboys caught in some guilty act. At least Paco is distinguished by a name, though he’s hardly a flag carrier for the brotherhood. And yet... Before Paula is molested she visits Agustina with her aunt and mother. She sits apart from them, but the scene is deep staged so she stays in focus, legs slung lazily over a chair; cavalier, innocent, provocative. If you wondered about her then, if you carelessly imagined, should you see yourself in Paco’s lip-smacking look? When he masturbates next to his wife and a single tear rolls down her cheek, is there a sense of implication about it? Because it feels like a finger pointing out of the screen – useless, horny, drunken layabouts. Maybe fratricide is the best thing that ever happened to a family; after all, women are clearly better off without us. If there’s an ambivalence to the film’s thematic focus, what’s not in doubt is that Volver is a prodigiously well-made movie, though not always in the ways you’d expect. Almodóvar is an urbanite by habit, tilting at the absurdities of Spanish society. But in Volver his outrageousness is tempered by introspection. In returning to La Mancha, the town where his own mother lived and died, it’s as if the arch provocateur has rediscovered something of his own quixotic sensibility. “Through this film,” he said, “I have gone through a mourning period that I needed. I have said goodbye to something to which I had not yet said goodbye, and needed to.”
P ick
apart the farce, the camp, and the dirty jokes and what’s left is a sense of quiet heartbreak. Volver is flamboyantly conceived – full of visual cunning and conceits – but it’s filmed with sincerity, at times a confessional simplicity that’s both poignant and elegant. It’s not that Almodóvar is growing up or calming down, worryingly for the rest of the Euro art house pack, it just seems like he’s getting better n
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Anticipation. A festival favourite from an art house giant. Four Enjoyment.
By turns shocking, serene, darkly funny and ruthlessly true. An alltoo-rare cocktail of cinematic know-how and genuinely touching human drama. Five
In Retrospect.
There’s so much to drink in, but you worry that Almodóvar isn’t the man to excite the masses. Four
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Penelope Cruz may be hogging the headlines, but Yohana Cobo is the rising star of Spanish cinema. She tells LWLies why she doesn’t believe in ghosts.
Daddy’s Little Angel
015
LWLies: You say that Pedro made things easy for you, but he’s a director who asks a lot of his actresses – he’s interested in some dark themes. This film is no different: you have one particularly difficult scene where you confess to Paco’s death. How did you prepare for that scene, and how did you cope when the time came to film it?
LWLies: How important is family in your own life? Cobo: For me family is extremely important. I actually limit my nucleus a lot. My bond with my mother is extremely strong. As we say ourselves, I haven’t really cut the cord yet. We have a beautiful relationship - we really work like sisters.
LWLies: The film crosses so many genres and emotions. When you look back, is it the comedy you remember or the sadness of Volver? Cobo: It is true that it is an emotionally intense film – there are scenes where I myself even cried. When we say goodbye to Aunt Paula and leave her on her own, it was only because we were standing on the set and the whole crew was behind her that
LWLies: Finally, do you believe in ghosts? Cobo: No, I don’t believe in ghosts as such. But I have my own theory – my own beliefs – that we are all energy after all, and energy is all around us n
LWLies: What’s next for you? Would you like a piece of what Penélope Cruz has got, or are there other things you want to achieve? Cobo: Well I’d rather not dwell on that kind of thing. My hope is to keep working at this job, which is a job that I love. As long as I keep getting good scripts and interesting projects then I’m over the moon to keep doing what I like.
LWLies: How did you find Cannes? Cobo: Well, the answer is ‘Wow!’ This film was like a crash course in all these new things: the opening in Pedro’s town was really sweet and emotional, and then the opening nights in Barcelona and Madrid... Just as I was coming to terms with all that we got to Cannes and there was the red carpet and I went up the steps in high heels. It was wonderful, it was lots of fun. And then we had the totally unexpected surprise of receiving the prize, which was amazing too. And all the amazing people who were there - Samuel L Jackson was on the jury and afterwards he came up and congratulated us. He’s an actor who I’ve always admired tremendously.
LWLies: Penélope’s character, Raimunda, begins as a very sexy, strong woman. But gradually she reveals more flaws and becomes a more ambivalent character. Did you pick up on that? Is Volver about strong women, or is it less clear-cut? Cobo: I do think that this is a film about very strong women, and it’s about the bonds that they build when one of them gets into trouble. I think Penélope’s evolution is very similar to the evolution of my own character – she’s an extremely strong woman but she has suffered tremendously. And after all, we all have a mother, so when Penélope goes through what she does, she comes back to her mother and becomes a girl again. And in my own character we can see that as well. I’m at that age where my relationship with my mother is a bit tricky but then after what happens to me I mature, and I turn back to my mother. In that whole process of maturing I become a lot closer to my mother and our bonds become stronger.
LWLies: To a large degree, Volver is about family. Did that spirit extend offset to your relationship with Penélope, Lola and Carmen? Cobo: Yes, we all connected really well from the beginning. There was a magic that made it very easy to establish a little family during the shoot. Now in promotion we’re travelling around together and Carmen is still very much the grandma and I run around with Lola and call Penélope ‘mum’ now and again - she makes sure that I’m eating properly!
LWLies: How does Penélope feel about that? Cobo: She takes it very well. It started off as a game at the beginning of the shoot and we kept it up.
I didn’t burst into tears. It was so heart-wrenching to have to leave her on her own; she reminded me so much of my own grandma that sometimes I would just have to step aside and do a bit of crying on my own because Chus [Lampreave] is so sweet and so loveable. The first time I saw the film I was just stuck to my seat. There was no way I could express what I was feeling: I was in a state of shock because I just hadn’t assimilated the film. And then the second time I saw it I enjoyed it a lot more and I cried more comfortably.
Cobo: It is true that he is extremely demanding, and some of the roles in his films are very risky. But he is so supportive that he drives you through it. The way he tells the story is so credible, you don’t even realise what you’re doing. So it is hard but he really guides you through it. When it came to filming this scene it really helped me out that Penélope was there throughout, and the way we shot it was very intimate – we had time, we were able to get into the situation. But having Penélope there made it a lot easier.
LWLies: Many of the actresses in Volver have worked with Almodóvar before, but this is your first time. How did you find it? Cobo: Of course it was special – all films are special one way or another. But although I was anxious about working with Pedro at the beginning, and working with all these amazing actresses, actually it turned out to be fantastic. Pedro is really charming and he really makes things easy for you. I was really moved when we first met, but it’s not something he does himself. It’s probably something that was in me – a respect.
Hasta la muerte todo es vida (Until death, all is life)
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
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Chapter Two. In which we introduce ourselves.
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LWLies: What do you love about Spanish film? Assumpta Serna: Well, I can speak as a representative of the Spanish board of the European Film A cademy. I think it’s so rich in language and culture - Catalan, Basque, Valencian, Mallorcan, Ibiza, Asturian, the accent from Extramedura every single community has its own rules, its own laws, its own TV channels, its own creators, its own adventures. It’s incredible. And there are lots of very peculiar things happening. I think that it is important for Europeans to see the differences in Spain and to actually understand that there are so many languages, we don’t actually understand each other...
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Honest, passionate and unmerciful. editorial@littlewhitelies.co.uk
Reviews Editor Jonathan Williams
Managing Editor Danny Miller
Matt Bochenski
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Editor
Design & Art Direction
Paul Willoughby paul@littlewhitelies.co.uk Rob Longworth rob@littlewhitelies.co.uk
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Back David Section Editor Jenkins david@littlewhitelies.co.uk
ShortJamesFilm Editor Bramble
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Website Editor Daniel Cullinan
Contributing Editors Jon Crocker
Sales Director Steph Pomphrey
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Editorial Assistant Andrea Kurland Words, pictures, thanks...
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© TCOLondon Publishing Ltd. 2006 022 THE VOLVER ISSUE
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© 2006 Rockstar Games, Inc. Rockstar Games, Rockstar North, Rockstar Leeds, the r logo, Grand Theft Auto and the Grand Theft Auto logo are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software. Rockstar Games, Rockstar North and Rockstar Leeds are subsidiaries of Take-Two Interactive Software. “ ” and “PlayStation” are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sony Corporation. All other marks and trademarks are properties of their respective owners. All Rights Reserved. The content of this videogame is purely fictional, and is not intended to represent any actual person, business or organization. Any similarity between any character, dialogue, event or plot element of this game and any actual person, business or organization is purely coincidental. The makers and publishers of this videogame do not in anyway endorse, condone or encourage this kind of behaviour.
What do you have to say for yourselves ? editorial@littlewhitelies.co.uk COMIC? YOU SAID IT
After reading your review of the horrendous X-Men: The Last Stand, I can fully agree with what you have said. It was a very poor third instalment of this once great comic-inspired film series, which is blatantly driven by the marketing and moneymen. The script was piss poor and completely hashed together. I can imagine the writers crawling around the floor to find extra nonsense to add in to make this a waste of an hour and a bit. Claire
Let there be no confusion: X-Men: The Last Stand is utter garbage.
HIP HOPS PROPS
It was good to see in your Awesome issue hip hop being taken seriously – a rare thing from the mainstream media. Too often hip hop is characterised in a series of clichés, mocked and patronised by those not associated with the scene. I’ve noticed that whenever newspapers, magazines and television deal with hip hop, their only reference is the last 50 Cent video filled with bling, bitches and booze – which is insulting to everyone who feels a part of that culture. But by getting Daddy Bones in to write, and by looking at the messages behind films like Wild Style, you’ve put together an issue that’s stereotype free. Good work. Terrence Kilman
HEAR ME NOW
Guys, still lovin’ the magazine. What’s with the online aspect though? Where’s the message board – any plans to give your fans a forum? Ian Tate
Thoughts, yes. Plans, no. We’ll keep you posted. 024 THE VOLVER ISSUE
BLOCK ROCKIN’ BEATS
Your Block Party conversation was well placed in an issue devoted to hip hop, but there was nothing cynical or condescending about the film. Everyone who was at the show had the time of their life. Chappelle didn’t have to do it, and he didn’t charge for it. If some of the performances were a bit weak, or the politics a bit grating, that doesn’t detract from the fact that Dave Chappelle was just trying to do a nice thing for the people of the Bronx. Daniel Jimmerson
HITTIN’ THE VIDS
I’d been waiting for you guys to do a feature on music videos, but you only just skimmed the surface. You mention Cunningham, Gondry and Glazer but don’t talk about any of their videos. These are the people driving forward the medium and making a real impact on mainstream cinema today. Some of the most progressive work is (as you say) being done in music videos today. It was good to read about the ‘classics’ but I hope you do more on today’s music vids in the future. Shep Hervet
LET’S GET ILLO
Your Beastie Boys cover is one of the best illustrations I’ve seen in a long time. Striking and original, it was the reason I bought your magazine. In a publication devoted to moving images and with so many amazing movie stills available, it’s a bold move to have an illustrated cover and to put so much illustration inside. But it works. Keep it up. Caroline Sumner
Okay, we will.
WHAT’S WHERE?
No contents page? I don’t think I’ve ever seen another mag without a contents page. Did you just forget or what? Andrea Wilson
BIG IS BETTER
Okay, so after the Spanish on the back page of the Beastie Boys issue I think I know what your next film is gonna be, but this summer has seen some great blockbusters. How come you guys chose a Beastie Boys documentary to do an issue on, (fantastic film as it was) when you had Pirates Of The Caribbean 2, Superman Returns, X-Men 3 and more? I’d have loved to have seen the White Lies take on any of these. Gary Matthews
We liked the idea of having a music issue slap bang in the middle of the blockbuster traffic. But in future if you want to see a Superman Returns type issue we suggest you ask the film companies to screen them more than a week in advance of release.
AWW, SHUCKS
Guys, thanks for recognising my work and keeping the foundation of hip hop alive!
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THANK YOU FOR REVIEWING
After reading your review of Thank You For Smoking I was intrigued to catch this for myself. Expecting a deep and direct approach to the subject mentioned in the film’s title, I was pleasantly surprised to be agreeing with the conclusion that your review put forward. It was amusing more than anything, and the review does the film justice.
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Chapter Three.
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In which we discuss themes of uncommon
interest inspired by our feature film. 026 THE VOLVER ISSUE
a iv ida v o M a L
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a ep ll m do hem om la om e en ex sted ed ral. ts a d pl , to a re ar rugs osio la Mdie. ll be c t– , n W au Ov ultu masex, of h ovid hil ty i we er ral de mu edo a – e it s ge ch the ca M sic nis a ill ner art ne pita ad , fi tic n of um ati th xt l o rid lm Sp ina on e p 10 f E th an ain te al at pa u e d ’s d th flow h of ges rope fas e er a , . cis da ing t p rk th as da at t. ys
While the big boys of
European fascism have long been consigned to their rightful place in the piss-pot of public consciousness, General Francisco Franco remains something of a mystery outside Spain. The romantic attachment of filmmakers and writers to the Civil War has meant that Franco remains most closely associated with that conflict, and yet this is a man who ruled Spain for some 35 years after the war ended in 1939. In truth, Franco is a misfit in the tin-pot club; a still controversial figure who cannot be dismissed as a mere demagogue largely because his power – as uncomfortable as it might seem – was a legitimate embodiment of the values of a certain part of Spanish society. Franco’s ideology, such as it was, is best seen as the conservative Catholicism of a career soldier. Born in Galicia in 1892, by the age of 34 he was the youngest general in Europe having mostly served suppressing rebellions in the then Spanish protectorate of Morocco. The increasingly polarised Spanish politics of the early ’30s, fuelled by workers’ unrest on one side and the fear of Communism on the other, created broad and uncomfortable coalitions on the Left and Right. In ’33, Franco established himself as a key figure on the Right by commanding the brutal suppression of an uprising of Asturian
Words by James Bramble
028 THE VOLVER ISSUE
miners. In ’36, following the democratic election of the Left-wing Popular Front, he played a major role in the military coup that precipitated Civil War. In October that year, having moved his African forces to Seville with German and Italian assistance, he was proclaimed Generalissimo and Head of State by the Nationalist forces. In ’39, the Nationalists won the Civil War. As Europe descended into war, Franco met Hitler to discuss joining the Axis, but chose instead to remain neutral. The obvious associations between Franco and fascism nevertheless remained, and Spain was kept economically and politically isolated until ’53, when the Cold War made her a useful ally. In retrospect, the enduring association of Franco with fascism is misleading. While they shared a conservative traditionalism, fascism was and is essentially a classless, secular ideology that celebrates both ubermenschen and mass-movement; at odds with the divine rights of monarchy and Church. In contrast, as EJ Hobsbawm writes, the Spanish Right was “an uncompromising camp of counter-revolution or reaction, inspired by a Catholic Church which rejected everything that had happened in the world since Martin Luther”.
Franco’s rule was characterised primarily by authoritarianism (elections were banned, censorship was strict), moral conservatism, (homosexuality and prostitution were illegal), the suppression of the Left (all trade unions were banned except the state-approved Vertical Syndicate) and the imposition of a single Spanish identity on the regions. While Picasso carried the flag for Spanish culture on the international stage (the Paris-based artist steered clear of the Civil War claiming – dubiously – to be a pacifist), at home the country’s artistic vibrancy suffered. Though there was no Sovietstyle purge of the cultural establishment, the Catholic conservatism of Franco’s regime led to a gradual encroachment of artistic freedom. An early nadir was reached in 1940 with the release of Raza in cinemas, a Franco-penned tale shamelessly glorifying the war. Franco died in 1975 as the economic miracle that was sparked by American rapprochement in ’53 was drawing to a close. His final speech stated, “I ask pardon of all my enemies, as I pardon with all my heart all those who declared themselves my enemy, although I did not consider them to be so.” It’s a staggeringly arrogant statement even for a
dictator, and yet one which recognises that his reign – and his life – would be remembered primarily for division and conflict. His death sparked a rediscovery of moral freedom, regional identity and cultural expression that he would have despised. In Madrid, the cultural explosion of La Movida saw the underground scene burst into life with music, fashion and film indulging in a hedonistic celebration of new-found liberty. Packing into weeks the fashion shifts that had taken other countries decades, it was as if Madrileños engaged in a race to reclaim the lost years of cultural stasis. But the talk in the bars and clubs was also of the future – of how Spain would rediscover its modernity, how this generation would not make the mistakes of those that had gone before, would not pursue money or power for its own sake, and would not submit to the steady compromises of success. A glance at Spanish popular culture today reveals that the vibrancy of that early burst of youthful energy has largely dissipated, as the protagonists have aged and succumbed to the comforts of power. But while the tides of change might have retreated, the cultural waterline has been changed forever n 029
“The human being will disappear. Even more, it is necessary to annihilate it to pass to a mechanical state. In this state, there won’t be individual freedom. The collective freedom will only exist. Neither will there be problems because each man-machine will be properly programmed and we will all be happy.” Notes from the Aviador Dro manifesto.
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n o
d d e g a ! m r ime T ElEcTro-FUnk oUTFIT aVIaDor Dro DrEaMED oF FrIEnDlY BoMBS FallIng FroM THE SkY. WHaT THEY SParkED InSTEaD WaS a cUlTUral EXPloSIon In MaDrID’S MUSIc ScEnE.
In the Sex Pistols’ 1977
number one ‘God Save The Queen’, Johnny Rotten slammed the British Royal Family as “a Fascist regime” and chiselled the bedrock of English culture into a slate-grey gravestone: “No future for you”. Ironically, however, just across the ocean, Spain – a nation that for 40 years had quivered under the jackboot of Generalissimo Francisco Franco – was gradually waking up to a future it could hardly have imagined mere years before. No metaphors; this was real. “The ideal of Catholic-fascist Franco’s regime was that the only culture available was the official ultra-conservative one,” says Servando Carballar. Then a 13 year-old schoolboy, Carballar was
Words by loUIs PaTTIson ImaGes CoUrTesy oF oPr reCords
numbed by the endless pamphlets dictating the virtues of religion and military honour. Spain was a population brainwashed, zombified by the starched blandification of the extreme Right Wing. “In Franco’s Spain there was no freedom of expression, press, religion, sex or reunion – no democracy at all,” remembers Carballar. Classrooms were centres for fascist indoctrination. “I myself wrote in school some dictations about the supremacy of the white race.” The death of Franco and his succession by the current Spanish monarch, the liberally-minded Juan Carlos, would spark off an explosion of liberty known as La Movida Madrileña (literally, ‘The Madrilene Movement’). To compare it to punk would be reductive – this was an awakening that cut through every strata of Spanish society. But for Carballar – now a student at Madrid’s Santamarca Institute – and his friends, La Movida would have a similarly energising effect. ▼
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“We were doing literary fanzines by then, inspired by Futurism and Dada,” he explains. “But when we discovered Kraftwerk, Devo and The Residents we shifted to pop music as our area of action.” While already in a band, Los Drugos, inspired by Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange and its Kubrick adaptation, the new way forward would come through the ready availability of new technology. The sound was built from new, cheap Korg and Roland synthesizers. The look was heavy radiation suits, bodies jerking around in inhuman, robotic spasms. And just as the Italian Futurists lauded the beauty of war decades before, this new band – called Aviador Dro – was about realising technology’s capacity as both utopian force and tool of destruction. One early song, ‘Nuclear Si’, was all about the prospect of Armageddon. “We thought about that like a new beginning,” explains Carballar. “We don’t really have any special desire to be wasted, but extinction is sometimes a necessary step for keeping ideas moving. So if the human species is to be erased, okay – insects and machines will build a new civilization. Probably better. Cleaner, less hysterical. Uninhabited worlds in the universe – Jupiter, Europa, Saturn – are beautiful without organic creatures making noise. They don’t need us.” 032 THE VOLVER ISSUE
Ahead of their time? That was certainly the conclusion of Spain’s record companies, who appeared to view Aviador Dro with a mixture of disbelief, confusion and revulsion. So in ’81 they founded their own record label – Dro. “The success was incredible. People queued outside the specialised record shops to buy our first singles. Aviador Dro, Los Nikis, Siniestro Total, Gabinete Caligari, Loquillo y los Trogloditas, Glutamato Ye-Ye – those were some of the most successful bands in the early ’80s, and they were Dro’s.” By ’86 Dro was the premier Spanish label – a gleaming example of free-market economics, perhaps, but not the ideal vehicle for Armageddon-obsessed artists waving down the friendly bombs. In ’88 they sold up. “It was our thinking that the label was on its way to mutate into another standard major label,” explains Carballar. “We started another company, La Fabrica Magnetica, a less ambitious and more indie project. The people that owned Dro wasted everything in just a few years and finally sold the company to Warner at a sixth of its previous value. A sad story, but the first eight years were truly amazing.” Aviador Dro remain active today, via a
deal with Subterfuge Records, a large Spanish independent label that keeps all their back catalogue in print. The band have also made their first forays into the US market with Eléctrico! – The Best of Aviador Dro 19782006, as well as a two-leg American tour that saw them cross both coasts. 2007 will see a new album and a tour of Latin America. Importantly, though, Aviador are keen not to become some museum piece. Far from retreading their own intellectual glories like some of the moribund, post-punk set – hello, Gang Of Four – Dro’s political message remains as fresh, if not fresher than ever. A self-proclaimed “scientific anarchist”, Carballar envisages a new, hard-left path that orbits the present establishment nucleus of archaic socialism and rotten conservatism. “In our days, left parties are very similar to conservative parties,” he says. “They assume that the ‘only’ way or system is this democracy-by-business oligarchy. But we don’t really live in a democracy. Banks and mega-corporations have the power. It is a new feudalism – the feudalism of money and oil and arms. This is the cause of the poverty in the world – the Iraqi war and the Muslim rage. We forgot how to think different.” n
A Night at the Opera
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Chic Lit
Words and ImaGe by James bramble
IT’S THE SPIrITUal cEnTrE oF THE SPanISH FIlM InDUSTrY, an olD-ScHool SEaT oF La MOVida anD IT coUnTS PEDro alMoDÓVar aS a FrIEnD anD PaTron. LWLiES cHEckS oUT MaDrID’S lEgEnDarY OCHO Y MEdiO BookSTorE.
