Little White Lies 12 - The Tales from Earthsea Issue by The Church of London

,ASER 0ROOF

)335% *5,9 !5'534 a

5)& 5"-&4 '30. &"35)4&" *446& "/*."5*0/ 41&$*"*/4*%& 456%*0 ()*#-* 5)& 5365) "#065 1*9"3 Ã&#x20AC;7"/,."+&3 41&",4 5)& .*:";",* '".*-: '&6%

i.: '"5)&3 *4 01104&% 50 5)& '"$5 5)"5 * ". )*4 40/w

IFQQIB TEFQB IFBP Qorqe # Jlsfbp

COVER image courtesy of

studio ghibli WORDS BY

LWLIES

002 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

â&#x20AC;&#x153;I despise people who do not treasure life.â&#x20AC;?

003

DIRECTED BY Goro Miyazaki STARRING Timothy Dalton, Willem Dafoe, Matt Levin, Blaire Restaneo

004 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

RELEASED August 3

005

As Goro Miyazaki steps out of his father’s shadow, can his film survive the glare of the limelight?

A new Studio Ghibli film is always an event, and when it came to the debut effort from Goro Miyazaki, the son of the Great One, everybody wanted a say...

So, Tales From Earthsea – what’s it all about?

D: It’s about a young prince, Arren, who kills

his dad for reasons that are pretty murky, runs away, and doesn’t seem to give a shit about his own life until he gets into trouble and is saved by Sparrowhawk, the most badass mage in the whole of Earthsea. Sparrowhawk decides that he was fated to meet Arren, and they meet a girl, Theru, who – whaddaya know? – also has some fate thing as well. J: Then the evil androgynous dude, Cob,

sends his men to get Sparrowhawk because he hates him.

D: Cob is after the key to eternal life, and it

turns out that this kid who has no respect for life is actually that key.

006 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

D: This is a very simple, very pure, very

Where does it fit in the Ghibli canon? Is it

Why do you think that is? Is it a lack of

closer to the action-oriented likes of Princess

confidence from a first-time director? Here’s

Mononoke, or the later, more whimsical films

a guy, Goro Miyazaki, the son of the most

makes it very different from Hayao Miyazaki’s

like Spirited Away?

famous animator in the world, whose only

films – while they gander off into the leftfield,

P: It harks back to Little Norse Prince,

previous artistic experience was as a

this was just a very solid story.

which is quite an early Ghibli film. The scene

landscaper – that’s a lot of pressure.

towards the beginning where the wolves are

P: It shows. A lot of the time the frame just

Is it possible to discuss this film and not talk

seemed empty. There are beautiful skies, vast

about Hayao Miyazaki? Was Tales From

got that medieval, European feel rather than

plains, huge rooms and castles, but they’re

Earthsea ever going to be good enough to

something that’s distinctly Japanese, and

just empty spaces. The story echoes that.

shrug off the mantle of being ‘that film by

rooted in Japanese society or Japanese

To what extent does the film feel like the

mythology, like My Neighbour Totoro or

work of an individual – like this is Goro’s

P: Absolutely not. No way.

Spirited Away, that sense of magic being part

distinctive vision of Earthsea – and to what

of everyday reality is a lot more evocative.

extent does it feel constricted by being a

This was unconvincing from the start.

‘Ghibli’ film?

chasing Arren is directly lifted from there. It’s

straightforward tale. It’s that simplicity that

Hayao Miyazaki’s son’?

that’s disappointing. When Ghibli films are

R: He should never have tried to make his

own film – it’s a completely pointless exercise.

P: There are far more talented directors out there who could have twisted the Ghibli ▼

007

structure and made a very good film with

of Ghibli film. It would have been easy for him

other ingredients in it rather than the generic,

to try and compete with the artistic flourishes

formulaic Ghibli picture.

and quirkiness of his dad’s films but he hasn’t. If he were to make more films and they were

Hayao Miyazaki’s fans are forever talking

all to be like Tales From Earthsea, then this

about his originality and his unique approach

would be the recognisable start of someone

to animation, but stylistically he’s one of the

who makes Ghibli films that are less

most unmistakeable animators in the world.

fantastical and more straight down the line.

If Goro follows that style, he’s just copying

Perhaps we’ll be losing a little if that happens,

his father, if he doesn’t – if he shows his own

but we need to keep it in perspective.

inventiveness – people get angry because

R: You can tell it’s adapted from the middle

he’s not giving them what they expect. What

book in a longer story – it’s a few too many

can he do?

steps away from being coherent. But put it

P: If you watch Howl’s Moving Castle it feels

up against any of the shit coming out of the

like that formula has come to a head – like it’s

US mainstream at the moment, and it’s a

lived its life and come to a point where you

much better film.

can’t take it any further. Maybe that’s why Miyazaki talked about retiring. The problem

What are its strengths?

with people’s perceptions of him is that

J: You would never see a Western

because he’s been ‘discovered’ so late in the

animation with the dark themes of this film,

West, people are really militant about what it

and not just the fact that it deals with

is they expect from him, but at the same time

patricide. There are two main clichés that

they’re confused about what they want from

you see in kids’ films: it’s either ‘learn to be

a Studio Ghibli that one day isn’t going to

yourself’, or ‘follow your dream’, or variations

have him at the helm. Goro’s kind of suffering

on that. In Tales From Earthsea, Arren isn’t

for that; he’s damned if he does and damned

following his dreams, he’s not learning to be

if he doesn’t.

himself, he’s fucking suicidal. He doesn’t

R: There’s no way out.

give a fuck. And he spends the whole film

aware, and you have to accept, that this isn’t

That’s a pretty dark business. Credit Goro

J: Right from the start you have to be

trying to learn to appreciate just being alive.

another Hayao Miyazaki film. This is Goro

Miyazaki for that.

Miyazaki’s first film. You can watch it as a

P: But if it wasn’t Ghibli it wouldn’t catch

Ghibli film, but if you’re going to expect

much attention – it would just be buried

exactly the same thing then you’re always

alongside a lot of other mediocre animation n

going to be disappointed.

Head over to page 32 for a revealing interview with

D: Goro Miyazaki has made a different kind

rookie director Goro Miyazaki.

008 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

Anticipation. The dawn of a new age for one of the world’s most famous animation studios? Or a folie de grandeur from Hayao’s kid? Four Enjoyment.

Flashes of beauty and a fascinating subtext let down by muddled plotting and uninspired design. three

In Retrospect.

On this showing, Ghibli’s older-hands aren’t going to be hustled into retirement just yet. two

009

A Writer

Replies Words and interview by Matt Bochenski

Fantasy author Ursula Le Guin published A Wizard of Earthsea in 1968. Thirty-nine years, four novels and one short story later, she can finally point to the kind of major movie adaptation that most writers only dream of. Why has it taken so long? Because Le Guin isn’t most writers. In fact, she’s spent the best part of four decades politely declining the approaches of film studios eager to bring Earthsea to life. Twenty years ago one of those Le Guin turned away was

the mushiness and cruelty, the total commercialism. So, equating animation with ‘Disneyfication’, I not only

rejected Miyazaki’s original contact, I refused to let

anybody talk to me about animating Earthsea. I wouldn’t listen to Martin Rosen [Watership Down, The Plague

Dogs] about it either, though he was persuasive. LWLies: Your first experience of Studio Ghibli was My

little-known Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. After finally

Neighbour Totoro. What was it about the film that made such

seeing My Neighbour Totoro, however, she had a change of heart

a great impression on you?

and entered into negotiations with Studio Ghibli.

Le Guin: Totoro is a charming, imaginatively original

But the adaptation did not go smoothly. Despite initial assurances that Hayao would direct, the project was passed to his son – a decision that caused a rift between the two parties. Posting on her website, Le Guin has said she is sorry “that anger

film of great emotional honesty, drawn with immense

verve and beauty. I had never seen anything like it before.

and disappointment attended the making of this film on both

LWLies: What impression did Hayao Miyazaki make when you

sides of the Pacific Ocean”.

first met to discuss the project?

Intrigued, we asked the notoriously private author to elaborate on her feelings about Studio Ghibli, the difficulties of the adaptation process and the future of Earthsea on screen.

Le Guin: ‘I am in the room with a short genius of

immense and rather dangerous charm and I like him very much.’

LWLies: You’ve said that the reason you originally rejected

LWLies: You’d originally been told he was to direct the film,

Miyazaki’s request to adapt your novels is because you only

now they were telling you that he was going to retire instead.

knew ‘Disney-type’ animation and disliked it. What did you

How frank were the discussions about who should or should

mean by that?

not direct the film if he was to retire?

Le Guin: I had come to dislike everything about Disney

Le Guin: They seemed frank, although it is hard to

huge heads and eyes, the sentimentality and cynicism,

a translator. The Ghibli people were very clear

feature films ever since the ’50s – the slick art, the

010 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

gauge sincerity when everything must go through

that Goro was to direct the film. That was what the

about making movies. Meddling authors could foul up

Hayao Miyazaki’s promise that he would keep an eye

brushed aside from having any input at all on the

discussion was about. The promise not carried out was on the process and see that the film satisfied him and myself. He did not do so.

LWLies: Do you feel betrayed by the studio? Le Guin: Yes.

the process badly. I feel badly used at having been last three movies ‘based on’ my work, because I’m not a meddler, and know enough about making films to be

very respectful of the process and problems of telling a verbal story visually.

LWLies: Do you think the relationship between filmmakers

LWLies: Would you work with them, specifically with

and fantasy novels over the last few years has been a fruitful

Hayao, again?

one for either side?

Le Guin: I cannot imagine this being a possibility.