Ocho y Medio,
the celebrated film bookshop just off the Plaza de España in Madrid, is no ordinary book depository. The walls are covered with pictures and messages scribbled by the visitors who have passed through its doors: Sofia Coppola (‘Hola!’), Woody Allen (‘I apologise’), Quentin Tarantino, Gael Garcia Bernal, Tim Robbins, Anthony Minghella, Nick Park, the Coen brothers, Javier Bardem and of course Pedro Almodóvar. The window display, dedicated to Volver, includes original props from the hair-washing scenes and copies of the screenplay, which the bookshop is publishing. The normally elusive Almodóvar has been at the bookshop himself signing copies. “When we began around 30 years ago”, says co-owner Jesus Robles, “it was the worst kind of adventure. We just wanted to make a very good cinema bookshop. In Spanish they don’t publish so many books, so we have books in French, English and Italian, and they say that we are probably one of the most complete cinema bookshops in Europe.” Jesus and his wife Maria Silveyro have moulded Ocho y Medio into nothing less than a centre for the promotion of Spanish cinema, not just a shop but a publisher, a forum for industry insiders and cinema-goers to meet and talk. It is, in a sense, much more about the films than the books. It is clear that Jesus’ primary motivation is a love of film. “We go to a lot of festivals all around the world to see movies. I used to go to more festivals than book sales; I feel closer to film 034 THE VOLVER ISSUE
people than book people and that’s great because they help us choose the books that we should publish, to design our place, maybe getting the advice of a cinematographer about our lighting, or a set director on the colour of the walls.” In addition to getting filmmakers to help him pore over his Dulux colour charts, Jesus also invites film designers, actors and directors to design the shop’s bags, which have become collectors’ items. But what if he doesn’t like them? “Sometimes they’re good bags and sometimes they’re horrible bags. Usually people that draw do better ones. Almodóvar’s are very good because he chooses the process with Juan Gati, who designs the posters for his films, or someone like that, so they use a lot of colour. They’re very nice.” Jesus and Pedro have known each other since the days of La Movida. “It was something like swinging London,” he says about that time. “People went to clubs to drink and meet with other people; painters, directors, musicians. Every night you could see a concert in little places, and the same groups that were playing in London at the Marquee or someplace on Monday, were playing here on Wednesday. It was a very strange moment. After Franco’s death we discovered freedom in a way.” And Almodóvar? “Almodóvar was a product of La Movida. Just in front of where we had the bookshop is the Alphaville cinema – they have a coffee shop and that was where Almodóvar had his first screenings, without sound. He would speak and make all the characters and change their dialogue every time. It was very funny. Fashion changed every two weeks; for two weeks you were a punk, then a new romantic, then a
Goth. A lot of painters, directors and actors that are famous now were there 30 years ago, and now are in the establishment.” His loyalty to Almodóvar, who is clearly something of a patron to the shop, is good evidence of the man’s importance to the Spanish industry’s self-confidence. Of the industry, Jesus paints a picture of overproduction, saying that most films are supported by state subsidies, and that while somewhere between 100 and 130 films are made each year, the domestic market cannot support them, and that only about 10 are any good. This is a regular refrain in Madrid’s filmmaking community, where there is a suggestion of bitterness at Almodóvar’s success and its implication for everybody else. Perhaps Jesus’ privileged position as someone closely tied to the industry, yet not reliant on it, allows him the luxury of balance. Or perhaps he is just a loyal friend and fan. Either way, it’s clear that he wants the best for the director he admires, and believes that film in general is richer for his work. “I think Almodóvar is very connected with modernity, you know? Now he is not so young but two weeks ago we were in the Retiro book fair – the Retiro is like Hyde Park – every year for three weeks at the beginning of the summer there is a book fair. Almodóvar was at our place and the queue went on for kilometres. He was very, very happy because there were many young people in the queue. Sometimes he thinks that the people that watch his films are the same age as we are, from La Movida. But these people said, ‘I love your films! I love your work!’ Usually the difficulty that directors have is that the people that see the films grow old with them” n 035
l o s
o r e A Forget Picasso, the real hero of Spanish art is La Movida’s graffiti king, Muelle. Words by Monisha rajesh
Juan Carlos Argüello,
Madrid’s prophet of graffiti, covered the city with his peculiar signature in the second half of the ’80s, inspiring a plethora of aerosol warriors to use the walls of Madrid to emulate an attitude and ethos that defied the conventional. His idiosyncratic artwork was more an expression of calligraphy than self-styled drawings, composed simply of the word ‘Muelle’: a design incorporating a dock finished with an arrow, and the letter ‘R’ surrounded by a
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circle, which, in his eyes, asserted copyright to his signature. Initially, Argüello wandered the streets of Madrid armed with little but a black magic marker, but as his symbol started to evolve and become more complex, combining different colours and chunky borders with 3D perspectives, he reached out for a good old can of vandal’s spray paint. Muelle, literally, made his name in the streets of Madrid during La Movida, starting in ’84 in the Campamento neighbourhood where he lived. The after-dark artist crept out onto the streets to play a game of cat and mouse with the authorities who tirelessly followed his trail, white-washing and scrubbing out his mark, while hot-blooded mini-Muelles followed his path, inspired by his audacity.
The intensity of his work, its visibility in public places, and the unique appeal of his designs made his signature so popular that other youngsters created their own tags, imitating Muelle’s style. They became known as flecheros – archers – for the arrowheads they drew in homage. The Madrid archers went completely against the grain of the New York graffiti scene, and Muelle became the pioneer of Spanish street writing. But why? Ultimately, Muelle never reached the goals he set himself. He had hoped his design would be the lucky quarter in the slot machine that would earn him enough for his rock group to buy better instruments, or enable him to set up a printing business, but his constant wrestle with authority made his plans untenable.
r a
In ’85 he copyrighted his signature and banned his name from being associated with any business or brand. He paid from his own pocket for the huge amount of markers and spray paint he needed, and brought a couple of lawsuits against some advertising companies for plagiarising his design. He even took Madrid city council to court in ’88 after they used his design in a local magazine. Muelle’s tussle with the government was an ongoing saga. He was caught and fined for spraying the statue of the bear and the tree – the symbol of Madrid – in the newly laid out Plaza del Sol but went to court, defending himself as a modern day Veronés – an Italian painter from the Renaissance era. He finally appeared in the papers; one of the few times he
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relaxed his attitude to the media. But his wry sense of humour got the better of the city and a year later, while the civil servants were cleaning the statue of Cibeles, he tagged all of the tarpaulins that surrounded the scaffolding. There are very few of Muelle’s designs left these days, and after his death from cancer at the age of 29, there certainly wont be any more. It may seem strange ripping chunks of graffitied rock out of the wall, but whoever finds a piece of original Muelle should treasure it. The Spanish Minister of Culture, Carmen Calvo, admits she would be prepared to display his work if there was the demand, which would be a curious and ironic gesture to a man who created a lot of work
for another government body – the cleaning department, a member of which referred to Muelle as “that one that made it fashionable to dirty the city”. At the beginning, his work was purely a signature; later on he gave them coloured shadowing and dimension. He preferred to use big spaces, such as billboards, considering that his work was a type of antidote to the barrage of images. He always avoided places of cultural interest or natural spaces. He was even concerned by the CFCs contained in the aerosols he used and their effect on the ozone layer. His legacy is clear: a normal hombre from the neighbourhood standing up against conventionalism and standing up for freedom of speech n 037
The Blood of the Land Words by David Jenkins illustration by paul willoughby
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DRAG QUEENS, DIRTY LANGUAGE AND FILTHY SEX. IS IT ANY SURPRISE THAT EVERYBODY LOVES PEDRO?
“At A sWim Pool party last long weekend, I found some real cool fun in the deep end. From the patio juke a bop beat wailed, I splashed to the beat and off I sailed.” It’s 1978 – a new Spanish constitution has been passed and Spain is now a de facto democratic country. The torturous regime of General Franco is over, and a cloudburst of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll has erupted in Madrid. Pedro Almodóvar has picked up a film camera and started shooting his feature debut, Pepi, Luci, Bom And Other Girls On The Heap, original draft title, General Erections. Its opening track is ‘Do The Swim (Splash Splash)’ by Little Nell, a pitch perfect piece of bubblegum punk from a rarities compilation of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The film itself is an appropriately kaleidoscopic display of artistic expression, youthful exuberance and conservative-baiting filth which Almodóvar has described as “a story about strong and vulnerable human beings, who devote themselves to passion, who suffer love and have fun.” It also supplies us with the nucleus of the Almodóvar vision, which has played out in his films over the past 26 years.
in EssEnCE, Pepi, Luci, Bom is a systematic
repeal of practically every taboo subject suppressed under Franco, and whilst it may be seen as Almodóvar’s most noticeably infantile piece of work, it stands as one of the most vibrant and vital artefacts of La Movida in existence – it’s perfect in its imperfection. The women are strong (the saintly Carmen Maura makes her debut feature performance as Pepi), the colours are brash, the language is foul, the men dress in drag, and the sex is dirty. It became a staple of late night screenings and festivals in the capital - the birthplace of all good cult cinema. Is Almodóvar an unfashionable filmmaker? Who else would draw influences from reality television, pulp romance, transvestisms, ephemeral pop
music and local legend? Who else would succeed in subverting these supposedly lowbrow media into high art? So much of what Almodóvar does goes against the grain of modern European cinema that it’s sometimes difficult to understand why he so often comes away from his experiments unscathed.
But EvErYonE KnoWs that fashion is cyclical, and that would make Almodóvar the ultimate trendsetter: ‘À la mode óvar’. He shoots Spain as if it’s been slathered in make-up – dolled up to the nines for the gaze of his roving camera to capture in all its ornate glory. His female stars strut across the screen in the latest high fashions, their physical assets front and centre for all to see. Forget Keira, Nicole, Gwyneth and Jen – think Ava, Joan, Greta and Rita. Like Gael Garcia Bernal’s character, Ignacio, in Bad Education, Almodóvar’s classroom was the cinema, his teachers were Rossellini, Fellini, Wilder, Godard and Sirk. The throwaway pop music sits comfortably besides the best of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Kurt Weill. This meshing of highbrow, lowbrow and no-brow culture is what Almodóvar does, and boy does he do it well. But when it comes to assessing his oeuvre, there’s a problem. With Almodóvar, you peek at his work over a pile of superlatives so high, you should wear heels to the screening room. His films are mediated through a prism of critical acclaim that distances the man from his audience, or at the very least distances the art from articulation. So where do you go to find the truth? The answer, perhaps, lies in the minds of friends, colleagues and acquaintances – people who have broken the fourth wall and have an actual insight into working with the director. In an attempt to get a little closer to Pedro Almodóvar, we spoke exclusively to his producer (and brother), Augustin as well as Spanish actress Lola Dueñas who starred in both Volver and Talk To Her. ▼
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Augustin Almodóvar has had a keen interest in his brother’s films ever since he started making 8mm shorts in the early ’70s. So sure was he that Pedro would someday make the leap from provocateur to auteur that he actually placed the early shorts in formaldehyde to preserve them for the collective appetite of a future generation of cineastes. Naturally, he believes that Pedro has had a huge influence on both Spanish and world cinema. Augustin Almodóvar: “Pedro found it pretty easy to make films because of the age he grew up in, and that’s meant he’s had a huge impact. He’s influenced many other filmmakers in Spain. He’s one of the few directors that people know by their face. He’s singular in the cinematography and the identity of his films. But he is also well known outside of Spain and Spanish cinema. He’s against commercial cinema and has achieved his reputation without making superficial, commercial films.”
Lola Dueñas plays the comic role of Sole in Volver with magnificent skill. She first came to the notice of European audiences through her emotionally scouring performance in Alejandro Amenábar’s The Sea Inside. As an actress, it’s sometimes difficult to accept the persona you
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create for the screen. With Volver this wasn’t the case. Lola Dueñas: “Working on the film was a really amazing experience. When I first saw it, I actually became quite emotional. Yet I was completely immersed and engaged with the film, which is very difficult if you’re in it. I was very much able to accept it from the outside. Then there’s the experience of working with Almodóvar which was, of course, a truly world-beating experience. I’d just spent two months in Paris and people were stopping to congratulate me in the street which had never happened before, even after The Sea Inside. It really is a worldwide event.”
It is often thought that the artistic freedom granted to Almodóvar, and the eventual success of his films, alienates other filmmakers working in Spain. So why have so few other filmmakers from Spain been able to emulate his international success? Augustin Almodóvar: “It’s maybe because of the difficulties of making a film in Spain. Other people might see Pedro’s success and feel
the colours are brash, the language is foul, the men dress in drag, and the sex is dirty.
frustrated. They compare themselves with the international phenomenon of Pedro and perhaps feel as if they’ve fallen short of expectations.”
With this in mind, it must be quite a triumph being asked to feature in one of his films. Lola Dueñas describes working with Almodóvar as being, “The top of the mountain”. A collective term for actresses such as Rossy de Palma, Carmen Maura, Victoria Abril and, indeed, any female who has featured in one of his films is a ‘Chicas Almodóvar’. But what does that really mean? Lola Dueñas: “It basically refers to any actress who works with him or has been part of his world. In Spain, it’s also the term you use when you get married to someone, so it’s like we’re seen as one of his many wives.”
The repeated use of strong female characters is certainly one trait that could be used to identify a film by Almodóvar. What also characterises his films is the conspicuous and overstated acting style, which tells us a lot about how Almodóvar sees people and how he interacts with them. Rumour is that during the rehearsals for a film, Almodóvar will actually act-out all of the parts as he sees them and ask the actors and actresses to mimic what he’s doing.
Lola Dueñas: “Yes it is true, he does play out all the parts and he does it very skilfully. It’s also true that he’s extremely generous and if you come up with your own suggestions and they’re good he’ll use them. What’s most entertaining is when he’s with you and plays the character opposite, because he really takes on all the attributes and emotions. He knows every character inside-out, even before the cameras have started rolling.”
A good director is always thinking about his next move. There has been talk since the mid’90s of an English language film (set in Florida, no less), but what exactly does Almodóvar plan on doing next? Augustin Almodóvar: “Pedro is working on two screenplays until summer and then he’ll know which one he wants to work on. He wants to write both films – just like he did with Talk To Her and Bad Education – and then choose which order to release them.”
You can’t avoid the notion that Almodóvar will make a bad film one day, but we still wait with baited breath for further additions to his wondrously creative and defiantly singular canon
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words by David Jenkins Posters courtesy of El Deseo Producciones Cinematograficas
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e mxy The promotional posters used by Pedro Almodóvar are as bold and timeless as the films to which they are attached. No dull drop-off spot for the jubilant quotes of critics, they are an extension of the films, offering insight into their content, style and tone. Their influences range from Lichtenstein and Warhol to Picasso and Braque. The approach to the designs evolved from the heavy-handed caricatures and bright colours of the early ’80s to the robust, angular style of the ’90s. As the years roll by, the images become more austere, more focused and more iconic n
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Film: PePi, Luci, boM y otras chicas DeL MontÓn Year: 1980 Design: ceesepe the orIgInal spanIsh poster for PePi, Luci, boM was desIgned by artIst ceesepe who was at the forefront of La MoViDa. the style was Influenced by the graphIc novels almodóvar was wrItIng at the tIme.
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Film: Laberinto De Pasiones Year: 1982 Design: Ivรกn Zulueta The 1982 poster for Labyrinth Of Passion was designed by artist and filmmaker Ivรกn Zulueta after the breakdown of shooting his legendary cult film Arrebato.
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Film: ¿QuÉ he hecho yo Para Merecer esto? Year: 1984 Design: Iván Zulueta Zulueta also played a part In almodóvar’s fourth fIlm, What haVe i Done to DeserVe this? thIs Image was not the maIn one used to publIcIse the fIlm In spaIn.
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Film: Matador Year: 1986 Design: Carlos Berlanga This poster for 1986’s Matador is an early sign of Almodóvar’s Cubist influence, seen again on the poster for 1998’s All About My Mother, designed by Oscar Mariné.
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Film: Mujeres aL borDe De un ataQue De nerVios Year: 1988 Design: Juan gattI thIs was the fIrst poster desIgned by long-tIme almodóvar collaborator, Juan gattI. WoMen on the Verge of a nerVous breaKDoWn would be the fIlm that ended almodóvar’s relatIonshIp wIth carmen maura.
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Film: Tacones Lejanos Year: 1991 Design: Juan Gatti Also designed by Juan Gatti, this is the German promotional poster for 1991’s High Heels. Introduces the use of the colour red, which has become a thematic trope of his poster designs.
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Film: KiKa Year: 1993 Design: Juan gattI french promo poster for 1993’s KiKa, whIch remaIns one of almodóvar’s most dIvIsIve fIlms.
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NO PLACE LIKE HOME WORDS BY STEVE WATSON ILLUSTRATIONS BY ROB LONGWORTH
FOR MOST DIRECTORS, SUCCESS MEANS A ONE-WAY GOLDEN TICKET TO THE BRIGHT LIGHTS AND BEL AIR MANSIONS OF HOLLYWOOD. BUT FOR OTHERS, HOME IS WHERE THE MOVIE-MAKING HEART IS.
hollywood, new York, los angeles, San francisco; all have been favourite locations for directors over the years, and all have become bona fide film stars in their own right. Yet for some directors the question of location is an altogether more personal matter. these men are renowned for placing the action on the streets that they grew up on, sometimes documenting and sometimes subverting the everyday lives that they see around them, and always home in time for tea.
the dardenne BrotherS // Seraing
Whether it’s the river, the sky, the tower blocks or the disintegrating industrial infrastructure, all is grey in Seraing, a small Belgian town outside Liège. Directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have used the broken-down town as the location for all their films since ’92’s Je Pense A Vous, growing their characters out of its post-industrial murk. Devoted to realism and honesty, the Dardennes shoot their films chronologically so that the action on screen is literally a journey around the town, each location painstakingly scouted for months in advance even though the brothers know Seraing’s backstreets and lockups as well as anyone who has lived in the same small town for the best part of 50 years. Starting out as documentary makers chronicling Liège’s crippling recession in the ’70s, the brothers turned to drama in the early ’90s determined to stay loyal to the real world they saw around them. “Whenever we think up characters we always see them in Seraing,” says Luc, testament to an entire creative universe that flourishes within the boundaries of one town.
aleXander PaYne // oMaha
Alexander Payne is on a crusade against the empty ideals of the Hollywood hero. In his ‘Declaration of Independents’, written in Variety in 2004, Payne called for a revitalisation of cinema: “I want a cinema that is intelligent, uplifting and human, and that serves – as good art should – as a mirror, not as an impossible or fraudulent consumer-oriented projection.” He leads by example: his own heroes sidestep Tinseltown conventions of good and bad to create flawed, human portraits that live in his own hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. It was in this Midwestern antithesis of Hollywood that Jack Nicholson played his awkward old man in About Schmidt and Reese Witherspoon sent up the traditional high-school comedy with an overachiever who doesn’t like competition in Election. And while Sideways proved that he isn’t limited to a 30-mile radius of his mum’s house, Payne seems happy to go back home. His next film is scheduled for release later this year, another road trip, this time simply called Nebraska. ▼ 051
Shane Meadows // Nottingham
Born in Uttoxeter, a town known for its racecourse, outdoor markets and relative proximity to Alton Towers, Shane Meadows has made more than 40 films all based in and around the Midlands, primarily in Nottingham. Beginning as a prolific short filmmaker, he graduated to features in the late ’90s with his Midlands trilogy, Twenty Four Seven, A Room For Romeo Brass and Once Upon A Time In The Midlands. Drawing strongly on his experiences growing up in the area, Meadows denies that any of the characters are autobiographical, but he will admit to similarities between their lives and his own. Yet the bond between the man and his films goes deeper: Meadows embodies the struggle against a system that doesn’t care about society’s most vulnerable members. He often complains about the state of British film and Hollywood’s stranglehold on the industry, fighting his underdog corner with an embattled passion that echoes the social injustices he grew up around and that fuel his films.