Le Guin: I don’t know. None of the films that I saw

Goro or Hayao, being cut out of the process from

of the book. In the case of The Lord of the Rings,

In fact, it never was. I did not ‘work with’ either start to finish. Names and some events from the books appear in the film, but this is exploitation rather than ‘working with’ the books.

LWLies: Writers are notoriously accorded little respect by the filmmaking community, or at least very little involvement

enriched or enlarged the imaginative accomplishment for instance, large and beautiful as it is the film

is very much a smaller, flimsier thing than the book. Of course, the success of fantasy films has enhanced sales of fantasy books, so, if you are using those scales, that is good.

in the adaptation of their work. Why do you think this is?

LWLies: Have your own experiences made you more

Le Guin: It’s tempting to say because movie people

determined to see Earthsea properly translated to the screen,

true of most of them. But there is a real reason for

Le Guin: My determination isn’t worth much; what’s

a lot of authors want to keep control, tell the

good job of translating the story to film. Find me

can’t read and are afraid of people who can. It is

or are you wary of going through a process like this again?

a filmmaker to be leery of the author of the book:

needed is a filmmaker determined, and able, to do a

scriptwriter how to write that scene, tell the

director how to shoot it – all without knowing beans

one, I’m game! n

Check out the full transcript of this interview on www.littlewhitelies.co.uk.

011

“I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known.” Walt Disney

016 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

LWLies: What is it that you love about movies? Goro Miyazaki: What I love about them the most is that you will find hope there.

017

Honest, passionate and unmerciful. www.littlewhitelies.co.uk

Editor

Publisher

Danny Miller

Matt Bochenski

danny@littlewhitelies.co.uk

matt@littlewhitelies.co.uk

Deputy Editor

Creative Directors

Paul Willoughby paul@littlewhitelies.co.uk Rob Longworth rob@littlewhitelies.co.uk

David Jenkins

Monisha Rajesh

Sub Editor

Website Editor

Website Design

david@littlewhitelies.co.uk

monisha@littlewhitelies.co.uk

jon@littlewhitelies.co.uk

cullinan@littlewhitelies.co.uk

DVD Editor

Gaming Editor

Incoming Editor

Short Film Editor

georgie@littlewhitelies.co.uk

adrian@littlewhitelies.co.uk

neon@littlewhitelies.co.uk

james@littlewhitelies.co.uk

Georgie Hobbs

Jonathan Williams

Adrian D’Enrico

Contributing Editors Kevin Maher Vince Medeiros

Daniel Cullinan

Neon Kelly

Staff Writers

James Bramble

Ad Sales Director

Andrea Kurland andy@littlewhitelies.co.uk Adrian Sandiford sandiford@littlewhitelies.co.uk

Steph Pomphrey

steph@littlewhitelies.co.uk

Words, pictures, thanks...

Ed Andrews, Henry Barnes, Anton Bitel, Mike Brett, Jonathan Crocker, Aaron Davies, Nick Funnell, Thom Gibbs, Matt Glasby, Lorien Haynes, Ellen E Jones, Levent Kerimol, Victoria Kettner, Adam LeeDavies, Kayt Manson, Simon Mercer, Jonas Milk, Lucy Muss, Paul O’Callaghan, Maisie Pomphrey, Dan Stewart, Laura Swinton, Mark Taplin, Emma Tildo Tildsley Girl, Steve Watson, Josh Widdicombe, Jason Wood

Distribution

Printing

COMAG Specialist

Mayhew Mccrimmon

To stock LWLies contact andy.hounslow@comag.co.uk

www.mayhewprepress.co.uk

Published By

The Church Of London Publishing Ltd. Studio 209, Curtain House, 134-146 Curtain Road, EC2A 3AR tel: 0207 7293675 The articles appearing within this publication reflect the opinions and attitudes of their respective authors and not necessarily those of the publishers or editorial team.

OUT NOW

ON NINTENDO DS

Nacho Libre: Game software Majesco Entertainment Company © 2006. All Rights Reserved. ©2006 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved. Eidos and the Eidos logo are trademarks of Eidos Interactive Ltd. NINTENDO DS IS A TRADEMARK OF NINTENDO.

LETTERS This month: praise, threats and the odd nugget of wisdom. Business as usual.

’ark at me!

BAFTA BASHING

I just wanted to drop you

I think it’s fair enough

sending me a copy of your

issues with the Rising Star

a line to say thanks for magazine. It’s the first

magazine I have read coverto-cover in years! It’s

really good. You should be

very proud of yourselves. I was flattered to find myself

in such interesting company, especially Mr Meadows.

Looking forward to the next issue. Your new fan. Garth Jennings

scouse grouse I am probably not the first person to say this, but

re. Derek Hatton’s comment on page 55 of LWLies 11

that Thatcher was on-track to lose the 1983 election had the Falklands War not

occurred, despite the fact that Kinnock offered no

real alternative and was a pantomime joke, doesn’t he

recall that Michael Foot was leader of the Labour Party for that 1983 election? Marlon

Good point.

020 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

that LWLies would have

Award (see Issue 11, JJ

Feild, page 43), since it is decided by public vote and

its parameters are probably not ones that exactly match your own perspective, but

FYI it is not technically a

BAFTA award, it’s the Orange Rising Star Award. It’s only existed since 2006, and had it done so previously we

would hope that both Gael

García Bernal (nominated in 2006) and Cillian Murphy

(nominated in 2007) would

already have been rewarded. Of the 10 nominees to date, I think those two stand

out as the most contentious

candidates in terms of their

failing British talent, it

point remains that BAFTA

award, and putting the likes

stars at the wrong time, and

is actually an international of James McAvoy, Chiwetel Ejiofor (2006), Naomie

Harris, Emily Blunt and Ben

Whishaw (2007) on a platform with stars from other

countries (in 2006 they had Rachel McAdams and Michelle

that British film fans are entitled to expect.

issue to This is England,

After dedicating a whole

to the heart of BAFTA’s

your ‘Original Skin’ feature

international perspective,

which many feel is wrong. For further context, it replaced the Orange Film of the Year award, which for three

consecutive years was won

by films in the Lord Of The

Rings trilogy, so hopefully

we can agree that it’s a step forward from that.

maybe you have issues with

British actors alongside US

other nominees (Chiwetel

stars seems to us to be an

that time). As for it

isn’t the kind of leadership

well. But that argument goes

The fact that BAFTA promotes

had the award existed at

more worthy winners. This

Hey, Dickhead

to a significant degree, but

year of Dirty Pretty Things,

previous years is denying

Bernal) I think serves them

Charles

have been nominated in the

in playing catch up with

Williams, in addition to

star having already risen

Ejiofor would presumably

is recognising the wrong

integral part of its remit. Why celebrate that when

failure to do otherwise would simply be a gross dereliction of duty? Moreover, the

seems to blow this love-in

out of the water. Commenting on Shane’s appearance with all the sensitivity of the late Bernard Manning in a

mosque, you dropped such gems as, ‘A frame like a second row forward just going to

seed’ and, ‘Hey baldy, lose some weight’. As a tetchy East-Midlander myself, I

would much prefer that you continue to celebrate the

fine frames of celluloid this region has produced instead

of making snide remarks about the appearance of one of our favourite sons. Hugh Foster

Collector’s DVD includes

the rare 1968 William Burroughs cut and

two newly conceived scores by electronic experimenters

BRONNT INDUSTRIES KAPITAL and contemporary composer

GEOFF SMITH

“A masterpiece of macabre cinema” BIZARRE

THE ORIGINAL & MOST NOTORIOUS CULT FILM OF ALL TIME

“ONE OF THE BIGGEST HEAD-F**KS EVER TO BE COMMITTED TO CELLULOID” BIZARRE

A SEX-OBSESSED GRANDFATHER, A CHAMPION SPEED-EATING FATHER AND A MASTER TAXIDERMIST TRYING TO STUFF HIMSELF. WWW.TAXIDERMIA.CO.UK

a tartan video release

OWN THEM ON DVD 13 AUGUST

022 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

on’t n, We dreligiog e a the bi havu t r of t j so e p wtainmen r t e artis ent ami, urak shi M Taka

From Hayao Miyazaki’s award-winning Spirited Away to James Cameron’s adaptation of Battle Angel Alita, Japanese anime is here to stay. LWLies traces the roots of this cultural invasion Words by Matt Bochenski

023

It’s 1988, and Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki is putting the finishing touches to My Neighbour Totoro. It’s a strange, brilliant, bucolic fantasy full of woodland sprites and bizarre creatures, but in the West nobody cares. This year belongs to Katsuhiro Ôtomo. When Akira, his dystopian vision of a cyber punk apocalypse, appeared on VHS it kicked open the doors for Japan’s vast anime industry to make a full-scale assault on Western audiences. Select magazine breathlessly exclaimed “See it and die!” but as fans of the film already knew, Akira wasn’t about death; it was about rebirth.