John Waters // Baltimore
According to John Waters in his autobiography Shock Value, “Bad taste is what entertainment is all about. If someone vomits watching one of my films, it’s like getting a standing ovation.” Such responses should be run of the mill for the director who once had his leading lady eat dog shit, but more surprising is the way that this dedicated outsider has been clutched to the bosom of his hometown of Baltimore. Waters has based all of his films in the city, and has engendered such affection there that in 1985 February 7 was officially declared John Waters Day. Of course he didn’t become such a revered citizen through sustained shit eating, but while his mainstream successes, from Hairspray through Serial Mom to Cecil B DeMented, have been more palatable than his early work, he has prevailed in his fascination with counter-culture kitsch. His tales of the everyday unexpected could have been set anywhere, but in Baltimore Waters revels in a city that he calls “Trashtown, USA, the Sleaziest City on Earth, the Hairdo Capital of the World”, a city that is at once inspiration and punch line for his off-kilter imagination.
Jafar Panahi // Tehran
His films about the city he lives in have garnered a host of international awards, yet few of Jafar Panahi’s neighbours have actually seen them. A native of Tehran, Panahi has been making films since the mid-’90s, but his frequent criticism of Iran’s ruling regime has led to them being banned by the censors. Tehran is home to Panahi’s main sources of inspiration, but it also presents his greatest challenges. He was denied a license to shoot his latest film, Offside, in the city because of its content, which questioned why women are banned from watching football matches. Undeterred, he used a fake name and an invented synopsis to obtain another license, but had to finish the last five days of shooting outside the city borders when the authorities discovered that they had been tricked and sent police to arrest him. Panahi could undoubtedly work under easier conditions outside of Iran’s capital, but he refuses to compromise: “Every three years I make one film which I think is necessary and important,” he said in an interview this year with Time Europe. “If I didn’t make these kinds of films, I’d be making much more money. But that’s just not my way.” n 052 THE VOLVER ISSUE
No Ghosts, No Glory Scientific phenomenon or religious fever dream: what is the truth of near death experience? LWLies goes in search of light at the end of the tunnel.
There’s an operating table surrounded by lights and machinery blinking and beeping with the familiar rhythm of countless TV shows. But there are no cameras here. You’ve been rushed to hospital, nauseous and vomiting. Your head CT showed subarachnoid haemorrhage. A small amount of blood is trickling into the third ventricle. You have a giant basilar artery aneurysm in your brain. You’re going to die. Standard neuro-surgical procedures are too dangerous. Instead, doctors are going to give you a ‘standstill’: they’ll lower your body temperature and stop your heart, flatten your brain waves and drain the blood from your head. They’re going to cut you open with a high-speed drill that looks like an electric toothbrush. You’re Pam Reynolds and you’re sitting on the surgeon’s shoulder. That’s your body, and according to those blinking, beeping machines you’re dead. Pam Reynold’s near death experience is one of the most well documented cases of a medical phenomenon whose study dates back some 30 years. Much of it is familiar stuff to anybody with a passing interest in cheap sci-fi: lights, tunnels, spiritual transcendence – like the end of ET, only replace aliens with Jesus. But this wooden-wheeled pop-culture bandwagon obscures a very real, and still very active, scientific debate.
Words by Matt Bochenski illustration by Chris Ledward
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In 1975 Dr Raymond Moody published Life After Life, a revolutionary account of over 100 patients who had experienced the afterlife after being resuscitated from clinical death. If it sounds like the first salvo in an academic bloodbath (Science! Religion! War!), things didn’t quite work out that way. Sure, Moody went on to become a controversial figure – founding a research institute in America’s Bible-belt where he claimed to have discovered nine past lives under hypnotherapy, later getting canned from the University of Las Vegas’ Consciousness Studies program due to a lack of results. But the fact of near death experience finds remarkably little opposition in the serious scientific community. The tone of the debate changed in December 2001, when Dutch cardiologist Dr Pim van Lommel published a groundbreaking article in respected medical journal, The Lancet. Speaking from his home in Arnhem, Dr van Lommel is clear about why his report was so important, “The studies until then had been retrospective,” he says. “They used highly selective patients, and there was no real possibility to look at all the medical circumstances that had happened 10 or 20 years ago.” In contrast, van Lommel’s research was prospective – rather than dealing with patients whose experiences dated back years or even decades, his team of researchers were based in cardiac arrest units where they had quick and easy access to survivors who may have had a near death experience. ▼
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Around 15 per cent of near death experiences have distressing aspects straight out of Dante’s Divine Comedy: demons, devils, people roasting on spits. This sounds a little ghoulish – like the medical equivalent of ambulance chasing, except the ambulances have just parked up and brought the victims straight to you – but the results were illuminating. Over a 12-year period, van Lommel found that 18 per cent of patients who survived a cardiac arrest reported a near death experience. And, unlike previous studies, which suggested that these experiences could be attributed to various medical factors, “We proved that it was not true – that you could not explain the occurrence of a near death experience by physiological, psychological, pharmacological or demographic factors.” Instead, van Lommel called for a reinterpretation of the science of consciousness – in essence a paradigm shift in the whole grounding of western medicine. “Such understanding,” he claimed in a follow up article in 2004, “fundamentally changes one’s opinion about death, because of the almost unavoidable conclusion that at the time of physical death consciousness will continue to be experienced in another dimension, in an invisible and immaterial world, the phase-space, in which all past, present and future is enclosed.” This is heady stuff, a complex mix of science, philosophy and even quantum mechanics, and van Lommel has no time for the sceptics: “The problem with sceptical people is that they are just prejudiced. They are not able to discuss things.” Even so, not everyone is convinced about the whys and wherefores. Professor Christopher French is a real-life ghost buster; head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths College in London. His job is to investigate paranormal activity and find a non-paranormal explanation. Ghosts, alien abduction, telepathy – he’s the man you’re gonna call. He rejects van Lommel’s dismissal of the sceptics, “There’s a kind of uninformed sceptic who will just dismiss the whole lot. But when Pim says that sceptics aren’t interested in debating, that’s an overstatement. There are a minority who are very interested.” Professor French wrote the commentary to van Lommel’s original article in The Lancet, and though cautiously supportive of the research (“There’s no doubt at all that this is a real experience that people have, and that it has profound long term effects on them”), he believes that near death experiences can be explained by anything from endorphins and ketamine acting in the brain, to a kind of psychological ‘lucky guess’; a sensory filling in of the blanks after disruption to the normal inputs: a very different interpretation to van Lommel’s belief in transcendence. Part of the problem is that religion – that old chestnut – is
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muddying the waters. In essence what near death experiencers are talking about is a glimpse into heaven and hell. That’s dangerous ideological ground for scientists. “I don’t use those terms,” says van Lommel, “because there’s an amount of prejudice about it. But I am open to everything, and these are aspects that people talk about.” What’s striking about near death experience is that the majority are overwhelmingly positive – transforming the lives of survivors in a way that Jan Holden, president of the International Association for Near-Death Studies describes as “loving and learning” (although Professor French points out that the divorce rate among near death couples is very high: it’s all well and good if your partner becomes a less materialistic person, but see how you feel when they sell the house for charity.) But if this is a glimpse into heaven, what happened to hell? According to van Lommel, around 15 per cent of near death experiences have distressing aspects straight out of Dante’s Divine Comedy: demons, devils, people roasting on spits – says Professor French, “On the one hand extremely frightening, on the hand just bizarre and unreal”. Is there anything that could convince the sceptics of a transcendent, non-scientific explanation of near death experience? “The out of body experience is the one component of the whole thing that does allow for the possibility that we might get some proof that would really challenge sceptics like myself,” says French. Also known as ‘veridical perception’, the out of body experience is where a person who is clinically dead can perceive things they should not be able to. This is Jan Holden’s research speciality, how does she see the debate? “I’m just sort of holding out judgment about what the ultimate nature of these experiences is. I do think the bulk of the evidence is supportive of a spiritual reality, but not everyone sees it that way.” The consensus will rest on the evidence, and Professor French is clear about the burden that places on sceptics as well as believers: “It’s just as important for the sceptics to have evidence to support their arguments. At the end of the day, what we can be sure of is that the vast majority of experiences that people explain in paranormal terms don’t require that sort of explanation. Whether or not amidst all the counter-claims there might be some that can’t be explained away so easily remains to be seen.” Whatever the answer, a word of advice: whatever you do, don’t cross the streams n
Photographed & illustrated by Paul Willoughby Styled by Andrea Kurland
Sunglasses: stylists own Scarf by Rokit Vintage Polka dot dress by Reko Red top by Traffic People
hair: make-up: styling assistant: model:
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Simon Izzard @ Daniel Hersheson using L’Oreal ZoË Taylor @ Soho using Mac and Essie CHARLOTTE JOSEPH amber @ select
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Strapless top by Warehouse Patterned skirt by French Connection Petticoat (worn underneath) by Rokit Vintage Shoes & beads by Rokit Vintage
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Nightgown by Rokit Vintage
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Cardigan by New Look Hotpants by Marks & Spencer
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Blouse by Reko Skirt by Motel
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Dress by Rokit Vintage
LWLies
PRESENTS
A Demon Dreams By David Mattin Tortured genius, dissolute dandy and rock ‘n’ roll writer of the greatest ghost story ever told.
LWLies salutes Edgar Allen Poe, the dark knight of the soul.
Illustrated by Paul Willoughby
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foREwoRd Edgar Allan Poe was found lying on the floor of a Baltimore inn on October 3 1849, delirious, in distress, wearing clothes that were not his own. The 40 year-old writer and widower was rushed to hospital. But he never recovered sufficiently to explain his sudden collapse, or why, when found, he had repeatedly called for a mysterious man named Reynolds. America’s greatest literary dilettante was dead five days later. Four mourners, a minister and a gravedigger attended the funeral. The circumstances of Poe’s death began a conundrum that remains unsolved. But what else should we expect from a man whose life, too, was an ever-shifting hall of mirrors? Chronic alcoholic, destitute writer of begging letters, starter of almighty feuds; Poe composed over 70 haunting poems, invented the mystery novel, and breathed life into the embryonic short story form. He was the first and only true American Romantic. He was Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Pete Doherty rolled into one, drunk on Martel Cognac. But Poe wasn’t a superstar when he died; that all came later. Born in 1809 to a Scots-Irish Boston stage family, the boy Poe was brought up by a rich local tobacco merchant, John Allan, after his mother died of tuberculosis and his father deserted him. Even Allan eventually disowned the young man when, in 1829, Poe racked up massive gambling debts and got kicked out of West Point Military Academy. By this time he had already published two books of stories and poems. Broke and living with his aunt in Baltimore, he fell in love with his host’s nubile daughter, Virginia Clemm; he was 27 when, in 1836, he took the 13 year-old girl for his wife. More books followed, including the now classic
Tales Of The Grotesque and Arabesque; Poe shocked readers with his demonic Gothicism; the casual torture of characters that he manipulated, puppetlike. Unable to sustain friendships, his pole stars were his wife and their tortoise-shell cat, Catarina. Yet in 1843 he wrote The Black Cat, a short story about an alcoholic who hangs his cat from a tree, and then murders his wife with an axe. Hack journalism for magazines such as Burton’s Gentlemen’s Quarterly kept him in Cognac, and bought his tormented genius time alone with pen and ink. But in 1842 what little peace of mind Poe had made for himself disappeared; his wife Virginia was singing in the parlour when blood suddenly spurted from her mouth and fell down her dress. Just like Poe’s mother, she had TB. Virginia died in 1847, sinking Poe into outright despair. He had grown ever more erratic during his wife’s illness, drinking more heavily and publicly feuding with the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The most famous of all his works, The Raven was composed during that nightmarish midnight of his soul. In desperate need of cash, Poe threw it into a local newspaper in January 1845, and it proved an immediate sensation. Mesmeric, hallucinatory, told by a narrator wracked by compulsive guilt, The Raven is a blackstained window onto one man’s private hell, and the high water mark in the career of a dissolute literary master. Just two years after writing it, Poe would find himself dying on the floor of that Baltimore inn. But listen carefully, and amid the lines of The Raven you can hear him gesturing to us from an unknown, terrible place
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nce upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door – Only this, and nothing more.” Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December, And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. Eagerly I wished the morrow; vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow – sorrow for the lost Lenore – For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore – Nameless here for evermore.
Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter, In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore. Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he; But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door – Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door – Perched, and sat, and nothing more.
And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me – filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before; So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating “’Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door – Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door – This it is, and nothing more.”
Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore, “Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven. Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the nightly shore – Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!” Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”
Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer, “Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore; But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping, And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door, That I scarce was sure I heard you,” – here I opened wide the door – Darkness there, and nothing more.
Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly, Though its answer little meaning – little relevancy bore; For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door – Bird or beast above the sculptured bust above his chamber door – With such name as “Nevermore.”
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before. But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token, And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore!” This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!” Merely this and nothing more.
But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only, That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour. Nothing further then he uttered – not a feather then he fluttered – Till I scarcely more than muttered, “Other friends have flown before – On the morrow will he leave me, as my hopes have flown before.” Then the bird said, “Nevermore.”
Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning, Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before. “Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window lattice; Let me see then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore – Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore – ’Tis the wind and nothing more!”
Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken, “Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is its only stock and store, Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful disaster Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore – Till the dirges of his hope that melancholy burden bore Of ‘Never – nevermore.’”
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THe rAVen Words by Edgar Allen Poe
But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling, Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door; Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore – What this grim, ungainly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore – Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”
“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil! Prophet still, if bird or devil! – Whether tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore, Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted – On this home by horror haunted – tell me truly, I implore: Is there – is there balm in Gilead? Tell me – tell me, I implore!” Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”
This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core; This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining On the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamplight gloated o’er, But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o’er, She shall press, ah, nevermore!
“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil! Prophet still, if bird or devil! By that Heaven that bends above us – by that God we both adore – Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn, It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels named Lenore – Clasp a rare and radiant maiden, whom the angels named Lenore?” Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”
Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor. “Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee – by these angels he has sent thee Respite - respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore! Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!” Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”
“Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked upstarting – “Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore! Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken! Leave my loneliness unbroken! Quit the bust above my door! Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!” Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”
And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming, And the lamplight o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted – nevermore!
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A LWLies review will not be inhibited by any perceived rules. Just as movies are about more than the two hours you spend sitting in the cinema, our reviews are a chance to talk about much more than the immediate experience of the film in question. There are many different aspects of the movie-going experience and we will embrace them all.
Anticipation
Ever waited six months for a boxoffice behemoth? Read a book that you loved and nervously watched the adaptation? Been pleasantly surprised by an off-the-radar independent? Anticipation plays a crucial role in your reaction to a movie. Rather than ignore it, we think it should be measured and acknowledged as part of the moviegoing experience. Marked out of 5.
Enjoyment
All other things aside, how did you feel for those two hours? Were you glued to your seat? Did the film speak to your soul? Was it upsetting, disappointing, or just plain boring? Were you even awake? Marked out of 5.
In Retrospect
Great movies live with you; you carry them around wherever you go and the things they say shape the way you see the world. Did this movie fade away or was every moment burned into your retinas? Was it a quick fix action flick, good for a rainy Sunday afternoon? Or the first day of the rest of your life? Did you hate it with a fury only to fall in love with a passion? Or did that first love drain away like a doomed romance? Marked out of 5.
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Chapter Four.
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In which we discuss the latest film releases.
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ThREE TiMEs RELEASED 4 August
Three times a charm? Not quite. This dreamy triptych on the wares of love and communication from the Ozufixated Hsiao-Hsien Hou veers dangerously close to being a dazzling celebration of cinema past and present, but is let down by a soggy and unfocused final third. The film is a trio of emotionally fraught love stories set respectively in 1966, 1911 and 2005 and all three star the same pair of actors (Shu Qi and Chang Chen). As we witness the intricacies of their courtship via the context of three very different backdrops, it becomes increasingly clear that Hou’s not-so-hidden agenda is to throw down some heavy concepts and
DIRECTED BY Hsiao-Hsien Hou STARRING Chang Chen, Shu Qi
bold symbolism instead of offering anything that might be described as a candid rumination on the nature of blossoming love. Both leads give performances of quiet, rapturous intensity which help to build on Hou’s fluid camerawork and florid tableaux. The best of the three stories by some way is the opener in which Shu plays a wandering billiards hostess who receives some mixed emotional signals from Chang as an army officer on furlough. The Platters’ ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’ acts as the soundtrack to their romance and its repeated use echoes that of ‘California Dreaming’ in the later half of Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express.
The following section is a total stylistic and emotional U-turn, played out in silence with all of the lovers’ speech subtitled on the screen. This, at first, smacks of a director who’s out to annoy, but soon transcends its gimmickry through sheer strength of heart. Alas, it’s the misfiring final third which spoils the show as we’re given a trendy uncle’s perspective on how the youth of Beijing all wander around in baggy jumpers and are all, like, ‘really fucked up’. The common strain that runs through these nervous romances never makes itself truly felt, leaving the film lacking some kind of conceptual closure.
As a follow-up to his much touted but little seen cinematic shrine to Ozu, Café Lumière, Three Times sees Hou sealing his reputation as a filmmaker and an artist as opposed to a purveyor of entertainment. David Jenkins
Anticipation. HsiaoHsien Hou is regarded by highbrow types as some sort of genius. Three Enjoyment. Slow, stately and sexy as hell. Three
In Retrospect. Lop off the ugly appendage which is the final third and you’ll be fine. Three 073
paper clips
DIRECTED BY Elliot Berlin, Joe Fab STARRING Tom Bosley, Linda Hooper, Sandra Roberts RELEASED 4 August
Imagine this situation. A school has built a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. They hold an opening ceremony where the headteacher delivers a speech. Her opening words are, “I am so grateful to live in the United States of America”. Does that seem wholly appropriate to you? Paper Clips is a documentary about one such memorial, consisting of millions of paperclips, one for each victim of the Holocaust, which were collected by the pupils of a Tennessee highschool, and stored in a WW2-era train carriage. Perhaps the natural reaction
of a cynical European when faced with the emotional openness of Americans is to find selfindulgence rather than empathy. But as the film, and the tears, both keep rolling, you’ll find yourself questioning whether this is a film in honour of the victims of the Holocaust, or the school children, teachers and everyday Joes that make America so goddamn great. At one point the children are taught that, “Propaganda has absolutely nothing to do with the truth”. Unfortunately, the first assertion of propaganda is exactly that type of truth-claim. Paper Clips’ ‘truth’ is that we
are capable – through public demonstrations of emotion – of understanding the Holocaust and the experience of its victims. This is empathy porn. It’s inherently demeaning to real human suffering, and it reduces the historical complexities of the Holocaust, which we might genuinely learn from, to a masturbatory tearjerker. James Bramble
shanghai dreams In Shanghai Dreams the teen movie is transposed to industrial China. But although the familiar tropes of ’80s American drama are all represented, they look and sound very different – and the results of transgression are devastating. Gao Yuanyuan stars as 19 year-old Wu Quinghong, who falls for a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, much to her father’s feudal disapproval. She is dutiful at home and hardworking at school, unlike her daring friend Xiao Xhen, who sports an illegal perm and sneaks off at night for dates with Guizhou province’s disco Mickey Rourke, getting down to the latest sounds from Boney M. When disaster strikes, as all aficionados of the teen genre know, it’s not Xiao who will suffer but Quinghong. A violent confrontation between her local boyfriend and uprooted father is especially striking, as daddy dearest emerges 074 THE VOLVER ISSUE
Anticipation. A Holocaust movie in disguise. Two
Enjoyment. You’ll cry.
But not for the reasons the filmmakers think. Two
In Retrospect. A troubling account of how suffering makes America look great. One
RELEASED 8 September
DIRECTED BY Wang Xiaoshuai STARRING Gao Yuanyuan, Yao Anlian, Tang Yang
from hard rain like a vengeful Takeshi Kitano. Director Wang Xiaoshuai expertly paces this autobiographical follow-up to Beijing Bicycle. But while he allows his actors the space to pull out some remarkable performances, you feel he is better on the specific than the universal. Especially intriguing is Wang’s careful sound design, which makes it all the more perplexing that the ending, which appears to rely so strongly on sound effects to pack its punch, fails so dramatically. Jonas Milk
Anticipation. Won the Jury Prize at Cannes. Three Enjoyment. Slow,
beautiful, but never involving. Three
In Retrospect. The ending may be a stumper, but Shanghai Dreams won’t keep you awake at night. Two
LiTTLE Miss sunshinE J. What do you think Little Miss Sunshine was about? M. I want to say family... because it was about family. It was about people getting over their depression and being seen in a new light remarkably quickly. J. I think it was about the imperfection of people and the situations that bring out that imperfection. M. Steve Carell’s character, even though he tried to kill himself, it was never suggested that he was a bad person or that he’d done
DIRECTED BY Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris STARRING Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Greg Kinnear
anything wrong. J. For a suicidal Proust scholar, he wasn’t very suicidal. M. I’ll say now, I couldn’t say what it was about but I certainly did enjoy it. J. And don’t even start me on the nihilist kid. Why the hell would someone take a vow of silence because they wanted to be in the goddamn Air Force? It makes no sense whatsoever. Anyway, what was your anticipation for this film? M. I was very excited to see it,
RELEASED 15 September
but I was hoping it would be a little rougher around the edges. The script felt like it had been rewritten a hundred times. J. Yeah. Instead of being an indie film by virtue of how it was made, it was more like they were trying to make a film you could place into the indie genre. M. I agree totally. I thought that from the start; with the introduction of the very first song, and the way all the characters are briefly introduced. J. I think one of its problems
was that it was too much a ragbag of influences rather than its own film. The final dance scene is a Napoleon Dynamite rip-off and the dad not getting the book deal is pure Sideways. M. It’s the indie film that someone like me would have made. J. It was the greatest hits of the American indie film. M. Alright, I think I’m going for Anticipation 4, Enjoyment 3, In Retrospect 2. J. Yeah, that’s pretty spot on. 075
harsh times
DIRECTED BY David Ayer STARRING Christian Bale, Freddy Rodriguez, Eva Longoria
RELEASED 18 August
As one Gulf War film is honourably discharged, another arrives to tell the story of how modern war affects the modern man. But where Jarhead alluded only briefly to its characters’ lives post-combat, Harsh Times focuses specifically on what happens when a professional killer attempts to take his place in civilian society. For Jim (Christian Bale) the natural choice is to wait for his call-up to the LAPD, but when that fails to materialise he returns to the streets of his childhood with best friend Mike (Freddy Rodriguez) to drink beer, cause trouble and occasionally look for work. There was much made of the return of the buddy movie after last year’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but where Shane Black’s film was packed with dark humour and genuine chemistry, Ayer’s script rings hollow. Scenes are littered with “Dude!”s and “Dawg!”s and soft punches as Bale and Rodriguez try to make it look like they’ve known each other for more than 10 minutes, a task not helped by Ayer’s fascination with street slang. The director is quick to proclaim that he walked a “sometimes rocky path” while growing up in LA, and is clearly proud of the grim jargon he picked up: guns, drugs and other illicit street furniture are given a vast range of pseudonyms that will thrill 13 year-old boys everywhere. Women are the enemy – either whores, bitches or laughably weak. Mike’s girlfriend is a motivated career woman who harries him out of the house in search of work and threatens to leave him when she uncovers his lies, only to take him back again. Meanwhile Mike hustles his way from one act of stupidity to the next, initially
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rebuffing Jim’s moronic schemes only to buckle at the first “Dude!” of disapproval. The lack of fraternal bonds makes his devotion to Jim inexplicable though, and the power that should accumulate from an increasingly frantic storyline is lost to two men trundling along without any evident motivation. That said, the knuckle-headed yarn of Jim and Mike’s search for work is certainly slick, and Bale throws in a few comic turns, most notably in an extreme take on the bottle of piss scene from Withnail & I. His strongest suit, though, is still the unhinged intensity that he showed in American Psycho, and easily the most powerful part of his performance comes from channelling this tension. Hugely menacing and disgustingly sexual, this extreme of Jim’s character is one of two moments of shocking pace and brutality as Ayer hits his stride and hints at what the rest of the film might have been. The first time we’re assaulted it seems that a turning point might have been reached. Suddenly we’re not watching a daft romp but actually engaging with Jim and Mike as they make their escape from a scene of unexpected violence. Out of harm’s way though, Harsh Times eases back into cruise control, and by the time Jim explodes at his doe-eyed girlfriend we know that it’s just an unpleasant exception to the tootame rule. Steve Watson
Anticipation. Batman in the sunshine. Three Enjoyment. Flashes of
action lost in the homeboy sprawl. Two
In Retrospect Dude!
Two
An interview with Freddy Rodriguez, star of Harsh Times. LWLies: David Ayer wrote Harsh Times from personal experience. Did you bring any personal experience to the film? Rodriguez: Yeah, I mean that’s the sort of area where I grew up, but in Chicago, so I was very familiar with that environment. The people, the vibe, that sort of energy of the film; two guys hanging out and encountering the sort of people that they did in the film – they were the sort of people that I encountered growing up as a young man in Chicago. LWLies: Was it hard to pick up the slang or did you already have it? Rodriguez: Yeah yeah, that’s in the blood I reckon, you
know? It was very easy to go into that mode.
LWLies: Mike’s relationship with Jim is central to the film – how did you get on with Christian Bale when the two of you were put together? Rodriguez: It just organically happened. You know, Christian and I got together and we’d just talk a lot. You saw the film; we spent 14 to 15 hours a day in a car together. When you spend that kind of time in a car with someone you can’t help but develop a relationship with them. So we talked a lot and developed a friendship that I think carried through to the film. LWLies: And did the two of you go out drinking like Jim and Mike? Rodriguez: Yeah I think we did that a few times. LWLies: But no mishaps like in the film? Rodriguez: No, no mishaps man. We couldn’t afford to get
crazy.
LWLies: Women often seem like the enemy in the film – why do you think that is? Rodriguez: Because guys just talk a lot of shit when they’re around each other, you know? That’s the truth. Why do you think women get so shocked when they’re around guys and they hear guys talk? It’s because that’s how guys are - we just talk a lot of shit. We don’t talk that way in front of our girls. So David wasn’t afraid of putting that on film and saying this is what it is, this is how guys talk whenever they’re around each other. LWLies: Did you carry on when the camera stopped rolling? Rodriguez: Nah, no of course not. LWLies: You and your real wife were high school sweethearts. Would she put up with what Sylvia puts up with from Mike? Rodriguez: I don’t know if she would put up with it man, you know, that’s a good question. Probably not - she’d probably kick my ass to the kerb. Steve Watson 077
nacho libre “What else have you got in your outstandingly inventive repertoire, I wonder?” asks Edmund in the final episode of Blackadder II. “A brilliant drunk Glaswegian, no doubt. A hilarious black man: ‘see you Jimmy, where am dat warty-melon’.” He has a point. Aside from the joy of watching Peter Sellers carry scores of lame Pink Panther gags on the strength of his ludicrous accent, people who think a funny voice equals comedy pay dirt are generally crushing bores. That goes for you too, Jack Black, porno ’tache or not. Black is asked to carry Nacho Libre almost single-handed as Ignacio, the man-child cook to an adopted family of friars who harbours a burning desire for glory in the ring of the Lucha Libre, the pumped up, theatrical Mexican wrestling circuit. But when his secret life as a wrestler conflicts
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RELEASED 11 August
DIRECTED BY Jared Hess STARRING Jack Black, Ana de la Reguera, Héctor Jiménez
with both his duties and his love for Sister Encarnación (the luminous Ana de la Reguera), he is forced to ask himself where his loyalties lie. Black and Jared Hess came to the project with a huge reservoir of goodwill following School Of Rock and the charmingly torpid Napoleon Dynamite, but most of it is squandered in a lazily scripted paean to the kind of lukewarm whimsy worthy of Chevy Chase at his lowest ebb. On the two or three occasions when things come together – like the hilarious but actually quite disturbing dwarf wrestling match – its flashes of genius make it impossible not to wonder what a couple of rewrites would have done for the material. The weakness of the plot, a carpe diem romance of the most basic kind, is laid bare by the lack of verbal punch and an over-reliance on the tableaux photography that worked so well in Napoleon
Dynamite but here seems overly mannered. But the biggest disappointment is Jack Black. He is, on the evidence of previous work, a talented actor who can bring depth and pathos to his comic roles. As Ignacio, he turns in a furious, gurning, posturing performance – William Shatner’s younger, fatter and less subtle disciple, each and every line delivered at the same high frequency panto note, overwhelming every scene with frenetic mugging. At least Black is unashamed of his tubby nakedness, insideout nipples and all, and uses his physicality to raise the odd smile in scenes that would otherwise be marooned among the tumbleweed. For that he deserves some admiration, as do the other grotesques in the cast who revel in their freakishness. It’s just a shame that their looks
are not matched in originality and daring by a film that falls flat in the face of so much comic potential. Paul Fairclough
Anticipation. Supergroup style team-up between key players in two of the most enjoyable comedies of late? This can’t go wrong. Four
Enjoyment. It’s
gone wrong. Occasional brilliance can’t make up for laboured gags and a tone that lurches from syrupy sentiment to cartoon buffoonery. Two
In Retrospect. Mexican wrestling - it’s inherently comic. Hess and Black deserve to eat canvas for their failure to pin this one down. Two
monster house Okay kids, are we sitting comfortably? Do we have our nachos and our buckets of popcorn gripped tightly in our hands? Then let us begin. Once upon a time there was this really skinny guy called Nebbercracker who had a major thing for really fat women. Turned him on no end. So one day he sees this enormously obese circus freak type lady called Constance, tied up good and tight in a big metal cage. Naturally, he goes crazy with desire, seduces her, brings her back to his house and feeds that booty up big time. Unfortunately, Constance soon begins to live a life of torment in Nebbercracker’s house, and tragically dies in a freak accident. Nebbercracker covers her big sexy body in cement, gets madly depressed, and stays mostly indoors living with his guilt and his
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DIRECTED BY Gil Kenan STARRING Steve Buscemi, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jon Heder, Jason Lee
RELEASED 11 August
demons for 45 excruciating years. Are we having fun yet? That’s Monster House for you. Possibly the first kids-oriented Hollywood-financed animated movie that has the nerve to gamely tread in the dark Stygian waters of fairy-tale dread. With a cocktail of narrative and stylistic references that run the gamut from the Brothers Grimm to the Brothers Quay, this is a movie that delights in the creepy psychic recesses of sexual torment and adolescent angst. And yes there are two ostensibly wholesome and unthreatening pint-sized protagonists, Chowder (Sam Lerner) and DJ (Mitchel Musso), but their existence is predominantly one of uncomfortable hormonal flux. Thus, as they stare across at the eponymous house, owned by Nebbercracker (Steve Buscemi)
but controlled by the homicidal spirit of dead wife Constance (Kathleen Turner), they negotiate the genuine perils of puberty – DJ’s voice is breaking, he’s putting away childish things like toys and trick or treating, he desires local girl-scout Jenny (Spencer Locke), and he’s establishing tricky new boundaries with his parents and his bizarrely attractive (for a cartoon character) baby-sitter Zee (Maggie Gyllenhaal). In the film’s appealingly axiomatic world view, the Monster House is terrifying adulthood, sex and death, while DJ’s bedroom is comforting childhood, the womb and life. Debut director and UCLA animation prodigy Gil Kenan handles all this with a deft touch. The film is a breezy 90 minutes, a perfectly snappy antidote to Pixar’s recent two hour bloater, Cars. Of course, it all goes a bit
ho-hum at the end, with the Monster House turning into a mobile Terminator of sorts. Yet even here, amidst the formulaic chaos, some smarty-pants visual nods to Cornelia Parker’s ‘Cold Dark Matter, An Exploded View’ (you know it; the YBA gardenshed-in-pieces piece) ensure that Monster House retains its bold, unapologetic edge. Kevin Maher
Anticipation. Monster House? Never heard of it. Sounds awful. One Enjoyment. Wow. Fat
chicks! Death! And Steve Buscemi! Love it. Four
In Retrospect. If you have to go to one big budget Hollywood pre-teen animated fantasy this year... Three
EROs DIRECTED BY Wong Kar Wai, Steven Soderbergh, Michelangelo Antonioni STARRING Gong Li, Robert Downey Jr, Alan Arkin, Ele Keats, Christopher Buchholz, Regina Nemni, Luisa Rainieri RELEASED 22 September
Three short films; three of the world’s most celebrated directors, all in orbit around that most tantalising of subjects, eroticism. Eros, it’s clear, promises much. But the three pieces here – think of this film as a cinematic short story collection – shot by Hong Kong’s fêted Wong Kar Wai, Steven Soderbergh, and Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni are a mixed bunch at best. None succeed entirely, two contain some wonderful moments, and one is awful. It all means that even if you’re in the mood for an ‘anthology movie’ – and lots of people aren’t, ever – Eros fails to become more than the sum of its parts. Unsurprisingly given the broad theme, each director gives us contrasting approaches. First up is Wong Kar Wai’s The Hand, the story of a young tailor, Xiao Zhang (Chang Chen), and his obsessive love for an unattainable Hong Kong courtesan, Hua (Gong Li). This is the strongest piece on offer: commissioned, year after year, to make the dresses Hua will use to seduce other men, Zhang watches the object of his affection sink into penury as her beauty declines, and we witness the slow – sometimes a little too slow – and artful unfolding of a small, affecting tragedy. What’s more, set in the ’30s, the story takes place against a sumptuous period backdrop, brilliantly realised by Kar Wai. That’s a start that sets the zinging, high verbal comedy of Soderbergh’s Equilibrium in stark relief. Robert Downey Jr plays a stressed out ’50s ad exec visiting a psychiatrist (Alan Arkin) to discuss a recurring erotic dream. Much of the entertainment derives from a series of wellorchestrated visual jokes based
on Arkin’s determination to attract the attention of a passerby while pretending that he is listening to his client. Meanwhile, Downey Jr’s scattergun, neurotic monologuing and the black-andwhite cinematography create the stylised, noirish atmosphere that counterpoints these high-jinks. It all makes for some perfect, laughout-loud moments. But attempts to draw significance from Downey Jr’s dream are opaque and irritating because we can’t help feeling that this opacity is hiding precisely nothing. Speaking of which, we come to Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Dangerous Thread of Things. In it, we follow an Italian couple; unhappily married and touring their country, they speak to each other only in prefabricated epithets: “Isn’t it funny, you talk so much about purity but always end up covered in
shit,” says Christopher (Christopher Buchholz) when Cloe (Regina Nemni) gets mud on her feet. Soon, Christopher encounters a pretty young girl at a restaurant. Their subsequent coupling is imbued with an absurd importance by a lilting soundtrack and more leaden dialogue: “My name is Linda,” the girl says, ominously, after the act. She is met by a meaningful silence. Next, and inexplicably, Cloe and Linda meet on a beach and wordlessly perform a kind of freeform, interpretative dance. It’s a fitting end to a ponderous, selfimportant 30 minutes unworthy of one of cinema’s most influential directors, now 94 years-old. The failure of the last story strikes, really, at the heart of the problem with this movie. Dispensing, as any anthology movie does, with the narrative energy provided by an overarching
story places demands on the work that Eros just doesn’t fulfil. Its localised joys – Downey Jr’s comic timing, Kar Wai’s understated melancholy – are too few and far between, and aren’t enough to make a pleasurable, or even coherent, global experience out of these three stories. Obsessive followers of Kar Wai, Soderbergh, and Antonioni have a curio to put among their collection. Everyone else will soon forget Eros. David Mattin
Anticipation. Three of the world’s great directors. Four
Enjoyment. A few
sparkling moments are overshadowed by narratives that often plod. Two
In Retrospect. An experimental curio. Two 081
tideland Is This It? asked The Strokes with the unappealing irony that comes so easily to louche rock millionaires. It’s the same question that haunts every queasy camera flourish of Terry Gilliam’s latest oddball offering, Tideland. Based on Mitch Cullin’s hallucinatory novel about a young girl, Jeliza-Rose, sinking into a nightmarish fantasy world after the death of her junkie parents, on paper this is the perfect marriage of director and material. And certainly, Tideland walks and talks like a Gilliam film. All the usual conceits are present and correct – there’s the shifting boundary between dreams and reality, a darkly humorous vision of the human spirit and a cast of
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DIRECTED BY Terry Gilliam STARRING Jodelle Ferland, Jeff Bridges, Jennifer Tilly
freaks including a lobotomised man-child and his one-eyed sister. There’s a problem though: for the most part Tideland is a mess. It’s overacted and out of control, all sweat and no suave. You can practically hear Gilliam playing the ringmaster behind the camera, urging more, more, more. But this is slapstick direction – a manic dissipation of energy whose only obvious result is some terrifyingly poor acting by the likes of Jennifer Tilly and Jeff Bridges. There’s so much noise, but so little being said. Producer Jeremy Thomas describes the film as an “oasis”, but if so, it’s one parched of any good ideas. Part of your brain is telling you that this is good Gilliam stuff – a darkly menacing Alice In Wonderland, provocative
RELEASED 11 August
and disorienting, you know, all the things you said you liked about Brazil and Time Bandits and Fear And Loathing. But your heart wont be in it. It’s babbling and inconsequential, tedious and annoying. Things perk up towards the end as the film walks a pitchblack knife-edge of uncomfortable sexual tension. Bravo for the brave intentions, but it’s naïve to think that suspicion and cynicism won’t come stampeding through the door with danger sensors on hyperdrive. Challenging perceptions of the modern world is one thing, but doing so through the eyes of a child who is genuinely vulnerable – who sleeps next to her father’s stuffed corpse – is just dumb.