Despite the fact that Japan had been exporting anime since the ’60s, and Japanese animators had worked on so-called ‘American’ features like Rankin-Bass’ 1978 version of The Hobbit, it had taken anime over 70 years to leave an imprint on Western pop culture. Its roots are widely debated. Isao Takahata, director of Studio Ghibli’s Grave of the Fireflies, reckons anime evolved from the embroideries and picture scrolls that inspired the great print artist Katsushika Hokusai in the early nineteenth century. It was Hokusai who coined the term ‘manga’ to describe the subjects of his slice-of-life prints. Meaning ‘trivial’ or ‘irresponsible’ pictures, it would come to refer to the Japanese comic industry which, by 1917, had given rise to an offshoot – anime. According to Helen McCarthy, co-author of The Anime Encyclopedia, the first dateable anime fragment is Oten Shimokawa’s Mukuzo Imokawa the Doorman, a day-in-the-life snapshot of a lowly doorman from 1917. Another recently discovered fragment may eventually be dated back to 1906, which would give Japan a shout at having the oldest animation industry in the world, but as McCarthy admits, “The jury’s still out on that one”. Anime’s ascent into the mainstream, however, can conclusively be traced to one man: Osamu Tezuka, ‘the God of anime’. Born in 1928, Tezuka studied to be a doctor before hitting pay dirt in 1951 when he created Atom Taishi, now known around the world as Atom Boy. “It was Tezuka who came up with the revolutionary idea of using cinematic techniques in his manga,” explains Gemma Cox, editor of Neo, the UK anime and manga magazine. “That not only made for a better way of telling a story, but made the leap into television and film that much more obvious.” Though these days Hayao Miyazaki is often referred to as the ‘Walt Disney of Japan’, that title

024 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

more properly belongs to Tezuka. When Astro Boy debuted on Japanese TV in 1963 it was the first ever colour cartoon show, and it still runs in various forms today. It was Tezuka who ensured anime’s place in the entertainment industry, not least by price fixing his episodes to make them dirt cheap for the TV companies. Tezuka was heavily influenced by Disney as well as animators like Max Fleischer (who brought Betty Boop, Popeye and Superman to life). In fact, though a lot of modern anime seems uniquely Japanese, the early years were very different. “Before the war Japan had a very active artistic and cultural exchange with the West,” says McCarthy. “There was a very solid awareness of what was new in European and American culture, and Japanese artists were constantly trading ideas and information with their counterparts.” The Second World War brought that to an end while simultaneously encouraging the

Akira (1988)

industry by flooding it with government cash to make anti-American propaganda films. By the

dir. Katsuhiro Ôtomo

time Japan was in a position to restart its cultural exchange, an important shift had taken place

The film that opened the floodgates

across the ocean. “In the ’50s and early ’60s Britain had a really dangerous comic culture,”

is a nightmarish vision of street gangs

explains McCarthy, “but we took a decision at some stage, and America took a similar decision,

and neon cityscapes with a scorching

that cartoons and comics were for kids. When you got old and serious you abandoned the

industrial soundtrack. A true classic.

super hero and you started looking at ‘real’ stuff. Japan never went down that route.” Because Japanese animators didn’t ring-fence certain stories as being ‘suitable’ for anime, “its role in Japanese society can be anything,” says Gemma Cox. Outside of the mass-market mainstream, where shows like Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! play

Ghost in the Shell (1995) dir. Mamoru Oshii

to millions of young fans every week, much of the attention that anime garners is focused on

Oshii had already made his mark with ace

its darker sub-genres. This underworld of no-holds-barred sex and violence, seen in films like

robot tale Patlabor, but this is the film that

Hideki Takayama’s legendary Urotsukidoji or Sho Hanebu’s Bible Black (where rape, tentacles

made him and Production IG. “Ghost in

and transgender sex is de rigueur. In fact, where transgender characters being raped with

the Shell was telling the Matrix story long

tentacles is de rigueur), is fascinating because it seems so at odds with the rest of Japan’s

before the Matrix was made,” reckons

traditional, conservative society.

Gemma Cox. Say no more.

One explanation is that this sub-genre, known as ‘hentai’, plays by different rules, governed Japanese. For Gemma Cox, the association of anime with hentai is just a distraction. “Japan is

Neon Genesis Evangelion (1996)

a land of juxtapositions,” she reasons. “You’ve got your history of rigid tradition, and then you’ve

dir. Hideaki Anno

got neon cities, virtual worlds and robots. This is just another manifestation of that duality that

Impossible to classify sci-fi freak out soon

Japan has – the inner and outer self.” Helen McCarthy agrees: “If you have a society which is

to be graced with a live action remake,

built on restraint, you very often find that that society has an incredibly rich and fevered interior

Rebuild of Evangelion.

by pornography laws that may seem strange to us, but which make perfect sense to the

life. In amongst all the pressure of one of the world’s fastest developing countries, you need an interior life as a safety valve.” That’s not to say that the Japanese don’t have reservations about the dangers of this interior

Perfect Blue (1998) dir. Satoshi Kon

life. McCarthy describes “regular backlashes” against the fringes of anime, especially in 1989

A virulent comment on modern culture

when aptly named serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki was revealed to have a stash of over 5,000

from Kon; “One of the most cinematically

anime videos in the apartment where he killed and ate four young girls.

literate directors in the world, in any film

But not all of those videos were explicit. As McCarthy points out, Japan’s most popular

genre,” according to Helen McCarthy.

anime is a 15-minute family drama called Sazae-san that’s been around in one form or another for over 40 years. “Japan,” she says, “is a very large, very stable society, in which much of the population watches anime, and yet the percentage of extremely violent crime is historically low.” Inevitably it’s difficult to draw conclusions about what anime tells us about Japan. As Gemma Cox says, it’s a land of contradictions, but in between those contradictions might be something approaching the truth. “You can learn a lot about how the Japanese want you to see them,” reckons McCarthy, “you can learn a lot about their fantasy of how they would like to perceive themselves, and in the gaps in between perhaps you can learn about how they’re afraid we see them.” Though economic and social changes in Japan mean that the future of anime is far from certain, as both a product and feeder of street culture it’s hard to see it going away. “Really, anime hasn’t ever just occupied one place in popular culture in Japan,” says McCarthy, “it’s kind of accommodated itself to whatever niche is there. That’s why it’s survived so well.” n 025

026 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

Hayao Miyazaki, the mysterious genius behind the greatest animation studio in the world, throws open the doors of perception. Words by Jonathan Crocker

Don’t listen to anyone who calls Hayao Miyazaki ‘the Walt Disney of Japan’; he makes Disney look Mickey Mouse. For most Westerners, Spirited Away was the first headlong tumble down the rabbit hole into the astonishing mind of Miyazaki. But people who knew – people like Kurosawa and Spielberg – had been worshiping him for years. If you’re lucky enough to gain an audience with the reclusive master, you’ll find a most unassuming deity: grey hair neatly trimmed and kind eyes hiding behind thick, black-rimmed spectacles. And if you’re really, really lucky, he might just open the doors to the dream factory. ▼

Left

Spirited Away (2001)

027

Left

My Neighbour Totoro (1988) Below

Castle in the Sky (1986)

A small, leaf-covered building tucked

difference. I think that if you are very genuine

away at the edge of Tokyo, Miyazaki’s

in doing films for young children, you must

Studio Ghibli has conjured everything from

aim for their heads, not deciding for them

a daredevil princess fighting for her people

what will be too much for them to handle.

(Nausicaä); giant, gentle robots protecting

What we found was that the children actually

Laputa’s floating island (Castle in the Sky);

understand the movies more than the adults.”

flying cat-buses that only children can see

And unlike Pixar’s CG adventures,

(My Neighbour Totoro); a teenage witch and

Miyazaki’s creations spill from the ink-jar

her talking moggy (Kiki’s Delivery Service);

not a computer screen. CG accounts for no

and a maverick pig who flies a World War II

more than 10 per cent of the images in any

hydroplane (Porco Rosso).

of his movies. “With the advent of computer

The big one was eco-epic Princess

graphics, I did feel that a very important

Mononoke, Japan’s biggest all-time till-ringer,

chunk of my work was lost,” says the

displaced briefly by Titanic before Spirited

filmmaker. “Even though much more can be

Away blew them both out of the water to

done that wasn’t possible before, I’m holding

become the highest-grossing Japanese film

on to my pencil.”

ever. Toy Story and The Incredibles have made

Indeed, there’s no computer on

Pixar the daddies in the West, but American

Miyazaki’s tiny desk. Wedged discreetly in the

animators – especially Pixar head John

corner of a room with all the other animators,

Lasseter – have long looked to Miyazaki for

it’s littered with pencils and sketches, an old

inspiration. Friends with the Japanese master

pair of shoes sitting underneath it. It’s the

for two decades, Lasseter freely admits that

spot from where Miyazaki not only writes and

whenever his creative team hits writer’s block,

directs his films, but designs every character

they all pile into their screening room and

and painstakingly etches the storyboards,

watch a Ghibli film.

personally checking and redrawing the

Miyazaki, however, insists that there’s

countless film cels. Once quipping that his

a difference between the two outfits. “John

idea of a holiday is a nap, he created World

Lasseter wants to guide children,” he says.

War II actioner Porco Rosso single-handedly

“I want to get lost with them. That’s the

when Ghibli couldn’t afford more manpower.