It’s tough because everybody wants to celebrate artistic freedom. A failure of uninhibited creativity is worth 10 big budget no brain successes, right? But the question remains: is this it? Was it worth all the battles, the heartache and the compromises to make this film? Was it worth The Brothers Grimm? You suspect not. Matt Bochenski
Anticipation. Gilliam in
full flow. Four
Enjoyment. Incoherent and inane, but also provocative and unsettling. Two In Retrospect. Dwell on it and it will dent your belief in Gilliam’s philosophy. One
-24
my angel
DIRECTED BY Serge Frydman STARRING Vanessa Paradis, Vincent Rottiers, Eduardo Noriega RELEASED 15 September
Tarted up and sitting in the red-lit window of a cheap brothel, Colette (Vanessa Paradis) exudes the bored sexuality of a woman well accustomed to the power she holds over men. Director Serge Frydman wrote My Angel with Paradis in mind, and right from this first scene’s long, lingering shot you can see that he, like all the men who gather outside her window, is fascinated by her. As she looks directly into the camera though, it becomes clear that she is far more than Gallic eye candy, and is in fact instrumental in Frydman’s ambitions to move beyond telling a simple story. The film opens with a narrator telling us that, “In the beginning it is dark”. The narrator is at once inside and out of the film’s action, and serves to remind everyone that they are sitting in a dark room waiting to be told a story. This direct communication continues
wilderness Here’s a gift for people who complain about the free ‘holidays’ dished out to young offenders. A group of teen convicts are taken on a camping trip, only to find that their deserted island hides a mystery guest. Everything goes a bit Friday The 13th, and before long the crims are fighting to save their worthless ASBO skins. Wilderness works well if you view it as a British re-imagining of Predator – swapping jungle for a damp forest, and the dreadlocked alien for a nutcase with a crossbow. There’s no Arnie here, but a likeable frontman is found in the shape of Toby Kebbell – formerly of Dead Man’s Shoes. While the lower budget clearly equates to less in the way of shiny effects, the film plays to its
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throughout the film, Colette repeatedly commenting on the story as it is being told: “I don’t want to be in your story! I want to be in my story!” Such self-conscious commentary could become an irritating distraction, but paired with the gentle oddness of My Angel it helps to create a world that is gleefully artificial but compellingly believable as Colette takes a phone call not meant for her and embarks on an unwanted adventure. A fellow prostitute she does not know is getting out of prison and asks Colette to collect her son Billy (Vincent Rottiers) from an orphanage and bring him to her so that mother and son can escape the sinister Kovarski. Colette picks Billy up, only to find that he is much older than expected, and when the mother does not turn up they discover
that she has been killed, and that they are next on Kovarski’s hit list. It is testament to Frydman’s skill that his musing on the nature of storytelling can actually enhance the story as it infringes on it. As Colette says, “You can’t make a story come true just by telling it,” and Frydman does more than just tell his story. He invests it with feeling and nuance, bringing it to life with a charm that verges on the childishly sentimental but comes together in an engaging and unconventional love story. Steve Watson
Anticipation. Vanessa Paradis in stockings. Three Enjoyment. A captivating, multi-faceted film. Three In Retrospect. Stylish and rich with impressive performances. Three
DIRECTED BY Michael J Bassett STARRING Toby Kebbell, Alex Reid, Sean Pertwee
strengths by making a rough stab at social realism: the young cast serve up some enjoyable ‘geeza’ shtick in their efforts to be urban, and this quirk goes some way to transcending the usual slasherfilm clichés. As a general rule, horror directors dominate their audience either through built-up tension or grand theatrical execution; Bassett’s approach favours neither path excessively, but when violence arises it does so with a dollop of creativity – one sap has their guts chewed out by a pack of hunting dogs. There are few major scares, but the fair selection of cheer-along-sadism – and occasional duff line – should appeal to fans of the genre, if no one else.
RELEASED 11 August
British horror has enjoyed something of a resurgence in recent years, and films like Neil Marshall’s The Descent prove that the UK can sometimes provide the best scares in the business. Wilderness doesn’t quite scale such dizzying heights, but it does more than enough to keep its severed head held high. Neon Kelly
Anticipation. Michael Myers goes to Brat Camp. Three
Enjoyment. Killer dogs improve any film they appear in. Three
In Retrospect. Won’t cause any sleepless nights. Two
csA: cOnFEdERATE sTATEs OF AMERicA RELEASED 4 August
Jerry: “Hey there, Mrs Peterson, is Mike home?” Mom: “Is that you, Jerry?” Jerry: “Yes. Yes it is. Uh, may I speak to him please?” Mom: “I’ll juuuuuuust get him.” [Muted] “MIIIIIIIIKE, get your no-good ass to the telephone!!!” Jerry: “Thank you very much, Mrs P.” [Pause] Mike: “J-bomb, waasssaaaappp?!!” Jerry: “Mikey, you’re not going to believe this, but me and the guys were down at Hooters after the grad ceremony, had a few Bud Lights, checkin’ out the babes...” Mike: “Fuckin’ awesome, dude!” Jerry: “...then Bob came up with this totally awesome idea!” Mike: “Whoa...” And thus CSA: Confederate States Of America was born. Taking ironic racism to as yet unplumbed depths, CSA is a mock historical documentary based on the fictional premise that the slavery-loving South won the American Civil War. If you think that sounds good, well, it feels like it was made by a bunch of overachieving grad students who had nothing better to do with their time. Spot-on parodies litter the (sometimes dull) chunks of straight
DIRECTED BY Kevin Willmott STARRING Greg Kirsch, Renee Patrick, Molly Graham
revisionist history, examples of which include a spoof ’50s paranoia film called I Married An Abolitionist in which a doting housewife is taken aback upon discovering her husband’s secret copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The film is also interspersed with ‘fake’ adverts for Coon Chicken and Darkie Toothpaste which, lo and behold, all turn out to have actually existed. Fans of Chris Morris’ brand of close-to-the-bone political satire should find much to laugh at, but CSA could have done with being a lot less clever-clever. Director Kevin Willmott is listless in the way he confronts and subverts ingrained attitudes and beliefs, and after the first hour the film just grinds and grinds like the pestle of good humour on the mortar of artistic integrity. It’s a novel and energetic idea, but that’s all it is: an idea. David Jenkins
Anticipation. Ooh,
clever. Four
Enjoyment. Hmm, clever. Three
In Retrospect. Ugh,
clever. Two
085
a scanner darkly Prolific sci-fi author Philip K Dick has a mixed bag of movies to answer for. From the classics like Blade Runner to the sillier fare – Total Recall springs irresistibly to mind – through to the highly bankable: see 2002 Cruiseathon Minority Report. Now, thanks to Richard Linklater, he can add A Scanner Darkly to the list; by no means the least credible adaptation of the Dick canon and probably the most personal. A Scanner Darkly follows a group of likeable junkie losers, and the efforts of secret agent Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) to pin down exactly what they’ve been up to. That’s tricky when he
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DIRECTED BY Richard Linklater STARRING Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr, Woody Harrelson
has something of a hidden agenda, being one of the group he’s tracking, or ‘scanning’, himself. Confused? You will be. It’s not a film for cinemagoers who like a linear narrative, and can be tough going at times even for those not reared on Hollywood exposition-fests. The director credited with legitimising the ‘slacker’ generation, 36 year-old Linklater has spent recent years cultivating a broader appeal with films like Bad News Bears and The School Of Rock, so it’s nice to have him back in cult territory. Despite the fact that A Scanner Darkly is animated, this yarn of drug use and abuse, intrusive police state surveillance
RELEASED 18 August
and double agents is anything but family friendly; the screen practically sweats paranoia with every frame. Nevertheless, the animation is more remarkable than any of the film’s subjects, most of whom we’ve seen before in some form. Looks-wise, you’ve never seen anything like this. Using the technique of rotoscoping, an effect almost 100 years old in its most basic form, Linklater and his team have created a living graphic novel, painstakingly painting over every frame of the film. Ironically, the effect produces Keanu Reeves’ most animated performance to date, though it’s Robert Downey Jr who completely steals the show
as Arctor’s loquacious two-faced friend Barris. The legendarily addled actor reportedly joked that he’d done 20 years of research for the role. For a trip like no other you’ll take to the multiplex this year, go see A Scanner Darkly. Take that mate from university who can’t get a job and lies around the flat all day smoking weed – it’ll either scare them into getting a job or completely break their mind. Just don’t go in expecting Before Sunset. Carole Chater
Anticipation. Philip K Dick via Richard Linklater? Keanu Reeves via rotoscoping? Robert
ThE sEnTinEL DIRECTED BY Clark Johnson STARRING Michael Douglas, Kiefer Sutherland, Eva Longoria
In 141 years there has never been a mole in the Secret Service. Maybe it’s the claws that make it difficult to hold a gun, or the fact that they’re blind? Regardless, someone is out to assassinate the president, and amidst a furore of personal vendettas, unturned stones and a wonderful mélange of unprofessionalism, all the evidence points to someone on the inside. From the outset, The Sentinel is bursting at the seams with potential. The mix of blood-red screens and black-and-white photography ring reminiscent of Copycat and similar ice-cold serialkiller thrillers. The pace, the cast, the sharpness and the speed at which events are machine-gunned into the plot all suck the audience
RELEASED 1 September
in, only to fizzle out like a morningafter bonfire. Details are woven meticulously into the plot, bundled into a big heap and dumped in the bin marked ‘unfathomable mess’. In the end, there’s nothing for the audience to pull at except their hair. Primarily, the fist-bitingly awful screenplay drags the film down into an abyss of no return. Laughable, in fact stomach-achingly hilarious, it’s hard to believe the cast swallowed it in the first place. Kiefer Sutherland’s natty suit is a feeble disguise for an easy Jack Bauer retread. Former sex addict Michael Douglas makes the beast with two backs with the First Lady, but that’s hardly eyes-on-springs shocking. And as for Eva Longoria – the one tiny thread that the film desperately hangs onto – she
barely even takes off her jacket. The one prick-twitching shot of her in her nightie with a quilt pulled up to her chin reminds you that PG13s really aren’t worth it unless they’re by Pixar. Monisha Rajesh
Anticipation. High expectation of this one: Jack Bauer to the rescue Mr President! Four Enjoyment. Laughed so
hard, left the cinema with a brand new hernia. Two
In Retrospect. Shame Longoria didn’t take on something stronger for her first role since Desperate Housewives - she’ll lose a lot of ‘credibility’. Two
Downey Jr via fictional drugs? Sounds bloody great, can’t wait to get strapped in. Four
Enjoyment. It’s like
being on drugs. Wait a minute, perhaps that’s intentional. Is this Richard Linklater’s great experiment in metafilm? Or does it just not make sense? Three
In Retrospect. You’ll need to see it again. Partly to see if it makes any more sense, partly because it’s just so damned pretty. Four 087
An interview with Laura Harris, star of Severance. LWLies: You have a real eye for cult projects. What goes through your mind when picking a film or TV show?
Harris: What goes through my mind is, ‘I’d really like to
work, please hire me!’ That’s what goes through my mind. I don’t know if I’ve planned my career as much as that, but Severance was something I read that I really loved. The last few years I’ve been educating myself more and more about film, screenwriting and scripts and everything else. I never had that education before so I would essentially just audition and work, or if I was lucky enough to be offered something do that as well. Now when I read something I actually have a grasp of its value to me or in general, and that grasp grows of course as you learn more and more. So something like Severance is just a fucking kick-ass script, totally awesome and the role is awesome and the people involved are awesome. It’s win-win.
LWLies: What with Hostel and now Severance, Eastern European tourist boards must be up in arms at their portrayal. What was your experience of filming in Hungary? Harris: We were in the middle of nowhere, so just beautiful forests. I don’t think I would be able to give you a fair idea of what Hungary is like at any level, except there are incredible insects. There are these lush forests and insects the size of your hand everywhere. But that’s not telling you anything. LWLies: Why do you think horror seems to be consistently popular at the moment? Harris: I don’t know how to answer that. I’m not enough of a film student to be able to give an accurate idea, however I’m learning and I’m interested. I love listening to [writer-director] Chris Smith talk about it because he is such a film geek and he really knows what he’s talking about. He’s actually answered that question and what he said was, we are dealing with different topics right now - Eastern Europe being broken open, and terrorism - there is something going down in the atmosphere of the world that can maybe be expressed easily through these horror films. And it’s being expressed in every genre. People are discussing it. But it definitely lends itself to some interesting slasher stuff as well. LWLies: Arguably your highest profile success is 24. You were a kickass bad guy. How’s it feel to be tortured by Jack Bauer? Harris: It was so hot, so sexy. There’s just something kinky about it, that whole scene. I don’t know what it was. It was dramatic and painful and everything else, but what was really happening for me every time he was this close to my face I was like, ‘Oh my god you are the most fucking gorgeous creature I have ever seen’. His voice is like melted butter and it’s just like soaking all over your face. That’s how I felt. Hemanth Kissoon For more of the same, check out www.littlewhitelies.co.uk. Kinky bitch.
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severance RELEASED 25 August
The unsettling juxtaposition of fear and laughter makes horror-comedy a difficult balancing act. The key is to come to terms with the fact that you’ve just laughed your heart out at a horrific incident involving a mantrap, then sit back and enjoy the ride. Severance is funny. You will laugh. You have been warned. So seven employees of a global arms supplier find themselves up against more than they bargained for when a corporate weekend turns into a bloodthirsty manhunt. The irony of their plight is that they are now in the sights of the very weapons that they produce, and find their new position uncomfortable to say the least. Yes, it’s ridiculous, but that doesn’t stop the film being both scary and funny. In the first half in particular, director Christopher Smith’s sense of timing and feel for camerawork are straight out of the top drawer. The brutal killings push the boundaries of what can actually be made playful, though
DIRECTED BY Christopher Smith STARRING Danny Dyer, Laura Harris, Tim McInnerny
refreshingly those boundaries turn out to be pretty malleable. Danny Dyer enjoys an excellent return to form as the drug-addled funnyman, and his farcical comic turn is excellently tempered by the dry sarcasm of token yank Laura Harris, who delivers her oh-soBritish withering comments like a true native. In a sense it is disappointing that Severance does not commit to horror more completely, but why deny the innate national ability of the British to mock, and to mock well. Severance treads the fine line of horror comedy with aplomb. Chalk and cheese do make a good dish after all. Danjo Thompson
Anticipation. Given Dyer’s recent double ‘ard geezer roles, not good. Two Enjoyment. Horrific and hilarious. Three
In Retrospect. It’s too funny. Thank fuck this isn’t a first date. Three
Atrium-NYC
Mario's-Portland & Seattle
Mitchell's-Westport
Stanley Korshak-Dallas
Lisa Kline- Los Angeles & Malibu
Lulu-Bal Harbour
By George- Austin
dirty sanchez: the movie
DIRECTED BY Jim Hickey STARRING Matthew Pritchard, Lee Dainton, Mike ‘Pancho’ Locke, Dan Joyce RELEASED 15 September
Ask yourself this: have you ever watched an episode of MTV’s Dirty Sanchez and thought, ‘Shit, man, I’d love to see another hour of this stuff.’ If the answer’s ‘yes’, your time has come. Dirty Sanchez: The Movie sees the four jackasses dispatched on a world tour to experience the Seven Deadly Sins in as graphic and sickening a fashion as possible. The result is one of the vilest, filthiest movies you’re ever likely to see. It’s genuinely fucked up, and at times it’s pretty funny. At one point, after getting riddled with 103 paintballs to beat a fictitious world record held by ‘Anthony
Kelly’, a naked, victorious Pritchard declares, “That fuckin’ Anthony Kelly is a right thick cunt!” You can’t script that kind of irony. But the thing is, when Jackass arrived it was a breath of fresh air on MTV; skate punks and existential cowboys reclaiming the airwaves from the corporate sloth the station had become. But there’s nothing punk about Dirty Sanchez – it’s a bunch of Welsh dudes who saw a gap in the market and realised they could make a quick buck. What’s more corporate than that? Maybe if one of them had the charisma of Knoxville you could just glide through it, but they come across as the worst kind of
nina’s heavenly delights RELEASED 29 September
Food is the way to a man’s heart. Nina’s poppadomwielding restaurateur father Mohan (Raad Rawi) knew it, and he tried to impart his culinary knowledge upon his impressionable young daughter (Shelley Conn). But her youthful progression to womanhood stole her away from the family curryhouse, stepping out from Mohan’s dominant shadow to seek her own fame and fortune. Though the cold, hard streets of Glasgow lost their charm, the passing of Nina’s father eventually brings her back to bonny Scotland. Cue concerns over the restaurant’s future without Mohan at the helm, a curry competition which must be entered and won to retain his
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obnoxious cultural tourists. Hiring Thai hookers and leering at the ladyboys? Classy. Ask yourself another question: would you actually want to be friends with any of these people? Thought not. Danny Bangs
Anticipation. Two hours in the company of people who drink each other’s puke? Erm... One
Enjoyment. Funny in
parts, but one for fans only. Of S&M. Two
In Retrospect. For the sake of your mental health, never think of it again. One No wait, you’ll talk about it endlessly in the pub with your mates. Five Aaargh. Three
DIRECTED BY Pratibha Parmar STARRING Shelley Conn, Raad Rawi, Art Malik
honour, a determined daughter desperate to find a purpose, and a lesbian relationship as spicy as a korma. All the staples of a classic Glaswegian tale. So, is it delightful? Unfortunately, no. Parmar’s first big-screen outing since Sita Gita is merely the sum of its parts. A small-screen cast of gritty actors and actresses from the streets of Holby, Albert Square and Sun Hill, combined with a director once prominent in the Sheba Feminist Press, do little to titillate a predictable script. It’s film-by-numbers; tale of woe, guilty feelings, honourable challenge, victory through adversity, forbidden fruit of romance, love wins through, smile for the cameras, roll credits.
However, to deride the film completely is perhaps to miss its point. Essentially, Nina’s Heavenly Delights is a BBC2 rom-com, and it has its moments. Mohan’s ghostly visitations to Nina amuse. An overly jovial radio presenter voice-over advertising the culinary event is curried off really well, and it all unfolds with homemade lowbudget British charm. It might not make you roar with laughter, but it should raise a smile; it’s honest, simple Sunday afternoon fodder.
Order This Life with some chicken madras and you’ll be reading from Parmar’s menu. Adrian D’Enrico
Anticipation. Everybody looks forward to a decent curry now and again. Two Enjoyment. Tasty-ish, but lacks any kind of vindaloo zing. Two
In Retrospect. Take-away
the film. One
ThE nOTORiOus bETTiE pAgE DIRECTED BY Mary Harron STARRING Gretchen Mol, Lili Taylor, Chris Bauer, Sarah Paulson
RELEASED 4 August
Who is the ‘notorious’ Bettie Page? Take your pick. She’s Burlesque Betty, part Botticelli’s Venus, part Gaultier’s Madonna: shackled bondage babe turned liberated sex symbol. She’s Big Bad Betty, a political prop of the Cold War, innocent victim of stiffs in suits with one hand on the Constitution and the other in their trousers. She’s Southern Belle Betty, apple pie of the preacher’s eye, finding glossy redemption in the arms of Jesus. Gretchen Moll’s Bettie Page is all these things and more. Taking her cue from the wide-eyed aesthetic of Bettie’s own films, director Mary Harron’s slyly subversive dig at Dwight D’s America is a fresh, fun take on a familiar era. Gone are the smokechoked hues of Clooney’s Good Night, And Good Luck, and in their place a film that’s no less dark for its bright and breezy atmosphere. Moll is terrific in the title roll, wielding a mega-watt movie star smile and transforming the tame poses of ’50s filth with her teasing sexuality. She has the charisma to carry off Bettie’s chameleon nature, donning and discarding the model’s many disguises with ease. But if she exhibits a kind of proto-girl power, she’s also an icon of old-fashioned femininity, and a victim of the dark side of America’s sexual tension. This is the film’s most powerful message: that as much as Bettie is demonised for corrupting America’s innocence, the rot had long seeped in under the cover of small town values – it’s there in every act of sexual violence muffled by the preaching of the moral majority. Perhaps Bettie is too passive, too easily drifting from success to failure with scarcely a finger on
the tiller of her own life, and the film doesn’t deal with the troubled episodes of her later days. But Moll carries the film with such effortless grace it’s never less than enthralling. And when she switches that smile off, your heart will break.
To mangle one of Harron’s favourite phrases, Bettie Page cooks, man. Matt Bochenski
Anticipation. A film about a pioneering porn star? Yes please. Three
Enjoyment. Sly, clever, funny, refreshing and superbly acted. Four
In Retrospect. Enough to make you renew your subscription to Razzle. Four 091
warrior king DIRECTED BY Prachya Pinkaew STARRING Tony Jaa, Petchthai Wongkamlao, Jin Xing
Tony Jaa is one of the baddest motherfuckers of all time. His first film, Ong Bak, was a sensation – a display of athletic brutality to rank alongside Enter The Dragon. The international rights to Warrior King were sold before it even started shooting. The plot is brilliantly bizarre. Jaa plays Kham – a local boy from a jungle village in Thailand. He grows up learning martial arts and playing with his ‘brother’, a baby elephant. Through a strange twist of fate, Kham’s two favourite elephants – including his brother – are kidnapped and taken to Australia, where he discovers they are to be the latest speciality at a high class Thai restaurant controlled by the Mafia, headed by
right at your door Right At Your Door joins United 93 in the current wave of US feature films addressing the events of 9/11. In this case the fictional, but all too believable, premise of multiple dirty bombs detonating in LA serves as the backdrop to husband and wife Brad (Cochrane) and Lexi’s (McCormack) attempts to survive. First time writer-director Gorak, either through artistic vision or budget limitations, chooses to focus on the couple’s experiences in the days following the crisis, while the rest of LA appears only fleetingly as a burning backdrop. The couple are separated for the first part of the film; a melodramatic half-hour in which Brad intermittently shouts into his mobile phone, and sobs
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a transsexual called Madam Rose (Jin Xing). Naturally there’s a rescue attempt in which Jaa gets into numerous, bloody, ultra-violent, but not unexpected fights, which are without exception lengthy and impressive. What’s exciting about watching Jaa is that he’s got the flashy moves and the acrobatics, but he is also ruthlessly efficient. Foes are dispatched with a charismatic intensity that never wavers. Even when faced by three seven-foot muscle men, his eventual victory never seems implausible. The downside of course is that Jaa’s acting skills are about as polished as Al Pacino’s Kung Fu. He delivers his lines like he’s reading them off a cue card,
one that he can’t see that well. Even subtitles can’t disguise the complete absence of talent, and even if they could, the script is simple and poorly translated. This air of technical amateurism is kind of patronising and disrespectful, but when all is said and done, you wouldn’t tell Jaa to his face. Jonathan Williams
Anticipation. One for the Jaa-heads. That’d be us, then. Four Enjoyment. What did he say? Oh, who cares? Hit him Tony! Three
In Retrospect.