028 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

The gentle, secretive Miyazaki still

attack on Pearl Harbor – to a designer of

reputation as one of the greatest filmmakers

punches the clock at the suburban studio/

bullets for fighter planes, the young Miyazaki

in the history of the medium. Not that

haven he created with filmmaking partner

took refuge from blasted post-war Japan in

most Western audiences knew it for a long

Isao Takahata in 1985. In the early days

an imagined Europe. He turned to Western

time. After US distributors fumbled the

Miyazaki worked from 9am to 4:30am.

literature, the surrealist paintings of Marc

video release of his debut feature, Miyazaki

In recent years, he’s apparently eased off

Chagall and the symbolic iconography of

halted international distribution until 1996.

somewhat: the old man now goes home at

Hieronymus Bosch, devouring a patchwork

When Miramax started the dub of Princess

midnight. Every year, he promises to quit.

of themes and imagery that left a huge

Mononoke, the fiercely protective animator sent

Every year, he’s back at that desk.

impression on his developing mind.

a Samurai sword to Harvey Weinstein with a

Born in 1941 – the same year as the

Now, at 66-years-old, he’s cemented his

note containing two words: ‘No cuts.’ ▼

029

Hollywood was never going to sit well

an impression of a real-life Wonka factory.

with Miyazaki. As well as being a nationalist

Sketches and storyboards paper the walls.

who would only fly on Japanese airlines, he’s

Model toys hang from the ceiling. And there

been a card-carrying Marxist for most of his

are books everywhere: The Best Children’s

life, despite the deep, psychic shock that he

Books in the World, Great Military Battles,

and many other Japanese socialists suffered

Mysteries of the Afterlife. Towering outside

over Tiananmen Square. Mamoro Oshii, the

the complex is a life-size figure of Castle in

maestro behind Ghost in the Shell, half-

the Sky’s guardian robot. “These things

jokingly referred to Ghibli as ‘the Kremlin’ and

represent what’s inside me,“ explains

quipped that, for Miyazaki, making movies

Miyazaki, “that feeling of something bursting

“is still a kind of extension of the union

in your chest. When making a film, I use

movement”. The UK miners’ strike in 1984

all my childhood memories: these are things

inspired Castle in the Sky. Unsurprisingly,

that can help us in life.”

then, there is no ‘Miyazakiland’. There is no

massive merchandising empire. No out-of-

and history, Miyazaki works on the same

work actors dressed up as his characters.

plane as CS Lewis, JRR Tolkein and Lewis

Instead, Miyazaki allows fans to enter his

Carroll. He doesn’t watch Lost. He doesn’t

world for real.

own a PS3. To him, modern culture is “thin

Designed to the last detail by the

and shallow and fake”. This mistrustfulness

filmmaker and his son, the Studio Ghibli

of the present is etched through his canon:

Museum is a gymnasium for the mind.

from the dark, apocalyptic environmentalism

Elf-sized doors, secret passages, propeller-

of Nausicaä and Mononoke to the anti-war

like ceiling-fans and spiral staircases give

implications of Howl’s Moving Castle.

030 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

Left

Princess Mononoke (1997)

“We have to be cautious in using this

capturing those fleeting, fragile

word ‘fantasy’,” he says. “In Japan, the

moments before a child becomes an

Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)

word is applied to everything from TV

adult. “All children are tragic because

Below

shows to videogames, like virtual reality.

they’re born with infinite possibilities and

But virtual reality is a denial of reality.

really the process of childhood is about

We need to be open to the powers of

cutting off many of those possibilities,”

imagination, which brings something

admits Miyazaki.

Above

Porco Rosso (1984)

useful to reality. Virtual reality can imprison

These fraught transformations –

people. It’s a dilemma I struggle with in

children into adults; wizards into birds

my work – that balance between imaginary

of prey; greedy parents into pigs; boys

worlds and virtual worlds.”

becoming dragons – are at the heart of

Far from the violent futurism or

Miyazaki’s world. So before we leave, we

tentacle horror of other anime, Miyazaki’s

ask him one final question. What animal

landscapes of magic and myth in everyday

would he turn into? He smiles. “A pu bug.”

life are time capsules of childhood

A woodlouse? Miyazaki nods. “It’s non-

experience. The visual delight, however,

aggressive, totally unselfish and just so

comes paired with a palpable sadness at

pure. It’s just busy living...” n

031

032 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

All debut directors feel the pinch of pressure, but none have faced greater obstacles than Goro Miyazaki when it comes to making that elusive first film.

Few animators have been called to the job as reluctantly as Goro Miyazaki. At 38-years-old he’d spent most of his life avoiding the profession that had made his father, Hayao, one of the most famous names in Japan. He went to university, qualified as an architect, and only found his way to the Ghibli studios after taking charge of the museum. But Goro couldn’t avoid the inevitable. Thirty-eight was the age at which Hayao Miyazaki had made his first film, The Castle of Cagliostro, now it was time for his son to follow, or perhaps be pushed, in his footsteps. The decision to give Goro Miyazaki the reins on Tales From Earthsea didn’t please anybody. In fact, it proved to be so controversial that the finished film would be hard pressed to compete with the blockbuster tale of intrigue and infighting that descended on the studio. Far from playing the supportive father, Hayao was outraged. “There’s no way he can be a director. He can’t draw, and he doesn’t know anything about animation,” he reportedly told studio president Toshio Suzuki. The animation staff were also sceptical of a director with no previous experience; a suspicion that was actively encouraged by Hayao, who called a meeting behind his son’s back in which he encouraged them to go on strike. The final straw for the young director came when his father called him into his office after seeing the storyboards to ask, “Have you been concentrating on this

movie or not?” It was the last words the two would share for over a year. For his part, Junior didn’t take it lying down. The family feud spilled onto the official production blog where Goro declared that he would give Hayao, “Zero marks as a father, full marks as a director.” He explained: “My father was almost never at home... That’s why, from my earliest awareness to the present day, I hardly ever had the chance to talk to him... Even on the rare occasions when we met, since we never talked usually, we had no idea what to say to each other.” In an extraordinary move, Goro even chose to fight back in the film itself. Tales From Earthsea begins with the confused, nihilistic Prince Arren killing his father in an unmotivated attack – a scene that has no direct comparison in Ursula Le Guin’s novels. Well, it’s cheaper than all those therapist’s bills at least. Mamoru Oshii, director of Ghost in the Shell, also weighed in on the feud, speculating that Hayao was simply scared of being eclipsed by his son: “He has the sense of crisis that he is being driven into retirement by the young generation,” he explained, “so he tries to kick the other party to the bottom of a ravine, even in the case of his own son.” Though Goro claims to have patched things up with his father, we had to ask about his experiences over the last few years, and this astonishing baptism of fire. ▼ 033

LWLies: In many respects you sound like a reluctant director. Do you have mixed feelings about it, and if so, why did you accept such a difficult challenge? Miyazaki: The desire to make animation was something

that I had sealed up a long time ago. I was reluctant because I was unsure if I should really be fulﬁlling

Miyazaki: My current relationship with my father is

the same as before; we are father and son who seldom

speak to one another. On the other hand, since I have

experienced making a ﬁlm, I can now truly look forward to my father’s next ﬁlm.

that desire at this age. However, as I became involved

LWLies: Do you think that, culturally speaking, there is a bigger

to realise this project became stronger and stronger.

Miyazaki: On the contrary, I feel that such a gap is

ignore the drive to create one, unique world.

to be more juvenile than before. The adults these days

with the planning of Tales From Earthsea, the wish

gap than ever between the young and the old in Japan?

Finally, I chose to accept the challenge as I could not

closing as the mentality of the Japanese elderly tends

LWLies: The style of animation is very much in the Ghibli tradition – did you ever consider making a radical departure and doing something that would be uniquely your own?

do not take pride in themselves as in the past, and

they lack self-discipline. In other words, they refuse to grow up.

Perhaps embracing more modern technology, for instance?

LWLies: It sounds like the animators on this project took some

Miyazaki: This is my ﬁrst time working on an animated

convincing before accepting you as a director. Why was this?

production, so for a layman without years of experience

inexperienced and also the son of Hayao Miyazaki. It

feature ﬁlm, not to mention that it is a Studio Ghibli

Miyazaki: That is obviously due to the fact that I am

to develop an original style, I consider my decision to

is understandable that professional animators would

follow the Ghibli style to be the most sensible one. Of course, if I were to make a ﬁlm in the future, I may take a different approach.

LWLies: Why do you think your father made life difficult for you during the production process? Was his approval important to you? Miyazaki: He was opposed to the fact that I had no

not easily accept someone who does not understand and

respect their work. It wasn’t until I began to draw the storyboards that their perception changed and I gained their recognition. One thing that I have learned from past experience is that it is impossible to create

something truly worthy if you cannot move the hearts of those working on the project.

experience in animation, and moreover that I am his

LWLies: Now that you have made your first film, will it be

commit to this ﬁlm was not his approval but rather

hard to prove yourself because of who you are?

take the job.

probably be more difficult. That is because the first film

son. In retrospect, what was necessary for me to

easier to make another one or will you always have to try extra

his opposition – his opposition fuelled my drive to

Miyazaki: Compared to the ﬁrst ﬁlm, the next one will

LWLies: How would you describe your relationship today?

034 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

was a ﬁght against others but the second ﬁlm will also be a struggle to overcome myself

“A delightful romantic comedy... amusing and sumptuous.” MARK ADAMS, SUNDAY MIRROR

“Shakespeare in Love… French style” LORIEN HAYNES, EVE

I N C I N E M A S J U LY 1 3

WORDS BY DAVID JENKINS

AROUND THE WORLD, DIRECTORS AND ANIMATORS ARE FIGHTING CONFORMITY AND FINDING THEIR OWN, UNIQUE STYLE. OVER THE NEXT FEW PAGES WE SPOTLIGHT TWO PEOPLE LEADING THE CHARGE.

036 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

Far Left

Persepolis (2007) Left

Princess (2006)

In the East and the West, Studio Ghibli, Disney and Pixar are towering monoliths casting a stylistic shadow over Europe and Scandinavia’s animators. Attempts to reproduce their methods have resulted in Hindenburg-esque disasters such as Arthur and the Invisibles and Flushed Away, both of which reverberate with the sound of boxes being ticked and dollar bills being shuffled. In short: if you want to make a play for the big league, it’s conformism or bust. Yet, away from the hurly burly of surfing otters, haunted gym shoes and talking accordions, there exists a clutch of directors and artists who are challenging the modern conception of animation as a highly lucrative product made solely for kids and, in most cases, at gun-point in the bowels of an Indonesian sweatshop. Advances in technology and a new approach to animation as a form of visual expression are breathing life into animated films beyond the mainstream.