Fighting is fun, bad acting isn’t. Two
DIRECTED BY Chris Gorak STARRING Mary McCormack, Rory Cochrane RELEASED 8 September
in the corner. When Lexi eventually turns up, the house has been quarantined and she can’t get in. Right At Your Door suffers from not knowing what it wants to be. The handheld cameras stay close to the actors, initially giving a strong sense of Brad’s claustrophobia and panic. However, the brief appearance of a series of seemingly pointless characters and barely-there sub-plots makes the whole thing start to feel like an episode of 24. Once an innocent man is shot by police in the confusion, and threatening military patrols appear in the neighbourhood, the theme of the film shifts to the distrust of authority and the government’s apparent willingness to sacrifice its
own citizens to contain the crisis. By the time the faceless soldiers in chemical warfare suits turn up, proceedings have descended into a sub-X-Files movie of the week. The disparate dots never quite join up, and things fizzle out with an unnecessary thriller-style twist. Disappointing. Tim Rudin
Anticipation. A thoughtful, independent take on a 9/11-style terrorist event. Three Enjoyment. A lack
of focus and a lack of credibility. Two
In Retrospect. Not the thought-provoking film it set out to be. One
An incOnVEniEnT TRuTh What do you get when you put morose-sounding former Vice President of the United States Al Gore in a room, blabbering on and on about gasguzzling cars and the science of climate change? Boring, boring and more boring, right? Wrong. This feature-length documentary is gripping stuff – you’ll put down your keys and never drive an automobile again. Here’s why. Gore, perennial next President of the United States (he had it snatched from him after a dubious Supreme Court decision in 2000, remember?) will tell you – through a highly-engaging hourand-a-half multimedia presentation – that you had better cut back on your CO2 emissions, like, now, or else we’re all doomed to a life of endless droughts, freak hurricanes and oven-hot summers that will kill more fat people across England than a permanent diet of pies and chips. As for polar bears, forget about it. The fluffy white creatures will be all but gone, drowned in a world where icebergs have melted away like Cornettos in the sun. Pretty tragic, right? That’s precisely why Gore, following his 2000 loss to Dubya, re-set the course of his life to focus on an all-
DIRECTED BY Davis Guggenheim STARRING Al Gore
out effort to spread the word about global warming. An Inconvenient Truth follows Gore’s lecture tour around the world, stopping every once in a while to show clips of key events that have triggered this quixotic mission. These are: a car accident that nearly killed his young son; the death of his sister from lung cancer (his parents were tobacco farmers); and the aforementioned defeat in the Presidential Elections against baby Bush. The film’s personal dimension is important, as it makes you care about Gore and listen carefully to what he has to say. How about weaknesses? There are a few. You can’t help but notice the glaring irony that is Gore riding in posh cars and flying in airplanes en route to his speeches. Plus, he never questions the systemic imperative that has been a major cause of global warming in the first place, i.e. the pursuit of profit above everything else. The notion that we operate within an economic system that relies on permanent growth is never discussed. The fact that corporations have a legal commitment to maximise dividends is all but ignored. But then again, would you expect such radical deviations from a
RELEASED 8 September
mainstream politician who’s also a businessman and sits on the Board of Directors of Apple? In the end, whatever you think of Gore, the message is abundantly clear: the world’s being fucked and it’s up to us to clean up our act. An Inconvenient Truth should be mandatory viewing for all who care about the survival of the species. Go see it now. Vince Medeiros
Anticipation. A film from Al Gore, the boring dude who let cowboy George and his cabal of trigger-happy neo-cons take over the White House? You gotta be kidding. One Enjoyment. You
mean America alone is responsible for almost a quarter of all the carbon dioxide emissions that are killing the world? Tell me more! Four
In Retrospect.
Seriously, we gotta move to a perma-culture farm on the west coat of Ireland that’s run like a Kibbutz and powered by wind or something. Like, now. Five 093
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Chapter Five. The Back Section. In which we discuss the medium of film in its many mesmerising forms.
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HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
I am Jack’s departed you Ed Norton is 37 on Augus th. t 18. HAPPY BIRTHDA
Are you singin’ to him? Y! Ro De Niro hits 63 on Augus bert t 17. HAPPY BIRTH
Sean Connery completesDAY! Her Majesty’s service on 76 years on August 25. AUGUST 14 – 27 EDINBURGH FILM FE STIVAL
Flee the Fringe and stea of the next 12 months asl a glance at the big gest films the EFF enters www.edfilmfest.org.uk its 60th year. AUGUST 3 PORTOBELLO FILM – 22 FESTIVAL 2006 Free screenings at
the bohem celebrates the counter-c ian film festival which ultural history of the Ladbroke Grove area. AUGUST 25 – 28 FRIGHTFEST
Soil yourself silly at the countr reputable horror festiva y’s most l. AUGUST SNAKES ON A PLAN 18 E – UK RELEASE After months
of online hype, the airbor ne reptile ready for take off. But wil l Sam Jackson crash and-fest is burn? AUGUST 14 SAM PECKINPAH’S WESTERNS DVD BO LEGENDARY X SET RELEASE Guaranteed
to cause the impromptu growth of chest hair.
AUGUST 7 HOSTEL DVD RELE ASE
Eli Roth’s latest offers tor ture-b fun for all the family. ased AUGUST 11 WORLD TRADE CE
NTRE – US RELEAS Brace yourself – bitter arg E uments are already in ful l flow and it hasn’t even com e out yet.
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HAPPY BIRTHD AY! Whoa! Dude! Kean u is 42 on September 2. HAPPY BIRTHD AY! The man that ma de deadpan cool and ghostbu sti ng co oler, Bill Murray is 56 on Se ptember 21. SEPTEMBE LITTLE BRITAI R 4 N SERI DVD RE ASE ES 3 Yeah, but no, buLE but it has got a bitt yeah, but no, old hasn’t it? SEPTEM STAR WARS: LI BER 11 MITED EDITIO N A set of stupendou DVD RELEASE sly fan tastic films fiddled bit more by CGI ge with a litt eks over at Skywalk er ranch. Enjoyle. CURB YOUR EN THUSIASM SE RIES 5 More gut wrench DVD RELEASE ing round uncomfortab , toe curling , hair pulling an d all le social horrors wi th Larry David, the American Bren t. SEPTEMBER 28 14TH The bestest and brRAINDANCE FILM FESTIV AL ightest of the indie for 12 days of film fi scene come tog fun and awards lm ga lore in London.ether www.raindancefilm festival.org SEPTEMBER 26 BITE E MANGO FILM Top notch Asian, TH llywood and Afric FESTIVAL comfort of BradBo an cinema, all withi ford’s best playh n the ouses. Fruity? We www.nmpft.org.uk/b think so. tm/2006 SEPTEMBER 21 LIVERPOOL FI LM FESTIVAL Had a hard day’s mystery tour to Linight? Well help is at hand. Take verpool for some top a magical www.liverpoolff.com amateur film action. TE CIOUS D TRAILER Jack Black getsNA back to basics wi make a film abou t the greatest filmth his buddy Kyle to ever. WARNING: this tra something. iler may contain Or air guitar. SPIDERMAN 3 TRAILER Spiderman ge Toy commercialts? badass in his black powersuit. Or an excuse for gro wn pretend to web sli ng in the street? men to
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A man plays the piano with his penis. A princess who is also a raccoon is brought back to life by a singing frog. A hitman urinates into his shoe. Welcome to the world of Seijun Suzuki. Born in 1923, the diminutive Japanese director is one of the true iconoclasts of Eastern cinema. His series of Yakuza films made for Nikkatsu Studios in the ’60s have been a huge influence on modern filmmakers such as Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino and Baz Luhrmann. He’s a God-like figure in his native country, not least because he played God on children’s TV show Bishojo Kamen Powatorin. Suzuki is a frail, white-haired man with a wispy beard and an overall frame not dissimilar to that of the wizened Mr Miyagi. When we meet he refers to me as ‘Daniel-san’. Get. In. He’s in town for a retrospective of his work at the ICA, timed to coincide with the release of his latest film, Princess Raccoon: a colourful rendering of a Japanese myth which tells the story of a princess who is a tanuki – a raccoon-like sprite who can morph into whatever form she likes - and falls in love with a human prince. Pigeonholeists might call it a family musical. Needless to say, it’s about as far as you can get from the violent Yakuza films that made Suzuki’s name in the ’60s. So why choose to make this film now? “Since WW2 the tanuki films have been very popular and were guaranteed to make money. I’d always wanted to make one so I thought, ‘Why not?’” This ‘Why not?’ attitude is essential to any understanding of Suzuki’s films. Watching Tokyo Drifter (probably Suzuki’s most famous film), it’s striking how many different influences – from pop art to the French nouvelle vague with the odd cowboy brawl thrown in – make up the film’s bulk. It’s the same with Princess Raccoon. One minute you’re watching a heavily made-up pantomime queen spit out rap lyrics, the next you’re seeing a bunch of Brazilian courtiers dancing to a samba beat. It’s a compendium of ideas that has been plucked randomly from Suzuki’s imagination. “I don’t expect people to understand it,” he says. “But they’ll enjoy it. I put something in for everybody.” The tagline for the film, he explains, is ‘A film for everyone from babies to old people’ (though it probably loses something in translation). Certainly with its display of special effects, riotously colourful costumes and lunatic dance scenes it’s a lot of fun. Alas, it wasn’t so much fun to make, he says. “It’s very tiring to make such a film. And always worrying about money!”
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The actors enjoyed it though, especially rising Chinese star Zhang Ziyi. “I’d never heard of her before,” he admits, “but my producer introduced us. I originally wanted a Japanese actress, but she was perfect.” Ziyi had to take a crash course in Japanese to make the film, but still sings her songs in Mandarin. In any other film this might seem incongruous but in Princess Raccoon it’s just another oddity to add to the mix. At root, it’s a very light-hearted and innocent film, with none of the head-splitting and gun battles that marked his earlier Yakuza films. What is it about the character of the Yakuza that appealed to him for so long? “The character is between life and death,” he says. “They are close to death and that makes them interesting.” This is certainly true of Hanada, the Yakuza killer in Suzuki’s Branded To Kill. As he gets closer to his final meeting with ‘Number 1 Killer’ his actions become more incoherent and surreal. There are echoes of Godard’s Alphaville here, as well as early Buñuel, but how strongly has Western culture inspired his work? “At the beginning, very much so,” he says. “Particularly Godard, some film noir, certainly Visconti. I was always very jealous of Visconti.” Today, however, he says he has no influences. “I try not to watch other people’s films because I’m afraid I’ll copy them. I want to make my own films.” Suzuki has remained faithful to his unique vision even when it damaged him. Famously, Nikkatsu Studios were so horrified by Branded To Kill’s sex, violence and general incomprehensibility that they fired him from their roster of directors. Even though he didn’t direct again for 10 years, Suzuki has no regrets: “Nikkatsu bought the script,” he shrugs. “They should have known. But it’s just as difficult for young directors today. In my day we didn’t worry about money, because it wasn’t important. Now directors must worry about money before anything else.” But Suzuki has more freedom now. When you’re a living legend in your own country and you’re 83 years-old, the studio limitations aren’t as stringent. “I can do whatever I want,” he says. So what’s next? He’s old now, he tells me, so maybe his directing days are over. “But I want to write something about people my age. They’re unrepresented in Japan.” A Yakuza in retirement, perhaps? “Yes,” he chuckles. “Now that’s an idea!” And there’s at least one God-like character who might just be perfect for the main part. Dan Stewart
SUZUKI FIVE COUNT TOKYO DRIFTER (1964) The film that put Suzuki on the map, this pop art-inspired Yakuza flick showcases the colourful visuals, hard-boiled dialogue and flying camera angles that would come to be his signature style. You won’t be able to get the theme tune out of your head for days. FIGHTING ELEGY (1966) A moody black-and-white story of adolescence and violence in ’40s Japan where antihero Kiruko is torn between his religious girlfriend and the masculine attraction of paramilitary fighting gangs. The hyper-realistic fight scenes are years ahead of their time. BRANDED TO KILL (1967) Suzuki was fired from top Japanese studio Nikkatsu for delivering this tale of two Yakuza battling it out to become ‘Number 1 Killer’. As the killer Hanada descends into madness and alcoholism, the film becomes a surreal nightmare reminiscent of the output of Lynch. PISTOL OPERA (2001) Suzuki came out of retirement to helm this remake of Branded To Kill, though he made the lead character a woman and replaced the original’s monochrome moodiness with colour and whimsy. A huge hit in Japan, it cemented Suzuki’s reputation. PRINCESS RACCOON (2005) This unique musical mixes Japanese mythology and theatrical tropes with an insane mix of music styles – from opera to teen pop via samba and even hip hop – to make the weirdest and most colourful film you’ll ever see.
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The War and the world’s perceived ingratitude for our part in saving it has always been a source of neurotic navel-gazing for the British. As a mature nation, we channelled our bitterness into giving something back – Auf Wiedersehen Pet, Pet, ’Allo ’Allo, and the Stanley-wielding Casual so beloved of ’80s nostalgists. However, it was during the twilight of the Cold War that the US was beginning to wonder just how it was that the Japanese were overtaking them as an economic superpower. And, regrettably, they had neither Tacchini-clad teenage assassins nor the comic genius of Gordon Kay to fall back on. In the mid ’80s, American manufacturing’s greatest success story was two kids with bras on their heads creating Kelly Le Brock in their bedroom. The belief that Japan was bent on buying America was becoming common currency among even serious commentators. Japanese takeovers of US companies sparked panic headlines, bumper stickers read ‘Buy American, or it’s your job next’ and brand new Toyotas were hauled in for car workers’ picnics just so they could be smashed to pieces with baseball bats. Hollywood was quick to tap in to the anxiety of a nation under siege from the inscrutable East, and the dream factory churned out a short series of yellow-peril nightmares. Japanoia had arrived.
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Coming at the end of the period (but a benchmark of the genre, due simply to its manic xenophobia) was ’93’s Rising Sun. Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes stepped in to a world of controversy with what was actually a toned down version of Michael Crichton’s Jap-baiting novel, the essence of which was that within every Japanese businessman was a moustache twirling Fu Manchu bent on global domination. As Snipes (wisecracking) and Connery (wise) investigate the murder of a hooker in the American HQ of Generic Japanese Super-corp something becomes clear: this is an unsavoury dog of a film, riddled with plot holes, vastly overlong and totally bombastic. Ace in the hole is Tia Carrere; a natural casting choice for a genius lab scientist, outplayed only by Harvey Keitel’s gloriously over-the-top bigoted cop who gets to deliver the film’s one solid gold line on the Japanese fiends – “These guys are known world class perversion freaks”. The American public flocked in droves to see it. Black Rain, just a few years earlier, had enjoyed similar success with its portrayal of Japanese economic expansionism funded by endemic corruption and laughing Yakuza killers. This time around it’s Andy Garcia and Michael Douglas as American cops in Japan who find themselves out of their depth amid Yakuza villainy. The investigation, it transpires, centres on Douglas bombing around Osaka on a motorbike, in the rain, at night, wearing sunglasses and a blow-dried ’do that would look more at home on a Lebanese barbershop wall. The rest is empty, kinetic violence with director Ridley Scott revisiting his Blade Runner landscapes while the Japanese actors – notably star turn Ken Takakura – play out underwritten ciphers for an impenetrable culture.
It had all seemed much more fun back in ’86 when Ron Howard’s unemployment caper comedy Gung Ho set out its stall right at the heart of the issue, with Michael Keaton’s smug auto worker out to attract foreign investors to save the town car-plant. With admirable disregard for the film’s title he sets off for Japan (not China) on a trip that makes the feature outing of Are You Being Served? look like a National Geographic documentary. Japan, in its entirety, is modelled on the sadistic ’80s game show Endurance. Ritual humiliation, shame, despotic emasculation and lots and lots of SHOUTING are the common currency of business. Nobody gets disembowelled for forgetting biscuits for a meeting but the implication is clear: behind the suit, the samurai lurks and he wants nothing more than a piece of your run-down, redneck town. Buck up America, says Richie Cunningham, or this Model Of Personnel Management is headed your way and it will definitely not be ‘cool’.
Way, way out of leftfield came the oddest premise of culture-clash paranoia. Collision Course wasn’t unusual in that it was a buddy movie featuring two mismatched cops, nor was it strange that the mystery centred on the murder of a Japanese defector among fiercely competitive Japanese and American car manufacturers. What was bizarre was that the two cops were Jay Leno and Mr Miyagi from The Karate Kid – that is, The Actor Pat Morita – wisecracking their way through what looks like a pilot for a tea-time cop show. Weirdly, there’s genuine chemistry, and more importantly the plot is never allowed to get in the way of a half-way decent gag. One can only wonder at the glory that could have been if original director Bob Clark, of Porky’s fame, hadn’t quit after a week. And De Laurentis Pictures had released the film on completion instead of waiting five years. And at the cinema. Instead of straight to video. Paul Fairclough
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Bill Nighy has had a great year. Having carved a career playing debonair Englishmen in a manner infinitely less irritating than Hugh Grant, his ship has, at last, come in. This summer sees him playing a half-man, half-squid sea creature in Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. A glance at his CV shows that Nighy has worked hard for his success, with years of TV work and minor European films under his belt. LWLies caught up with him in his role as spokesperson for Rushes Soho Shorts to talk short film and admire his tentacles. Why are you this year’s spokesperson for Rushes Soho Shorts? The reason I’m keen to be a part of the festival is because it’s very important for any country to have its own cinema, or at least to make as many films as possible, because I think its very important for our sense of ourselves. We need something that’s particular to us, and the only way for people to do that is often to make short films so they can advertise themselves. They’re a great way for young directors to try and make a future in films. I think internationally people are more interested in shorter films now and there are more festivals. I used to like B movies – second features I mean – but you don’t get them now. When I was a lad you’d get two movies: one which was slightly shorter and then you’d get the main event. I used to enjoy that. I don’t know why that died out. Do you think shorts have helped your career? Yes I do. I’ve made a couple of shorts which I know have done well in festivals, and I got to play leading roles at a time when I perhaps wouldn’t have been asked to play leading roles in feature movies, so that was very useful for me. It gives you an opportunity to see how you’d do in that situation. It doesn’t matter how long a film is if it’s any good; if it’s any good it’ll travel and further the career of the people involved.
Can we ask about Pirates Of The Caribbean? If you enjoyed the first one it’ll make you very happy. It’s more adventure, more romance, lots of great jokes. It’s an odd experience for me because I play a computer generated sea creature; me and my crew are all half-man, half... in my case, half-man, half-squid. There’s method acting involved obviously. Obviously. I did a lot of psychological investigation into the mind of a squid and the motivation of a crab, which is sideways. My men, as I like to call them, are half-man, half-hammerhead, half-man, half-lobster, half-man, halfwhatever; they are quite extraordinary. It’s a very spooky experience. I’ve done some dubbing, and seeing your movement and hearing your voice coming out of this creature is very odd. I’ve done things for animation before, but it’s another country compared to that. What was the vibe on set? We were out in the Caribbean for quite a long time and there were moments when you looked at the set, which was basically one or two or three galleons floating on the Caribbean ocean, surrounded by rain barges which bring on huge amounts of movie rain – movie rain is big and fat, it’s not like real rain – and then they hang these enormous, I mean the size of buses, Chinese lanterns all over the set, and you see the movie rain coming through the light in the Caribbean night, and you think: well, this is the movies. I’ve never seen anything as big as that; it’s an enormous operation. You look at it and just wish there was someone there with you because it’s what you imagined Hollywood was all about. It’s incredible to walk onto a set like that. Do you feel like you’re in the big league now? Well, you look at the ship for instance, which is so beautifully constructed, and you think, ‘Shit, I better be bloody good because this is serious’. I stood on the deck and thought, ‘How the fuck did I get away with this?’ Often you’re handed a prop which is humbling, it’s just something that someone’s made, and it does often make you think you better be bloody good, shape up, in order to earn your props. James Bramble Rushes Soho Shorts runs from July 29 – August 4. www.rushes.co.uk/sohoshorts
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CHR IS S SHO HEP RT F HER ILM DP : ROF ILE Chris Shepherd has animated some of the blackest
and most brilliant of comedies, working with Chris Morris on Jam and Nathan Barley, and creating the World Staring Olympics for Big Train. What characterises much of his work is its bleakness. While there is a childish pleasure in his animation, playing with the boundaries of reality and finding black humour in the ridiculousness of the everyday, these are also films about innocence and cruelty. In Silence Is Golden, which will screen at this year’s London Film Festival, a young boy takes out his frustration on the elderly neighbour next door, who vents his loneliness by banging his head on the wall. Dad’s Dead mixes live action and animation to evoke the moral wasteland of Jonno, the sociopath found in every school. While Who I Am And What I Want, an adaptation of the book by David Shrigley, features, amongst other things, a baby being burnt with a magnifying glass, and a simpleton God encouraging the protagonist to give him a blow job.
Shepherd grew up in Anfield, Liverpool: “My mother would never really let me out of the house as she was basically too scared I’d get beaten up by the other kids,” he says. “What happened was that I used to watch a lot of telly, so when the other children were in bed or doing homework, I’d be watching Dennis Potter or The Prisoner – things like that.” Following a course in animation at Liverpool Poly, Shepherd made his first stop-frame animation while on the dole, and – to his credit – he hasn’t been easy to pigeonhole since. While a brilliant animator, he clearly sees himself primarily as a narrative filmmaker who uses animation only as a way to illustrate ideas that live action can’t convey, describing himself as, “Just a filmmaker really... a bit of a hybrid director... an anomaly”. Are there any themes that tie his films together? “I think they’re about things that are slipping away. They’re about cruelty. When I was a kid I always ran across people who were like those in Silence Is Golden or Dad’s Dead, so I wanted to react to the things I saw. There’s a bit in Dad’s Dead where it says ‘Police Suck Cock’ on the front of a guy’s house – that was real, I haven’t done that on a computer. I don’t know what you do if you come home one day and find ‘Police Suck Cock’ on the front of your house. Do you phone the police? I suppose I’ve always just wanted to tell a story about where I grew up.” James Bramble Who I Am And What I Want is available to buy from www.onedotzero.com
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“Reality changes,” said Bertolt Brecht. “In order to represent
it, modes of representation must change.” Fictional film was once able to address reality – to help you understand it or accept it. For example, Hal Ashby’s Coming Home remains the defining document of the effect of Vietnam on the American psyche. In Britain during the ’80s, Alan Clark and Mike Leigh truthfully addressed the reality of working-class life during the Thatcher regime. Now the mode of representation has changed: to discover truth – or reality – in the cinema today, look to the documentary. America has Sundance. Canada has Hot Docs. Europe has the International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam. But the UK hasn’t had a national festival dedicated to non-fiction film until this year. The organisers of the Britdoc festival are working to make sure this year’s symposium, held in Oxford, puts the UK’s documentary-making community on the map. As well as attracting commissioning editors from high-profile channels including Channel 4, the BBC and HBO, the festival will bring together filmmakers, production companies, sales agents and festival producers to indulge in an orgy of networking, mutual appreciation and – hopefully – industry recognition. Big-name filmmakers like Nick Broomfield, Kevin Macdonald and Morgan Spurlock are slated to attend, and there will be screenings of both classic and brand new documentaries across the weekend.
The breadth of new material on show is testament to the skills being fostered and the risks being taken by British filmmakers. One group dedicated to finding new talent is FourDocs, an online documentary site run by Channel 4, which is showing a series of short documentaries at the festival. Highlights include Matthew Killip’s Master Of Reality, the story of a Texan teenager’s obsession with slasher films, backyard wrestling and crypto-zoology. Like Capturing The Friedmans or Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation, the film is put together with hours of home-video footage propelled by the raw, naked honesty of its star, a real-life Napoleon Dynamite. Checkpoint visits the West Bank in 2005, meeting the Israeli human rights groups who are dismayed at how their countrymen treat the Palestinians of Gaza. Mature and evenhanded, the film avoids the polemic that often accompanies such films in favour of a non-partisan look at the problems facing the West Bank. A surprising and uncomfortable parallel is even made with the Stockwell shooting, especially in a bravura cut at the film’s end from a speeding Israeli taxi to a tube train rattling into a station. The message of the festival is that the British are coming, and on this evidence it’s on the documentary circuit that they’ll be making their biggest splash. Dan Stewart For more on the Britdoc festival – including a full rundown of Channel 4’s 3-Minute Wonder short film series, feast your eyes on www.littlewhitelies.co.uk
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LWLIES TALKS TO COMEDIENNE NICKO – OF NICKO AND JOE FAME – ON WOODEN SHEDS, MUTANT FISH AND ALL THAT IS BAD ABOUT CINEMA. “The search for excellence is the noblest search there is,” claimed Lyndon B Johnson. LBJ meant well, yet he overlooked the fact that the pursuit of crapness can also be quite a hoot. This is especially true of film. Fellini’s work may represent the pinnacle of cinematic art, but sometimes its simply more fun to watch a man die at the hands (or fins) of a mutant fish. Ladies and gentleman, welcome to the world of the good-bad film. Comedy duo Nicko and Joe are possibly the world’s leading experts on the pleasures of dire movies. At the start of the year they founded The Bad Film Club, a live event where a guest comedian commentates over a screening of their favourite celluloid disaster. Audience participation is encouraged, and the ensuing free-for-alls sometimes resemble a happier form of the ‘Two Minute Hate’ scene in Orwell’s 1984. Past favourites at the Club have ranged from big-name failures like Jaws: The Revenge to more recent classics, like 2002’s Frankenfish. Nicko explains that she and Joe started watching bad films to combat the boredom that accompanies long stretches of touring. “When we were in Melbourne a few years ago we saw a film called Atomic Twister – a cheap cash-in on the Twister franchise. There’s a tornado heading towards a nuclear power plant where this woman is in charge. She’s got one of those old military wind-up phones, and after finishing a call for help she goes and puts it in a wooden shed outside the nuclear bunker she’s hiding in. Then she’s surprised when it gets destroyed: ‘Our communication has gone!’ Of course it has, you idiot!” This epiphany sparked a mild obsession, and the pair now own a combined library of around 2000 DVDs - most of them rescued from charity shops and the bargain bins of rental services. Despite its derisory nature, Nicko insists that the Club and its members feel love and affection for their cinematic screw-ups. The films themselves are carefully selected, which in turn suggests that one shade of shit is somehow better than another. What exactly are the ingredients of the perfect bad movie? “It’s got to have a delusion of grandeur about it,” says Nicko. “Anything with action in its title, or a low-budget creature feature that tries to be something more important. A very complicated plot is also a good sign. There’s an Italian film called Creatures From The Abyss, and that has about 12 plot points going on at any given time. Five students go out to sea and get trapped in a storm, during a meteor shower, then one of them finds some white powder, eats it, and turns into a fish, while another student is being raped by another, different fish. Hollywood blockbusters are never that complicated. “These films are like a dog with rabies, I suppose. From the outside it looks like a normal dog, but then it falls to bits, like a ticking time-bomb of death.” Neon Kelly Nicko and Joe’s Bad Film Club will be at The Barbican in London on October 11, and The Duke of York’s Picture House in Brighton on October 12. Buy tickets now, or else weep salty tears when the shows sell out.
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FRIGHTFEST IS LONDON’S SCARIEST HORROR MOVIE MARATHON; PRIDING ITSELF ON BEING SO TERRIFYING YOU WILL EITHER VOMIT OR SOIL YOURSELF. OR HOPEFULLY BOTH. LWLIES GETS THE ULTIMATE SURVIVAL GUIDE FROM ALAN JONES, CO-FOUNDER OF THE FESTIVAL (CUE RUMBLE OF THUNDER AND MANIACAL LAUGH). Frightfest is in its seventh year now, why has it remained so successful? I think there are more fans now. Everyone is a cine-buff and everyone is a horror fan. It’s just got that appeal. Isn’t this just an event for the terminally dateless? No, not at all. Amazingly there are loads of girls turning up now; they like horror just as much as men. You go along because the girl is supposed to leap into your arms at various moments. I think our movies are very romantic, they make people come together in ways you never expect. So what can we expect from this year’s selection? This year seems to be the revival of the slasher. But what seems to be the general trend now, thanks to films like Hostel, is that it’s got grimmer and more gruesome. We have one particular day where I think if people don’t end up slitting their wrists I will be very surprised. What about those of us who have yet to dip our toes into this extreme genre? People who are new to the genre are in for a real surprise. We have gone for the most gruesome stuff you can get. We’re not horror fans because you can sit there and sing along to the theme song; we are there because we want to be grossed out. We want to be scared ’til we’re sick. What do we go and see? There are so many horrid films this year, but Hatchet is the big new one I adore. It’s everything you want from a Friday The 13th movie; gore taken to the absolute limit of where it can go. What will the plucky festival goer need if they are to survive the carnage? They definitely need a strong stomach and yes, they may want vomit bags. I think they need a cushion as well, to make sure they don’t get bum tired. Maybe the cushions will be good to hide behind as well.
Anything else? I would take food. We do one long gap each day, but most of the time people are just scrabbling about the foyer eating cinema staples of nachos and hotdogs. It is an endurance test and you have to have a certain stamina. I would be exercising now to be able to get it all in. You have to be in peak condition. So if anyone survives this assault on the system, what do you want them to leave with? We end with The Host, which is a wonderful Korean monster movie. When they come out they always look completely brain dead, they have always had such a great time. Lee Jones Frightfest will run over the August Bank Holiday weekend, August 25-28, at the Odeon West End. More information can be found at www.frightfest.co.uk
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METROPOLITAN (1990) DIR: WHIT STILLMAN AVAILABLE NOW It’s weird, but there are people out there who collect final lines of films. Metropolitan has one of the best – a closing statement that could stand as a motto for living – but we’ll come to that later. Metropolitan was American writer-director Whit Stillman’s feature debut. Set in Manhattan, Christmas vacation, not so long ago, Metropolitan has withstood the 16 years since its release extraordinarily well. Tom is our introduction to New York’s preppie East Side youth, a West Sider co-opted by the group for dances through a mixture of chance and an escort crisis. Such is Stillman’s warmth and wit, what could be a hermetic tale of privilege is instead a very funny, surprisingly elegiac take on the passage of youth to adulthood among the ‘UHB’, or Urban Haute Bourgeoisie (this is a scene replete with its own acronyms). Stillman emerged at the same time as another darling of US indie filmmaking, Hal Hartley. Both share a love for sharp one-liners, but while the more prolific Hartley’s tart verbal jousting seems to have had its day, Stillman’s obvious affection for his subjects has proved more lasting, as evidenced in The Squid And The Whale, Whale, another movie set among ’80s New York’s chattering classes. Both Tom, here, and Walt, the son in Noah Baumbach’s film, live on pre-digested views – they never read the novels they discuss, only criticism. As with any good teen movie, Metropolitan boasts a sleazy hate figure and a very cute love interest in Audrey – she actually reads the books. The other two main characters worth noting are cynical Nick (Christopher Eigeman) and Tom’s shy rival, Charlie (Taylor Nichols). Eigeman and Nichols play essentially the same parts in Whitman’s second feature – of only three – Barcelona. Critic Graham Fuller noted their roles “are so unfashionably unhip, and so unlike any other characters you are likely to find in an American film in the ’90s, they are sublimely ‘cool’”. That’s Whit Stillman for you. And that delicious final line? “You don’t want to overdo it.” Jonas Milk
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THE ERROL MORRIS COLLECTION (1978-1997) DIR: ERROL MORRIS AVAILABLE NOW Since 1997’s Fast, Cheap & Out Of Control Errol Morris has been conducting interviews with his terrifying-sounding ‘Interrotron’. Made from a modified teleprompter, it lets him talk to his subjects via a monitor placed over the camera lens and thus get them directly addressing the audience. Locking spectator and subject in eye contact has long been crucial to his filmmaking, however, helping conjure a deeper link between public and his often oddball participants. For first feature Gates Of Heaven (1978), one of three earlier works that comprise this box set, Morris positioned his head right up against the lens to get his interviewees looking at him. As they offer their observations on the nutty world of two Californian pet cemeteries, one set up by a naive animal lover desperate not to see pets ignominiously turned into glue, which fails, and another set up by a family who apply sound business sense and see their venture bear fruit, you listen with surprising sympathy. Unexpected, profound and beautifully bananas. It’s a similar story in Vernon, Florida (1980), never before released in the UK, where Morris films the titular town’s eccentric, mostly elderly, inhabitants charmingly, if sometimes incomprehensibly, rambling at you about taxes, tortoises, possums, God, turkey-hunting, bits of the brain, vans, and the amazing multiplying powers of sand (“I just had a little bit in the jar and now it’s nearly full – it grows. In two years it’ll fill the jar.”). Mad old duffers, you think, but as they prattle, their eccentricity becomes less interesting than their humanity and the result leaves you elated about a world accommodating such dotty diversity. The Thin Blue Line, Morris’ 1988 film that famously overturned the conviction of Randall Dale Adams for the murder of a Dallas policeman in 1976, would offer more categorical truths, you might think. But despite making a perfectly sound case for Adams’ innocence, there’s still plenty of room for niggling doubts, gaps, detail, asides, red herrings. It’s the most complex of the films here, capturing the messiness of the case with a mélange of interviews, reconstructions, newspaper cuttings and old movie clips while the Philip Glass score blends gliding strings and nagging alarms, periodically breaking the silence and lulling you out of complacency. Truth is never served up pat; for Morris it lies in the interstices, in fragments as hard to mine as they are to assemble. All three films come with brief but instructive introductions by fellow documentarian Nick Broomfield. Nick Funnell
LOUIS MALLE COLLECTION VOL. 2 (1971-1990) DIR: LOUIS MALLE AVAILABLE NOW Volume 1 showcased the best of the French director’s work from the ’50s and ’60s, now we leap a decade and beyond for this largely self-penned second collection. Le Souffle Au Coeur Coeur,, Lacombe Lucien and Au Revoir Les Enfants are the best of the five films here, because of the unsentimental view they take of adolescence. The first two stirred up quite some passions on release in the ’70s. While Benoît Ferreux sparkles in the first as a 14 year-old recovering in a clinic determined to lose his virginity – which he eventually does, with his mum – Pierre Blaise is distinctly unsympathetic as self-important collaborator Lucien Lacombe but then, perhaps that’s the point. Certainly Au Revoir Les Enfants never tries to win our sympathies but is nevertheless a stunning portrayal of schoolboys whose teachers try to hide a Jewish boy during WW2. It’s a true masterpiece. Milou En Mai, released a couple of years later in 1990, however, is a rather theatrical country house comedy set in 1968, featuring a warring family who flee to the hills when they hear of the revolting students in Paris. The curio here is 1974’s utterly bonkers Black Moon, a retelling of Alice In Wonderland at a time of war between men and women. Despite the attractions of star Cathryn Harrison’s blouse, the top of which gets lower and lower as the film goes on, you’d have to be pretty far gone to enjoy this. Jonas Milk
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MAGIC DIR: RICHARD ATTENBOROUGH (1978) AVAILABLE NOW Those who criticise Anthony Hopkins’ acting these days as one big Anthony Hopkins impression should take a look at Magic. Magic. Hopkins plays a timid, failing magician, Corky, who is brought out of himself through his ventriloquist’s dummy, Fats. Fats is scarier than Chucky, Emu and Punch put together, which is a tribute to Hopkins’ almost schizophrenic occupation of both parts. The scenes where Corky and Fats fight are essentially Hopkins acting against himself, and yet are imbued with more tension and fear than many so-called psychological thrillers today. An excellent support cast including Burgess Meredith as the showbiz agent who has seen it all make this a highly underrated classic. Tom Young
SAMARITAN GIRL (2004) DIR: KIM KI-DUK AVAILABLE: 21 AUGUST Teenage prostitution – it always ends in tears, doesn’t it? Schoolgirls Jaeyoung and Yeo-jin run a sex-for-cash service, but when one girl meets her maker the other seeks redemption by sleeping with her friend’s former clients. Unfortunately, Dad stumbles across her plan, and the consequences are bloody. Kim Ki-duk’s latest is a puzzling affair, a triptych narrative with three wildly differing tones. The provocative themes are handled with a commendable lightness, although the emphasis on symbolism leaves one too many open questions. You’ll shrug at times, yet the bittersweet conclusion merits a compassionate stroking of chins. Neon Kelly
INSIDE MAN (2006) DIR: SPIKE LEE AVAILABLE NOW A boiler-suited gang takes over a Manhattan bank, locks up its customers and employees, and then sends out for pizza. The pressure’s on negotiator Denzel Washington to resolve the situation as quickly as possible, but he’s caught between some serious city politics (marshalled by Jodie Foster on behalf of the bank’s owner, played by Christopher Plummer), a trigger-happy policeman (Willem Dafoe) and the hostage-takers’ crazy demands (delivered by their leader, Clive Owen). Director Spike Lee’s Mamet-like heist caper is so assured he deserves to be considered alongside such luminaries as Spielberg or Scorsese, the odd, horrible misfire notwithstanding. Jonas Milk
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HIGH TECH SOUL: THE CREATION OF TECHNO MUSIC (2005) DIR: GARY BREDOW AVAILABLE NOW This story of the birth of techno in the words of pioneers like Derrick May and Juan Atkins also looks deeper into the socio-economic roots of the Detroit sound. The documentary offers more than the average cut and paste of garish club footage, and puts the city itself firmly centre stage in creating the beats that ate rock. While ageing ravers will love the inside stories on the creation of classics like ‘Strings Of Life’, for others this gives the lie to the idea that four to the floor means leaving your brain at the door. Paul Fairclough
TELL THEM WHO YOU ARE (2004) DIR: MARK WEXLER AVAILABLE NOW Haskell Wexler, all round cinematic supremo and tortured genius, must have been tough to grow up with. A bit like The Fast Show’s Competitive Dad, Haskell criticises and competes with a person who just wants a bit of recognition and love; his son and fellow filmmaker Mark. Packed with more Hollywood greats than you can shake a glitzy stick at, Tell Them Who You Are looks through the lens at a relationship that has been affected by modern cinema more than most. Real and at times uncomfortable, this documentary hits the spot. Lee Jones
ROLLIN’ WITH THE NINES (2005) DIR: JULIAN GILBEY. AVAILABLE: 21 AUGUST The tone for this ugly little Brit-flick is set in the first minute when a selection of firearms is lovingly shown being cocked and fondled. Guns, drugs and the bling lifestyle that supposedly accompanies them are relentlessly fetishised. The lead characters are all drug dealers who kill people and say “fuck” and “bredren” a lot. On their trail is the best-armed bunch of coppers in the UK, who are on the take and say “fuck” and “you caant” a lot. You’d find more insight into race and inner city life in a 50 Cent video. Dan Stewart