If there’s one way to get the fedorawearing cinephiles in Cannes a bit hot-under-the-collar, it’s to throw an animated film into the competition. At the 2007 festival, Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi’s French/Iranian co-production, Persepolis, which tells the true story of Satrapi’s years as a woman growing up in Tehran, put a rocket under jaded audiences. After the graphic novel Xerox-jobs of Sin City and 300, Persepolis could be the closest thing yet to a movie that fully respects the comic book form. Influenced by the simple etchings of novels like David B’s revolutionary Epilepsy, it’s a delightful piece of monochrome minimalism which should be heading to our shores any day now. Meanwhile, from Denmark comes Anders Morgenthaler’s Princess which, although deeply indebted to the tentacle-upthe-ass tenets of a certain strand of anime, casts a daring and distinct eye over the Danish pornography industry. With its avenging angel plotline, Princess isn’t that far from a Euro-riff on Taxi Driver. Avoiding the fantastical elements that are generally part-and-parcel of the form, the story of Princess uses

animation to create scenes which may have been a little uncomfortable to present in a live-action setting, but damn well could have been. There’s plenty going on in the UK as well. The Philadelphia-born, Londonbased Quay brothers – perhaps in an effort to mimic the career of their messiah, Jan Švankmajer (interviewed overleaf) – are now lacing their live-action features with snippets of their patented baroque stop-motion, last seen in the recent Piano Tuner of Earthquakes. Animation fans who have never seen the brothers’ Street of Crocodiles owe it to themselves to beg, steal or borrow a copy. Alongside Švankmajer’s Dimensions of Dialogue it’s arguably the greatest animated film of all time. Over the next few pages, we talk to two of the most significant animators in the vanguard of the leftfield – Jan Švankmajer and Michel Ocelot – who offer us unique insights into their methods, influences and, most importantly, the need for animation that offers more than an excuse to sell toys, no matter how cuddly n 037

IN THIS EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, LEGENDARY CZECH ANIMATOR JAN ŠVANKMAJER ACCOMPANIES ADAM LEEDAVIES ON A WHIRLWIND TOUR OF HIS ILLUSTRIOUS AND SINGULAR CAREER.

There is a word that celebrated Czech filmmaker, animator and artist Jan Švankmajer uses to describe the ultimate goal of surrealism: ‘freedom’. It is this freedom – of expression, of form, of content and of movement – that permeates his work. The freedom to adopt or disregard formal rigour with a child’s caprice; to flit between animation, stop motion and live-action; and to question the received notions of reality and generally find them wanting. “My films are imaginative,” he says, “so I would hope that they work as a trigger to explode barriers and limits within people, to prepare them for imagination and metamorphosis; to detonate the 038 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

acceptance of reality and open people up to what I would ultimately call ‘the principle of pleasure’. Art should liberate.” Born into the alchemical wonder of Prague in 1934, Švankmajer trained at the Institute of Artistic Industry and then at the Fine Arts Academy before becoming involved in the city’s famous Lanterna Magika Theatre. It is here that he met Alfred Radok, a protomultimedia artist whose ahead-of-thegame mixing of theatre and film alerted Švankmajer to the surreal possibilities of the moving image. “Film for me at that time was, ‘Cut!’” he explains. “I was attracted by the possibilities of cutting and cutting and cutting from one composition to another without the constraints of real time that one had to put up with in the theatre.” Such a kaleidoscopic vision of time and

logic is similar to something one might experience in dreams, and this relentless editing tempo would be a technique frequently employed by Švankmajer to take the surrealist element of juxtaposition to its illogical extreme. Arriving at filmmaking during a thaw in the communist regime marked by the Prague Spring (“Thank God for the ’60s, when so many things were possible!”), Švankmajer was afforded the relative artistic freedom to produce such early masterpieces as A Game with Stones (1965); a stop-motion pageant in which a Heath Robinson clock/tap vomits clusters of pebbles which episodically enact the full scale of human drama from basic cell division to selfdestructive cataclysm. This freewheeling apprenticeship would be harshly discontinued when Soviet tanks rumbled into Prague in ▼

Above

Dimensions of Dialogue (1982) Left

Alice (1988)

039

the summer of 1968. But despite the reassertion of a Red jackboot into his creative rump, Švankmajer succeeded in making the live action film The Garden (1968), a sober but less than subtle critique of social engineering that investigates the links in a human fence encircling a modest suburban home. The unhinged comedy of The Flat (also 1968) sees a slapstick fallguy experience escalating levels of confusion and frustration as the fixtures and fittings of the world exhibit nothing but treason. With hindsight, it is clear that Švankmajer’s increasingly bold satire of the communist regime was likely to get him noticed by Party censors. It was an audaciousness that would culminate 040 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

in the dispute over Leonardo’s Diary in 1972. Conceived as an exercise in animation based on da Vinci’s copious notebooks, Švankmajer defied the authorities by inter-cutting shots of riot squads in full flight and collapsing buildings between hand-drawn studies of the beatific ‘Mona Lisa’ and trademark scenes of regurgitation and biological taxonomy. “It was criticised by the Central Committee of the Communist Party,” he says with a hint of pride, “and critics were appalled that such a film could represent Czechoslovakia at the Venice Film Festival.” But, he claims, the problem did not lie in the film itself: “There was always in-fighting amongst the highest functionaries of

the Committee and it impacted on me and my film.” It is a vaguely disingenuous remark that hints at the mischief that leavens even his most contemplative works. The episode would see him banned from making his own films for seven years. Returning after those years of exile, during which he concentrated on producing a series of fine art projects with his wife, Eva, Švankmajer completed his abandoned documentary The Castle of Otranto (1977), in which some crackpot (who uncannily resembles a young Kissinger minus his specs) soap-boxes a lifelong theory that Walpole’s Gothic novel was set in the heart of Bohemia rather than the heel of Italy. Then in 1982 he

Left

Faust (1994) Above

A Quiet Week in the House (1969) Right

Down to the Cellar (1983)

produced his masterpiece: Dimensions of Dialogue. Somewhat better translated as Possibilities of Dialogue, it features three pairs of heads which disgorge the reductive repetitions of Švankmajer’s unchecked worldview: that such possibilities are remote. A move into feature films came with Alice in 1987, which saw him take Lewis Carroll’s whacked-out meditation on childhood’s mobile swamp of memories and make it very much his own. A retelling of Faust – that eternal alchemist – followed in 1994, but it was with the Promethean excesses of Little Otik in 2000 that all of his obsessions came to a demented nexus and found him connect with a (left of) mainstream audience.

A guilt-drenched exploration of the responsibility of creation and parenthood, it follows an infertile couple who adopt a gnarly treestump and will it to life with Grimm consequences. “It is a rebellion against nature. It is a misuse of natural laws and that is something which has always fascinated me,” he admits. He then recounts a bizarre tale in which inhabitants of Papua New Guinea to whom the film was screened believed it to be a documentary, which has our translator slapping her thigh like a Hogarthian gin queen.

de Sade, Lunacy tells the tale of a troubled young man dispatched to the blue blazes of a crumbling lunatic asylum where the inmates may very well be the ones in charge. It is a troubling film, and one that espouses Jan Švankmajer’s continued belief that surrealism, at its heart, is primarily a revolutionary movement; that it has the power to set the mind free. “The magic is real,” he assures us. “The magic is real.” n A comprehensive collection of all Švankmajer’s short films was released by the BFI on June 25. A complete retrospective

Such ‘perversion’ is a prevalent theme in his latest film, Lunacy. Shot through with the bleak macabre of Edgar Allan Poe and the radical licentiousness of

of all his work is now touring nationwide. Thanks to Renata Clark at the Czech Institute and to Zdena Tomin for translation.

041

FRENCH ANIMATOR, MICHEL OCELOT, IS FORGING HIS OWN PATH.

WORDS BY DAVID JENKINS

Below & Right

Azur and Asmar (2006)

042 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

“I am very into princesses, fairies and twinkling stars. I use those things a lot in my films. I like to enchant people.”

There was a documentary made a couple of years ago on the life and times of the Beach Boys figurehead and allround Loony Tune, Brian Wilson, which was given the slightly ominous subtitle, Beautiful Dreamer. But although it’s a term which has the fawning air of some fanboy concoction, when you actually listen to the music, you realise that there had to have been some strange shit going on in that acid-soaked head of his. Without meaning to bandy the term about, the same can be said of French animator Michel Ocelot (sans acid of course). When you watch his films you can’t help but wonder about the ideas and images that must’ve been swishing around inside. Born on the French Riviera in the early 1950s, Ocelot claims to have been an animator since the age of two: “I always liked drawing and doing things with my fingers. I liked decorating the house for Christmas. I liked making little gifts for people. And now that’s my job.” He spent a fair portion of his childhood in Guinea, which made a huge impression on his artistic and creative temperament. “I read a lot of books and got connected with the world of art,” he says. “I tried all the visual arts including theatre, dance and music. When I was young, people would tell me I had to make a

decision about what I wanted to do, but that’s not the case with animation. I can get into the history of taste, sentiment, love, drawing, painting, sculpture, costumes, music, voices and languages. I love to find beauty in the world.” Known mainly for directing a short series of films based on a magical baby, Kirikou, who has the intellectual attributes and moral rigour of an adult, Ocelot has a new film on the way entitled Azur and Asmar which is his first foray into digital animation. Like the Kirikou films, there is a preoccupation with Franco-African culture, with immense effort going into getting the costumes and the backdrops just right. “The costume of Azur at the end is precisely the French fashion of the fifteenth century, and the costume of Asmar is the latest fashion from Spain in the sixteenth century. The buildings are mainly from North Africa and Andalusia. The palace of the Fairy Queen is based on a mosque in Istanbul.” The one thing which really hits you about Ocelot’s work is that it is idiosyncratic to the point where you’d be straining to compare it to anything else in the animation landscape. His taste does stray into the mainstream, but he’s very specific about what he likes and why he likes it: “I love the early Disney movies. Although for me, Disney stops at Sleeping Beauty. After that, he does products. Before that he made beautiful films, and there was the sense that he’s trying to be better all the time and not

scrimping on money or effort ever. After that, he just stopped.” The only movies being made today which share a similar strand of DNA to Ocelot’s are those by Miyazaki and Takahata. “We are all very good friends. They are actually releasing Azur and Asmar in Asia. The films I like best of theirs are Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies and Pom Poko. I think all of his films are very discreet, but groundbreaking. The interesting thing about Takahata is that he doesn’t draw. He thinks of something to say, then gets people in to help him visualise it and he just directs the film. The danger with animators is that they fall in love with their drawings – he doesn’t forget about film because he can’t draw.” So what was the film which piqued his interest in animation? “It could have been a Czech film I saw as a child. It was an early-version of Toy Story and I think it was called The Revolt of the Toys. Hermína Týrlová was the director. It was shot in the ’50s and I think it was about the war. The baddie was a live-action German soldier and all the toys would come to life to try and get rid of him. I told that to a Czech audience once and they were very moved by the idea that, in the ’50s, there was a little French boy in Africa who was moved by a simple Czech film. That’s the magic of cinema for you. You make this little contraption, then you see it turning, then it goes on turning years and years after you leave it.” n 043

044 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT denim SOCKS evisu the riddler cap new era GOOFY CAP A CAR BOOT SALE SKULL & BONES TEE FENCHURCH A TOTORO www.japjap.co.za MEI www.japjap.co.za Arisugawa PVC STATUE www.TOKYOTOYS.COM ZOETROPE WWW.EBAY.COM IRON MAIDEN SK8-HI VANS Mickey gloves www.mouseshoppe.com GIANT GUNDAM RX78 BANDAI

045

Forget Wellington and San Francisco, thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s something special going on in Britainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s effects industry. Words by Steve Watson

046 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

Back in the mid-1980s, while Shane Meadows was up in Nottingham

the top two companies in the world but Weta is just one company in New

shaving his head and wearing his trousers too tight, another group of

Zealand, whereas London has got a number of top companies. So I’d

future film pioneers were having their own formative experiences in a small

say second only to the West Coast, and not by that much.”

office in Soho. Entering long lines of code into their computer, the group

Yet it wasn’t the movie industry that first inspired the digital pioneers.

made a sphere appear on the screen. Another ream of code and the ball

Instead, the first steps in CGI were taken on behalf of the advertising

rotated. Once.

industry, and the British companies that today amaze audiences in

“It sounds rubbish but it was absolutely bleeding edge stuff,” laughs

cinemas still make a steady profit flogging everything from luxury cars to

John Harvey, head of 3D and VFX at Prime Focus London, one of Britain’s

toilet cleaner. The rising popularity of music videos also provided an ideal

biggest visual effects houses. “People were absolutely amazed by it at the

outlet for CGI work, which led in turn to longer format television pieces and

time. It all came from code back then, but it was only a year or so before

eventually to the silver screen. And while the purpose-built post-production

we got our first gooey.”

houses in LA and New Zealand have been able to tailor their work

Spend any time with CGI specialists and such conversational oddities come thick and fast – ‘gooey’, or GUI, means ‘graphical user interface’ – but the jargon is hardly surprising in a technical industry racing to keep

specifically to movies from the start, the multi-disciplinary British model has brought its own advantages. “Britain used to be really good at doing tricky smaller things,” says

up with itself. Where a rotating sphere was enough to induce gasps

Webber, “innovating and doing things well on budgets that other people

of amazement 20 years ago, today the industry’s focus is on creating

couldn’t work on. The American industry back then was already a big

marauding polar bears, undead pirates and even a completely convincing

industry with a lot of people, but because of the size of their machinery

human baby. And while the undisputed champions of the world are George

they couldn’t be as light on their feet and solve problems in quite the

Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic in LA and Peter Jackson’s Weta in New

innovative way that we could – they’d just throw the size of their machine

Zealand, the kids from London were there at the start and have fought hard

at it and get there that way. I think that separation is less so today – we

to stay in contention, setting up a world-leading CGI stronghold from the

can handle big shots now we’ve got a much bigger industry, but at the

back rooms and basements of Soho.

same time we’re probably not as light on our feet as we used to be

“I think these days we’re second only to the West Coast of America,” says Tim Webber, Director of Visual Effects at Framestore CFC, the biggest visual effects and computer animation studio in Europe. “Weta and ILM are

because of that.” Indeed the pressure to increase in size is being felt across the industry, and where Soho was once littered with small boutique operations it is ▼

047

today seeing widespread consolidation as companies seek safety in numbers. One of the most dramatic examples of this is being seen at Prime Focus London, an Indian-owned concern that has combined London houses VTR and Clear Post with Mumbai’s Prime Focus to create an international CGI giant with close to 1,000 staff. Founded by Indian CG expert Namit Malhotra 10 years ago, Prime Focus dominates the Indian market and has long wanted to open a scanning solution in London to take care of Indian films being shot in Europe. Finding VTR in financial difficulties but with good infrastructure and creative talent, Malhotra made his move and bought the company, purchasing boutique house Clear Post at the same time and installing the two in the heart of Soho. “They undertook a whole process of cost cutting and really sorted out the finances at the back end of the company, investing a huge amount of money in technology here, and installing a full 2k end-to-end pipeline,”

We Did That: Britain’s Greatest VFXports Buckbeak Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) Framestore CFC

“The hippogriff was a big moment,” says Tim Webber. “Computer generated feathers are very complicated because of the way they move and the way they look. I think it was the first time anyone in Britain had done a truly excellent CG creature, and at the time it was probably the best in the world.”

says MD Simon Huhtala, somewhat mystifyingly (‘2k’ is the two thousandpixel industry standard resolution for cinema, and the ‘end-to-end pipeline’ means Prime Focus London can handle every stage of the process from taking the film out the back of the camera to delivering it for projection). “The challenge for us,” he continues, “was to align all that we were doing in a small, elegant little boutique and bring those efficiencies to a big plc. here in London.” Yet of course the London operation is only a small part of the story. The Mumbai office is currently hiring 15 new staff every week to keep up with demand, delivering serious manpower but raising difficulties of its

Squirrels Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) Framestore CFC

Webber: “The publicity was doing a lot of talking about ‘trained squirrels’ when in fact most of them were replaced with CG squirrels. It was very much done on computer.”

own. London staff are currently in India helping to set up a more studio-

Water Superman Returns (2006)

based approach, which, if successfully introduced, will massively increase

Framestore CFC

the company’s potential on the global stage. Proof of its efficacy came with 28 Weeks Later, the first project that Prime Focus undertook internationally. There’s a sense of genuine

“Fluid simulation is a new area that has been cracked fairly recently. Superman had a lot of CG water work in it and that was a step forwards,” reckons Webber.

excitement in the company as they look forward to refining their processes and growing even more. “People I’m employing now can see that what we’re doing in this building is the future,” says John Harvey. “We’re no longer just an island – it is literally cross-continental.” Harvey and the rest of the team are not the only ones looking east for the future. Sony Image Works has set up shop in Mumbai, and Framestore CFC’s Tim Webber admits that they too are seeing the effect of the Indian market, though, he notes, “They’re not really competing with what we do at the moment. They couldn’t do a creature yet. Of course, the worry is that

Napalm 28 Weeks Later (2007) Clear Post

“The flames are there,” reveals John Harvey, “but we’ve added in the exploding windows, some debris, and beefed them up. That was a nightmare for production because I said, ‘Okay, we need 100-metres of flames, we need two cranes with 35mm cameras on them’, but they did it.”

as time goes on they will be able to do that. We need to ensure we stay ahead of the game.” Britain’s CGI industry is maturing and expanding, but although skills and expectations change, the enthusiasm for the work remains. People cheerfully admit to the antisocial hours and talk of shrinking budgets and ever-tighter deadlines with an air of masochistic pleasure because essentially they love the jobs they do and the community they work in. “It’s funny,” says Webber, “people who come from other places like LA generally say that here in Soho it’s incredibly competitive and yet an incredibly close knit community as well. We’re all here together and a lot of people have moved from one company to another, so we’ll all go down to the pub and chat together. It’s a funny mixture of two extremes really.” Funny and potent. As Soho’s pubs continue to pull pints for CG experts from around the world, the British industry is in rude health n

048 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

Armoured Bears The Golden Compass (2007) Framestore CFC

Says Webber: “We’ve got fights between bears, and it’s hard to get so many creatures looking absolutely believable in one shot. To get that many bears interacting with each other and with humans who have been shot separately is tricky.”