NOCE BLANCHE (1989) DIR: JEAN-CLAUDE BRISSEAU AVAILABLE: 28 AUGUST It’s worth seeing Jean-Claude Brisseau’s Noce Blanche for Vanessa Paradis’ debut as a doe-eyed schoolgirl, but it has little else going for it. Despite the film’s attempt to poeticise a rather seedy storyline with philosophical references, the drama sways dangerously close to soft-porn frolicking. Trust the French to romanticise illicit relationships. And the stream of gratuitous shots of the lithe Mathilde (Paradis) being ravished by her middle-aged philosophy teacher is enough to make you throw up your crème brulée. Lieu Pham
THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON (2006) DIR: JEFF FEUERZEIG AVAILABLE: 21 AUGUST The future looked bright for Daniel Johnston. With palpably detached sentiments, director Jeff Feuerzeig’s biopic of the Texan musician and artist explores the life of a gifted young man whose dream was to become famous through his art. Splicing together home movie footage and re-constructions with interviews of family, friends and collaborators, this film not only looks at Johnston’s creative output but also the bi-polar disorder which defined his life. At best, his illness supplied him with creative energy, and at worst it threatened his life and those around him. What this film shows best is the support that surrounds Daniel from his long-suffering parents to the growing legions of fans. It’s a re-assuring testament that his light will surely never go out. Abigail Lelliott
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THE CRYING GAME: SPECIAL EDITION (1992) DIR: NEIL JORDAN AVAILABLE: 31 JULY The quality and originality of Neil Jordan’s breakthrough hit is still in danger of being overshadowed by its famous twist. The leading lady’s secret became a pop culture joke referenced on everything from Ace Ventura to The Simpsons. It’s a shame because if you look past the twist you’ll find a well-scripted IRA thriller meets quirky rom-com hybrid. Stephen Rea is terrific as the Irish fugitive who falls in love with the girlfriend of the dead soldier he kidnapped in Ulster. It may have dated a bit, and the low budget occasionally shows, but this is still a class act. Dan Stewart
SHOOTING DOGS (2005) DIR: MICHAEL CATON-JONES AVAILABLE: 31 JULY Based on actual events, this dramatisation of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 is a harrowing, heavy-handed affair. Colin Firth-a-like Hugh Dancy plays a gap year teacher under siege at the school of expatriate priest John Hurt. While the UN dithers, the machete-wielding Hutu tribesmen get ever closer. Unlike 2004’s Hotel Rwanda, the film doesn’t shy away from bloodshed and boldly eschews a happy ending for its refugees. It’s not subtle, but some solid storytelling, sensitive performances and disturbing re-enactments of the massacre perfectly stoke the righteous anger you ought to feel watching a film like this. Dan Stewart
BRICK (2006) DIR: RIAN JOHNSON AVAILABLE: 18 SEPTEMBER Rian Johnson’s explosive debut, Brick,, takes John Hughes’ candyfloss girls and day-glo guys and wipes the stupid smile off their pretty vacant faces. Brick takes everything you think you know about the LA high-school scene and grinds it into dust as Brendan (Joseph Gordon Levitt) worms his way into the school-circle of a local drug lord to find the killer of his exgirlfriend. It’s bewilderingly inventive, breathlessly aggressive, and it stares one hard truth right in the face: school is war. Matt Bochenski INITIAL D: DRIFT RACER (2005) DIRS: WAI KEUNG LAU & SIU FAI MAK AVAILABLE NOW “One should always find a world which one belongs to.” This is the message of Wai Keung Lau and Siu Fai Mak’s manga-to-screen adaptation about the story of Takumi Fujiwara; an average Japanese high school student with a not-so-average talent for street racing. Takumi clearly belongs to the world of drift racing, but his dopey alter ego is reluctant to give up his ordinary life working in a petrol station and serving tofu all day long. Takumi is eventually forced out of his mundane existence and a predictable, albeit endearing, storyline ensues. Lieu Pham
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BRIEF CROSSING (2001) DIR: CATHERINE BREILLAT AVAILABLE: 28 AUGUST After the success of her psycho-sexual muck fest, Romance, director Catherine Breillat knocked out this quickie for French TV about a fleeting romance aboard the not-so-glamorous surroundings of a crosschannel ferry. A couple meet in the queue of a serve-yourself canteen, the inane banter slowly materialises and by the end the night they’re pushing the twin beds together in her cabin. Like much of Breillat’s work, the script is verbose and unnaturally coarse, coming across like crib notes for an Arthur Miller book. But the romance is tender, the context believable and the acting superbly understated. David Jenkins
JUNEBUG (2005) DIR: PHIL MORRISON AVAILABLE: 21 AUGUST While Gondry, Jonze and co. make their films look like feature length music videos, Phil Morrison – director of the classic School Of Rock-style Rock-style video for Yo La Tengo’s ‘Sugarcube’ – has ditched the choppy editing and visual flamboyance to make this bittersweet culture-clash comedy in which Amy Adams delivers a perfectly honed comic performance. This double disc release will hopefully precipitate a second wave of adoration after its underwhelming cinematic run. David Jenkins
LOVE + HATE (2005) DIR: DOMINIC SAVAGE AVAILABLE: 25 SEPTEMBER Two young lovers divided by warring factions in a town full of tensions: Dominic Savage’s first feature brings a hint of Shakespearian tragedy and a dollop of Lucas’ American Graffiti to a racially divided northern England town. A story full of holes and some weak acting from the older cast members is thankfully overshadowed by brilliant performances from the young stars on both sides of the divide. Love + Hate swerves away from the stereotypical grim northern race drama to portray something altogether more delicate and real. Lee Jones TIME BANDITS (1981) DIR: TERRY GILLIAM AVAILABLE NOW It is a testament to Gilliam’s realistic portrayal of the bizarre that when a giant wearing a boat-shaped hat containing a bunch of time travelling dwarves gets injected with sleeping potion through a pair of miniature bellows, your first thought is: there’s no way the midgets can survive a fall from that height. As with all fantasy it’s attention to detail that makes the strange seem believable, and Gilliam never forgets it. The giant sits down, carefully puts his hat on the ground, and the dwarves troop off to drop out of the sky onto the Titanic. Sheer genius. Tom Young
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LAST HOLIDAY (2006) DIR: WAYNE WANG AVAILABLE NOW A romantic comedy as slushy as a Slush Puppy left in the sun, as predictable as an England penalty shootout, but as entertaining as a day at the zoo. Queen Latifah, a rom-com stalwart of recent years, delivers a sterling performance as the terminally ill dreamer, while love interest rapping superstar LL Cool J does his best, which is all you can ask from him really. This won’t blow your mind, but it may produce a tear or two at the end. Just pretend you stubbed your toe playing sports or fighting or something. Lee Jones
WE JAM ECONO: THE STORY OF THE MINUTEMEN (2005) DIR: TIM IRWIN AVAILABLE NOW Suitably lo-fi film on essential ’80s hardcore punks The Minutemen. Narrated largely by the charmingly earnest bassist Mike Watt, a combination of talking heads and archive footage chart the origins of the three bro’s who, along with Hüsker Dü, revolutionised the US punk scene and laid the foundations for grunge. With contributions from the likes of Henry Rollins, Flea, Thurston Moore and Jello Biafra this is a testament to the lasting influence of the band, and a fitting, affectionate tribute to the memory of Minutemen singer and main-mover D Boon. Paul Fairclough
C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) DIR: JEAN-MARC VALLEE AVAILABLE: 21 AUGUST This could so easily have been a five-star film. The first 90 minutes of this Quebecois comedy contains a charming air of whimsy. But the last half-an-hour is so bad it’s as if another director has taken over the reigns and started to make a new, totally separate, totally shit film. There’s enough evidence, however, to suggest that director Jean-Marc Vallee has got a great film in him somewhere. With his fast-moving camera work and distinct comedy timing, he could very well be the new Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Watch this space. David Jenkins
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THIS ISSUE: THE BEST OF TIMES (1986), WARNER HOME VIDEO. MARKINGS: CROWN VIDEO, BLAKEMORE CASH AND CARRY, WALSALL. NO. 1 FOR VIDEO LEASING TRAILERS: A SPIELBERGIAN ‘NONE’ A pre-Aladdin Robin Williams plays Jack Dundee, the man who, years before, dropped a last minute touchdown pass that cost his town, Taft, a college football game against arch-rivals Bakersfield. He is a sheepish, simpering joke and the town’s Judas goat – a goat in sheep’s clothing if you will – and has never stepped out of the shadow of that ball. Kurt Russell is Reno Hightower; it was he who threw that spinning javelin of hope only to see it skid off the mud and bounce off a tree. His life followed the same course. What else is there left for these forgotten men to do but replay that game? Cue 90 minutes of shitty training montages and worse jokes. To say that this film was to Wall Street what Slap Shot was to The Deer Hunt Hunter is to entirely miss the point. Whereas the Newman vehicle was merely a pithy ice hockey comedy with a few liberal trappings, The Best Of Times will not lie down so easily: it’s nothing less than a State of the Nation address. When Springsteen sang about going down to the river, it was almost certainly the mighty river that flows through Taft, if, indeed, it has one. Russell outdoes himself, painting a far more subtle critique of Reaganomics than his hillbilly rage in Overboard or the Swiftian excesses of Used Cars. Adam Lee Davis
HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS COLLECTORS DVD BOX SET
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There are loads of different versions of House Of Flying Daggers knocking around on import (including the swanky Chinese wooden box) but the Collectors DVD Box Set is probably the best value. The film is pretty great (always a bonus, though not strictly necessary if you’re a whore for packaging), and the outsized slipcase has excellent cover art. Inside is a 144-page Making Of booklet (in Korean or Klingon or some other alien tongue) and a second cardboard booklet that folds out to reveal the two-disc DVD (with DTS sound), a soundtrack CD sheathed in gold paper, and – an import classic – the plastic bamboo biro. Matt Bochenski
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Chapter Six. Don’t believe the hype. Incoming movies laid bare.
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Chronicles.
Dir. David Fincher
UPDATE
It’s all change. It’s all questions. Why did Paramount pull the release date? That’s a mystery to rank alongside Fincher’s true-life tale of a ’70s serial killer, now re-christened Chronicles. Originally slated for November, rumour is it’s now been yanked to January ’07. Cold feet? Hot heads? Or is it because with Gyllenhaal, Sevigny and Mark Ruffalo on board expectation is sky high and maybe, just maybe, they’re putting the picture before profit and taking the time to make it right? ETA: January 2007
The Meat Trade.
Dir. Antonia Bird
NEw
This is not the fly-on-the-wall biopic of JB Wilkinson & Sons Quality Butchers that so many have been waiting for. Instead, Brit super director Antonia Bird (Priest, Ravenous) is directing Irvine Welsh’s first original screenplay. Set in Edinburgh, it’s a contemporary reworking of the crimes of the nineteenth century body snatchers Burke and Hare, who rob graves in the name of science. Could this be the film that puts Bird’s name on the map? And God knows it’s been a while since its two stars (Colin Firth and Robert Carlyle) have done anything that threatened to be decent. Cinephiles will also be pleased to hear that The Meat Trade is being produced by the most mimicked man in film criticism, Mark Cousins. ETA: 2007
Indigènes.
Dir. Rachid Bouchareb
NEw
Rachid Bouchareb’s story of Algerian soldiers fighting for the liberation of France in 1944 might sound like Glory meets Saving Private Ryan, but it’s Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle Of Algiers that casts a shadow across the production. For all it’s old fashioned blood-and-guts bombast, Indigènes looks readydated by France’s post-colonial politics, not to mention the bitter smell of cars burning in the banlieues. Still, it’s always good to see another war movie on the big screen. ETA: 2006
The Golden Compass.
Dir. Chris Weitz
NEw
The Golden Compass must be the antithesis of Snakes On A Plane. One is a director’s dream (1 - put snakes on plane. 2 - collect profit). The other, based on the His Dark Materials books by Philip Pullman, has a cult following but includes such cinematic hurdles as inter-dimensional travel, talking dust particles and souls embodied in animal form. If this wasn’t enough, in the first instalment director Chris Weitz (About A Boy) will have to handle a plot which rests on a tricky base of metaphysics, quantum mechanics and religious philosophy. Quite a task - especially when reports suggest that all mention of the Church has been banned from the screen version incase those Jesus-loving southern states get upset. Good luck with the conclusion of the trilogy, then, chaps. ETA: December 2007
Southland Tales.
Dir. Richard Kelly
UPDATE
This is how the hype ends, not with a bang but with a screening. Post-Cannes, Richard Kelly’s sci-fi, hi-fi opus has a new French flavour. Une folie de grandeur they call it. They? So the white sock ‘n’ sandal brigade didn’t dig it, but the anti-backlash starts here. At least we know what we’re in for - neoMarxists, amnesiac action stars and porn pundits in a chaotic piece of pop culture candy about the end of the world and everything in between. Expect it to be snipped - but not by much - from the print that (dis)graced La Croisette. ETA: 2007 123
Babel.
Dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu
Update
If people gush with praise, can you drown in accolades? That’s the question for Iñárritu four features into a rocket-powered career. Babel was the star turn of Cannes, and the star wattage that kept the festival aglow came mostly from its cast. Blanchett, Bernal and Brad Pitt are the luminous lights in one of those faintly familiar twisty-turny tales about a series of continent-hopping tragedies and innocent lives going awry. So he can do good, but when is Iñárritu going to do new? ETA: January 2007
INLAND EMPIRE.
Dir. David Lynch
new
Here’s what we know: David Lynch has been shooting INLAND EMPIRE (yes, in caps) for two years. It stars Lynch old-girl Laura Dern. It’s a mystery thriller set in the desert of LA’s outskirts. It’s shot on DV. It’s got Polish people in it. It missed a mooted premiere at this year’s Cannes. Here’s what we’re guessing: INLAND EMPIRE will be totally nuts. We’ll know more after its premiere at this year’s Venice Festival. In theory. ETA: 2007
Zidane, Un Portrait Du 21ème Siècle.
Dirs. Douglas Gordon & Philippe Parreno
new
Part gallery installation, part adidas advert, Zidane looks like one of those projects that does tricksy things to the line between art and commerce. Cinematographer Darius Khondji (who’s worked with Fincher and Chris Cunningham) synchronised 17 cameras to follow the head butt-happy football star in a match at the Bernabeu. The result is a closer look at the man in action than any of the world’s defenders got in his heyday, and by all accounts a cult smash waiting to happen if the film can pick up a UK distributor. A screening at the Edinburgh film fest is a good start. ETA: TBC Dir. Tim Burton
new
You can’t keep them apart: Burton and Depp look set for a sixth outing as they take on Stephen Sondheim’s barbaric barber musical. John Logan has provided the screenplay, though this may well get the snip in favour of a self-penned Burton effort. Either way, let’s hope the final cut is a step up from the diluted stickiness of Chocolate Factory and Corpse Bride. Chin up: Tim and Johnny have a history of success with sharp objects after all. ETA: 2008
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Marie Antoinette.
Dir. Sofia Coppola
Is it a flippant fake? Or a sly satire on the shimmering confection of celebrity? How about a poignant glimpse into a world of crumbling walls from the daughter of a once-great filmmaker diminished by the collapse of his Zoetrope empire? Was the whiff of garlic in the air at Cannes just the residue of those French-flavoured boos, or does Marie Antoinette really stink? Coppola’s Cannes experience raised yet more questions from the critics. Our verdict: forget cake, let them eat their words. ETA: October 2006 Update
Sweeney Todd.
Dir. Larry Charles
NEw
Ali G was a peculiarly British creation, but in Borat Sacha Baron Cohen has a character that the rest of the world can laugh at. Except Kazakhstan, whose government has taken out a four page advert in The New York Times explaining to America that their people don’t really throw Jews down wells or make homosexuals wear blue hats. Baron Cohen is known for stepping over the line habitually, and Borat threatens to take the theatre of embarrassment to new depths as he tours the US looking for Pamela Anderson and learning about western ways of government... whilst showing us his khram. ETA: 3 November 2006
Sunshine.
Dir. Danny Boyle
British sci-fi films are as common as our successful World Cup campaigns, so when Danny Boyle dispatches a team of astronauts to fix the dying Sun, you know it’s time to pay attention. It’s been a long while since anyone pulled off a decent outer space caper, but this could do the business: the trailers suggest claustrophobia, blistering visuals and a low-key cast headed by Cillian Murphy. Forget the nice-and-safe gloss of Star Wars - this is Brit grit on an intergalactic level. ETA: March 2007 NEw
Borat.
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Dir. Mel Gibson
new
Here we go again. Mad Mel’s latest wheeze is a jaunt through the ancient Mayan civilisation in Central America where a kidnapped native seeks to escape a mass human sacrifice. In the original language, natch (though shocking reports suggest that his preferred dialect, Yucatec, is not actually authentic. The horror!). The teaser poster is pretty moody, but the trailer’s a mish mash of everything from tourist trip photos to Indiana Jones via Kevin Reynold’s Rapa Nui and an ’80s perfume ad. Still, it shouldn’t be as bad as last time - there’s no Holocaust for dad to deny, and at least the Mayans wont be block-booking the MidWest. ETA: January 2007
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This Is England.
Dir. Shane Meadows
Britain’s foremost chronicler of life in the Midlands is in the process of wrapping his sixth feature. By the time you read this, editing should be completed and talk of release dates well under way. This is actually Meadow’s first period piece: the film tackles the genesis of the skinhead movement during the ’80s. His idea is to quash the myth that far from being born out of punk rock, Oi! bands and weak lager, the movement was in fact inspired by a love of reggae music. The bad news is everyone’s favourite comedy psycho, Paddy Considine, will not feature in This Is England - he’s probably too busy suing Steve Coogan over Saxondale, who, eagle-eyed readers will have noticed, is a complete rip-off of Considine’s character in Romeo Brass. Bastard. ETA: 2007 new
Apocalypto.
All The King’s Men.
Dir. Steven Zaillian
NEw
What the golly gosh happened to Sean Penn after his world-beating 2004? Well, you know what they say: when the chips are down, what better than to play an obnoxious, well spoken yet totally corrupt Southern politician? All The King’s Men is a remake of the 1946 original, which is itself an adaptation of Robert Warren Penn’s novel about the radical populism of Southern demagogue, Willie Stark. Writing and directing duties have been taken up by Steven Zaillian who honed his career as a screenwriter, and whose credits include Gangs Of New York and Schindler’s List. On the other hand, All The King’s Men has been delayed by almost a year, and if the distributors are not desperate for us to see this film, should we fear the worst?
Dir. Sam Raimi
NEw
Tobey Maguire - he just looks so sweet. There’s not a bad bone in his body, but we’re supposed to believe in Spiderman 3 that he finds ‘the darkness within himself’. Maybe we’ll see him driving over the speed limit or something. Still the black suit looks pretty cool in the trailer; no doubt it’ll help Maguire contemplate the duality of man while still pining for the delectable Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst). And the latest rumour is that Uncle Ben is back from the dead. However, next to Superman flying in from the other side of the galaxy, Spiderman’s web slinging is starting to look a little lame. ETA: July 2007
The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford. Dir. Andrew Dominick
NEw
Good westerns have been few and far between in recent years, but Brad Pitt and the increasingly visible Casey Affleck might be just the outlaws to revive the genre. Again. Jesse James is the perfect role for Pitt - a brooding but charismatic loner who attracts admirers like flies - but a ruthless murderer at the same time. Not that we’re saying, well, you know... This is of course the mythologised version of the man, but the truth is probably far less interesting and would make a rubbish movie. Despite Pitt’s aptitude for the role, it might yet be Affleck that steals the film and finally shows big bro’ who’s boss. ETA: April 2007
NEw
The Good German.
Dir. Steven Soderbergh
Steven Soderbergh deserves a laugh as much as anyone, but the mutual masturbation of the Ocean’s Eleven gang got old real fast. The Good German should make amends, pitching Clooney’s American journalist against the underworld politics of post-WW2 Berlin. Cate Blanchett plays his Aryan mistress, while the exclusively black-and-white cinematography should set the noir-ish tone nicely. The Third Man or simply third rate? We’ll have to wait and see. ETA: March 2007 NEw
Spiderman 3.
Dir. Clint Eastwood
America’s most famous flagpole becomes an awards-season movie tent pole courtesy of Clint Eastwood. Inspired by Joe Rosenthal’s image of four marines planting the Stars and Stripes on the island of Iwo Jima - the most reproduced photograph of the century - Flags Of Our Fathers promises to be a sensitively handled retelling of a battle that cost 27,000 lives. The director travelled to Japan to get official approval for the project, and next year will see the release of an intriguing companion piece, Red Sun, Black Sand to be shot on Iwo Jima itself. The good news? Despite his dodgy politics you can’t doubt Eastwood’s integrity. The bad news? The last war flick that promised to give the other side a fair shake was We Were Soldiers. We were not impressed. ETA: November 2006
Transformers.
Dir. Michael Bay
Transformers will live or die by its effects, yet the first official teaser limped home with little CGI meat on its bones. Still, it’s early days, and a photo of one of the ‘bots sneaked online looked promising. Michael Bay is no auteur, but his shoot first ask questions later approach is surely all that’s needed for an explosive romp with giant robots warring on Earth. John Turturro and Bernie Mac are both to appear in minor roles - interesting casting, but nothing compared to the ’86 cartoon’s mix of Scatman Crothers, Eric Idle and Orson Welles. For shame. ETA: July 2007 UPDATE
ETA: November 2006
Flags Of Our Fathers.
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