050 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

As a character layout artist, Ivaylo Anguelov has worked on everything from CGI cows to the topsecret black ops of The Simpsons Movie. We caught up with him to ask, ‘Where do you draw the line?’ Words by Neon Kelly

Here’s a scenario: you’re at a Hollywood party,

At best, credit for success is given to an entire

and character models will be designed on

the most exclusive gig in town. You’re a small-

studio (‘Another great Pixar film’) while largely

computers, creating a reusable selection

time player who bagged a lucky invite – you’ve

ignoring the contributions of individuals. Then

of basic elements. In either case, there’s

downed a drink or two for luck, now you’re

again, there’s the argument that this accurately

a huge amount of cleaning-up, polishing,

trying to work the room.

reflects the group nature of the task.

and general fine-tuning. It’s particularly vital

You’ve already clocked The Director –

“You’re not there to display your own

to nail the timing of dialogue and actions

he’s the one with the beard and the baseball

style,” argues Anguelov, “you’re there as

– the slightest error may lead to hours spent

cap, holding sway over an adoring crowd.

part of a team, helping to create a project

re-recording the soundtrack, or starting an

The man in the Armani suit with the Lewinski

of a particular style, to which a trained artist

animation from scratch.

cigar must be The Producer. And that neurotic

can adjust fairly quickly. A symphony

guy in the corner, the one with years of pain

orchestra is assembled of various eccentric

to sacrifice the artist’s ego. “You can’t have

etched across his face, he must be The

musicians, each with an individual style of

100 artists all giving creative input about

Writer, correct?

performing and composing when it comes

major design choices or story points; you’d

to their personal music, but under the baton

end up with a huge mess,” says Anguelov.

hello. You introduce yourself, then ask your

of a talented conductor, the Boléro sounds

“Still, there’s undeniable satisfaction when

new chum what he does for a living. “I’m a

impeccable, don’t it?”

you see a scene that you’ve created on the

Suddenly a stranger walks up and says

character layout artist,” he replies. That’s right

Like their live action equivalents, an

A career of this sort requires the ability

big screen – yes, under the big man’s direction

– you just soiled your pants. Because you have

animated film begins with an idea, which

– but one that emerged under your mouse

absolutely no idea what this person does to

is then turned into a script. Once this is in

or pencil, with your small fraction of creative

earn their crust.

place a storyboard is drawn up and a rough

input, which hopefully got approved and

soundtrack is recorded, a combination of

made it into the final cut.”

“A character layout artist is basically a key animator,” explains Ivaylo Anguelov, the man

dialogue and a pared-down version of the

you just insulted. Nope – still drawing a blank.

score. These two elements are then united

Animation demands a knack for remaining

“You draw the key poses for the characters in

to create a ‘leica reel’, or animatic – a series

detached, strong artistic skills and a tolerance

a given scene, based on a storyboard and a

of stills which demonstrate the way the

for long work hours. When the money is

voice track. You create the action, acting and

narrative will play out. From here, animators

good, it’s great – but employment can be

overall composition of the shot. After that an

draw up what are known as ‘line tests’

sporadic and hard to predict. “Is there a

in-between animator finishes the animation to

– very basic representations of the story in

constant flow of work? Definitely not. The

its final, ‘smooth’ look.”

motion, usually drawn in pencil. These rough

comparison to actors is a pretty fair one, we

animations are gradually used to replace the

have a similar lack of job security. Of course,

in the number of animated films on general

stills in the leica reel, eventually creating a

animators lack another thing as well – those

release, yet most people don’t have a clue

first draft of the film.

residual cheques.”

In recent years there has been a boom

about how these projects are brought into

What happens next depends on the

It’s certainly not the easiest of lifestyles.

Still, a job this tricky must surely

being. Even when dealing with smash hits

project. More traditional, two-dimensional

command respect from the rest of the film

like Monsters Inc. or the Shrek series, media

films require background artists to paint

industry? “Well, amigo, we are the pimps of

coverage tends to focus on the stars who lend

sets, over which will be laid thousands of

the town. Hot chicks are drooling in our

their voices to proceedings, rather than the

individual cels, painted onto transparent

footsteps, rappers are writing songs about

technical experts who actually run the show.

acetate. In the realm of 3D work, both sets

us. It’s pretty sick.” n 051

052 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

right now, It’s the most successful animation studio in america, famous for its creativity and imagination. But behind the walls of Pixar palace something feels... wrong.

Words by Victoria Kettner. illustrations by mark taplin. It’s the large wrought iron gates that do it. They stand there, twice head-height, at the entrance to a grand 21-acre site at the east end of San Francisco’s Bay Bridge, in the small town of Emeryville, California. They instantly recall so many iconic gates of the collective consciousness. They speak of the opening-reel gates in Citizen Kane. And they hint at the entrance to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. And perhaps, most bizarrely, and against all intentions, they ape the doors of Auschwitz. Only here, instead of ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’, the metal lettering above the gates simply spells one lone intimidating word – ‘Pixar’. ▼

053

That first analogy, of course, is accurate. For at the heart of Pixar

Here, the emphasis on ‘fun’ and the need to wring every single drop

resides the Charles Foster Kane of computer animation – John

of ‘creativity’ from staff is exhausting to witness. Everything from

Lasseter, a 50-year-old former Lucasfilm Ltd employee who now runs

mindless doodling to extra-curricular activity is seen as a possible

a billion dollar cartoon-making machine while holding the title ‘Chief

source of collaborative input. It’s as if a collaborator can’t even nip

Creative Officer’ of the entire Disney empire. Pixar too is Wonka-like

off to the Pixar toilets for a mid-afternoon wank without being forced

in its conspicuous emphasis on wacky, good-times productivity, zany

to transform it into a script pitch, an animatic sequence, or at least a

employees and unfettered creativity. Most important, however, is the

quirky character idea.

palpable sense that rigid ideology is king, that Lasseter is in fact a dictator of sorts, and that work, this work, doesn’t set anyone free.

After a couple of hours on the inside, you get it. Pixar employees, possibly all 700 of them, seem to be remarkably ‘on message’. They show you round the

immaculately preserved grounds – from the football pitch to the

volleyball court, to the swimming pool, the outdoor amphitheatre and the giant indoor atrium where oil-painted portraits from Pixar hits like Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc. and The Incredibles adorn the walls. Incidentally, later, Lasseter will tell you that his workers are not called ‘employees’ but ‘collaborators’, because they are here to collaborate in every way possible on his movies. In the meantime you meet these same collaborators at their computer screens, in their darkened rooms, and they tell you that, in the Pixar universe, it’s all about having fun. Because the fun, they say, will find its way into the movies. They speak in handy idiomatic bites. They say things like, “Story is king,” “Trust the process,” and “There is no, ‘No but’, there is only ‘Yes and’.” And yet, for all the emphasis on creativity and unfettered freedoms, there is something slightly stifling about camp Pixar. For a start, to the outsider, there seems to be no physical space for dissent – the collaborators are housed around the perimeter of the main building and then, after an epic day’s rendering, are simply disgorged into the central atrium where they must play and frolic on the foosball tables under the watchful eye of Big Brother Lasseter.

054 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

Everywhere you look, the dead hand of formula seems to be creeping round the throat of originality. Lasseter himself marches around the building in his trademark Loud Hawaiian Shirt like an advert for his own off-kilter genius. He is treated with something approaching trembling awe by his collaborators, some of whom are also clad in wacky shirts – none of which, it must be noted, are as loud as Lasseter’s. Rotund and amiable in person, he has a certain twitchy energy that suggests a knife-edge balance between avuncularity and bullishness. And now that he is effectively responsible for the $7.4 billion paid by Disney last year for the purchase of Pixar, the bullishness is perhaps just that tiny bit in the ascendant.

For instance, he has no problem with formula. “For every laugh

Meanwhile the computer animation market has become fatally

there should be a tear,” he says, outlining the emotional journey of

overcrowded. In 1996 Toy Story was competing against the likes of 2-D

characters like Woody and Nemo. “I believe in that. I believe in making

stinkers Space Jam and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The novelty then

things stunningly beautiful, and having action that’s gripping, and

was certainly as much in the form as the content. But now the likes of

having great characters that you fall in love with.” He believes too, he

Chicken Little and Happy Feet have proven how dull this same form can

says, in self-improvement, in the growth of the main character, and in

become. Lasseter himself, belying his golden touch, even produced

how he changes. He believes in international markets. “I realised after

this year’s flop CG animation Meet the Robinsons. While Pixar’s next

A Bug’s Life that our market is, really, the world,” he says. “And we’ve

flagship flick, Ratatouille, the Paris-set story of a rat who, er, likes

worked really hard to make our films as international as possible.”

cooking, is, according to animation expert and Disney observer Jim

He believes in frames that take over 200 hours to render (as some

Hill, a desperate salvage job on a movie that was already going down

of those in Cars did), he believes in staying true to the integrity of

in flames. Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles, was parachuted in to

the material that you’re animating, and most of all he believes that

rescue the project after original director Jan Pinkava walked, although,

computer animation is merely a sideshow to Pixar’s greatest strength

in fairness, early word on the film from America is strong..

– storytelling: “Pixar is not successful because we use computers,” he says. “Pixar is successful because we tell good stories.”

What all this means is not that Pixar is on the brink of collapse and

Which is fine in theory, but the cracks in the Pixar methodology have begun to show on screen.

eventually made top box office dollar, which Ratatouille will no doubt

that Lasseter should hand the $7 billion back to Disney. Indeed, Cars emulate. But if Lasseter really wants Pixar’s movies to fulfil its early promise, or if he wants to achieve the auteur status of his hero Hayao Miyazaki, he needs to dump this stultifying obsession with the Pixar method, the Pixar universe and the wacky, zany irony that permeates the Pixar brand like a sickness. In short, he needs simply to return to the naivety and innocence of ‘Once Upon a Time’ storytelling. Getting rid of those gates would be a good start n

Last year’s Cars was critically reviled

not because of its computer animation, but because of its

meaningless story. The formula was there, the anthropomorphic boxes were all ticked, and the journey of a race car from fameobsessed egotist to altruistic nature lover seemed destined to resonate. But the film was crass and overconfident, bloated with ironic quips, visual nods and gags, the result of far too many collaborative sessions in Emeryville. Pixar movies feel increasingly like overworked sit-com gag sessions, rather than hermetically sealed stories in their own right.

055

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 movie-going 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.

062 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

Lady Chatterley RELEASED August 24

Times have changed

since DH Lawrence’s infamous novel scandalised society in 1928. But if modern morality has little to fear from this tale of the affair between an aristocrat, Constance (Marina Hands), and her husband’s gamekeeper, Parkin (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h), what does Pascale Ferran hope to achieve with this new adaptation? If it’s a demonstration of her visual virtuosity then by all means take a bow. This is a lush, sensuous film full of vivid landscapes and the mossy, musty scent of the forest, somehow reminiscent of Lawrence’s near contemporary Thomas Hardy. Like Hardy, Ferran believes in

DIRECTED BY Pascale Ferran STARRING Marina Hands, Jean-Louis Coulloc’h, Hippolyte Girardot

the poetry of nature, especially as a mirror of human passions. This is a tale told in frozen fields under brooding skies and rolling thunder. Lawrence’s famous scene in which the lovers cover their bodies in flowers is almost Edenlike in its innocent beauty. But there are problems in paradise. Ferran is prone to making her point with heavyhanded symbolism, especially in numerous scenes in which Constance’s paralysed husband is cruelly contrasted with her vigorous new lover. When it gets down to the nitty gritty, however, Lady Chatterley lacks an erotic spark. Constance’s sexual revolution amounts to little

more than digging splinters out of intimate places, and call it realism if you like, but the look of panic in Parkin’s eyes when she starts to make herself at home shows that some things, at least, never change. Though intertitles, voice-over and repeated fades give the film the intelligent, chapter-like impression of a novel, tonally it’s a strange beast, caught uneasily between France and England. While retaining the book’s original milieu (miners, class struggle, holidaying in far-away Paris) everybody twitters on in French without batting an eyelid. Worst of all, Parkin’s ‘tu/vous’ is subtitled as ‘yer’ – perhaps in some kind of

ridiculous homage to Sean Bean’s career-making TV performance. Despite hitting these shores with a big reputation and a clutch of Césars, Lady Chatterley is anything but an affair to remember. Matt Bochenski

Anticipation. A muchlauded award-winner in France. Four Enjoyment. Strong

performances and moments of beauty, but ponderous nonetheless. Two

In Retrospect. Has nothing relevant to say to a modern audience. Two 063

Private Fears in Public Places Few other filmmakers

can boast a career as artistically vital as Alain Resnais. Despite the diversity of his output, what unites the 85-year-old Frenchman’s work is his interest in the fuzzy distinctions between appearance and reality. His latest film is no exception. Derived, like his Smoking/No Smoking, from an Alan Ayckbourn play, Private Fears probes the sometimes wildly opposing faces people adopt in different situations. Mild-mannered estate agent Thierry (André Dussollier) is struggling to repress his feelings for devoutly religious

064 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

RELEASED July 20

DIRECTED BY Alain Resnais STARRING Sabine Azéma, Lambert Wilson, Isabelle Carré

colleague Charlotte (Sabine Azéma), who lends him videotapes containing risqué footage of her. Then there’s Thierry’s live-in sister, Gaëlle (Isabelle Carré), secretly looking for love in the lonely hearts ads, and Thierry’s client, Nicole (Laura Morante), whose ex-soldier fiancé, Dan (Lambert Wilson), would rather booze than find a job. Lastly, there’s bartender Lionel (Pierre Arditi) who presides over Dan’s favourite haunt and supports a bed-ridden, foulmouthed father, who Charlotte cares for in the evenings. What sounds like a thankless

merry-go-round is brought alive by Resnais’ skilful staging. His elegant use of porous partitions – glass walls, sliding doors, curtains – to reflect the divisions between and within characters shows his command of mise-enscène, as does a theatrically long take of Gaëlle’s changing face as she falls for Dan on a blind date, or a delightful exchange in which Thierry and Charlotte giggle like school kids. Fairytale snow falls incessantly, adding an odd, dreamlike quality that further emphasises the flesh-and-blood actors and the flux of changing

emotions. Indeed, in a movie about characters being more than they first appear, you’ll come to relish their transformations. Nick Funnell

Anticipation.

Resnais’ recent offerings haven’t been to all tastes. Two

Enjoyment. Masterfully assembled, it’s touching and compelling. Four

In Retrospect. Not one he’ll be remembered for, but a cut above. Three

Filthy nihilist or wanton genius? Bruno Dumont, director of Flanders, answers the questions that matter. LWLies: Flanders is a war film in the same way that 29 Palms is a love story and L’Humanité a detective story. Are you influenced by genre? Dumont: I try to subvert genre. The spectator needs to be surprised before he can sink into a state of meditation. It needs to be subtle but surprising; known and yet unknown. LWLies: Was it inspired by Iraq? Dumont: It is inspired by the current war, but as well as being a real war it is symbolic. This war is kept quite abstract to let the spectator be introspective. I am using the contemporary war because you can’t film an interior war. All my films are about war in some way. LWLies: Did you meet with soldiers before making the film? Dumont: No. I didn’t want reality, I wanted the opposite. Because it’s a symbolic war, I needed something that was fake. There is so much documentation about the war, if I followed that route people would think it was like a documentary. I needed it to be realistic, but not real. LWLies: Do you consider yourself to be a realist? Dumont: No. I think the realist tradition is more like Ken Loach; cinema that is political, or sociopolitical. My cinema is more expressionist, philosophical, symbolist. The problem is, because I work with the appearance of realism, people think that it’s realist, but it’s not. LWLies: What are your main inspirations? Dumont: I have been inspired by Greek and German philosophy; philosophers who write on the representation of truth. I love Shakespeare because of this. My two main influences are Shakespeare and Bach. LWLies: And in film? Dumont: I consider myself a student of the past. Robert Bresson, Rossellini, Bergman – these are the people who have most impressed me. These are artists of the cinema. You can’t talk about art and cinema nowadays. LWLies: Some people hate your films. Why do you think that might be? Dumont: People are really affected by my films, but only afterwards. A few days later they can say it is a masterpiece or they hate it. I would prefer people to hate my films than to come away feeling nothing. At least hate is a strong emotion. LWLies: What are the odds of you making a comedy? Dumont: I would love to make a comedy. I love Shakespeare, and he is the greatest comedy writer of all time. So yes, I would make a comedy but I am not ready yet. Dan Stewart There’s an actual transcript of this very interview at www.littlewhitelies.co.uk.

Flanders DIRECTED BY Bruno Dumont STARRING Adélaïde Leroux, Samuel Boidin, Henri Cretel

Bruno Dumont’s films

are about as art house as it gets. Improvised dialogue? Check. Amateur actors? Check. Unsimulated sex? Check. The only thing missing, at least in Flanders’ case, is a soul. A monosyllabic farmer, Demester (Samuel Boidin), tends the grey fields of northern France. Occasionally he has joyless, barnyard sex with his nextdoor neighbour Barbe (Adélaïde Leroux), but, tired of being used like a wordless animal, Barbe turns to the more refined Blondel (Henri Cretel). It’s a ménage à trois: so far, so French. But Dumont’s films are about subverting both genres and expectations. Flanders comes alive when Demester and Blondel are packed off to an unnamed desert war – perhaps it’s Iraq, though we might as easily be in Afghanistan or Algeria. The point is: war is hell. Dumont’s soldiers behave like animals – raping and killing with the same blank nonchalance they showed wandering about the French countryside – before being gruesomely despatched by the desert militia. This is probably the director’s

RELEASED July 6

best-looking film, full of washedout landscapes of rural France and burning yellow desert. In spite of his aversion to spectacle, Dumont has an eye for beauty, whether it’s the army patrol perched on a mountainside overlooking the plains, or Barbe making her way through the winter snow at sunset. The problem is that nothing in Flanders seems real – not the war, not the characters, not the suffering that Dumont puts them through. Everything is so selfconsciously artistic that as a viewer you never connect to events on screen. Perhaps this distance is supposed to give the audience room for reflection. Instead, it simply creates inertia and finally apathy. Dan Stewart

Anticipation. A philosophical treatise on the nature of war. With fucking. Three Enjoyment. It

sometimes looks beautiful, but by Christ is it difficult. Two

In Retrospect. Yet another endurance test from Dumont. Two 065

The Golden Door With fairytale designs on a land in which carrots grow to the size of small children and the trees bare banknotes from their branches, Salvatore Mancuso (Vincenzo Amato) decides that now is the time to escape from his hovel in rural Sicily and make for this strange new world. Assembling his two brothers and elderly mother, he embarks on a perilous journey across stormy seas only to be met with a mixture of disdain and derision upon reaching his final destination: America. The Golden Door is the third feature from Italian director Emanuele Crialese, and though its story comprises a relatively narrow slice of recent social history, its true intention is to explore one of

066 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

DIRECTED BY Emanuele Crialese STARRING Charlotte Gainsbourg, Vincenzo Amato, Aurora Quattrocchi

RELEASED June 29

the broadest human-interest themes imaginable: the birth of civilisation. If the first half of the film presents a society whose principles are based on magic, suspicion and a skewed form of earthy logic, it is only to emphasise the prejudices inherent in American notions of cultural imperialism. The film’s conclusion is set in a house of social assimilation where prospective citizens are subjected to a series of Darwinian tests by officials who drop racial purity soundbites that prefigure Mein Kampf. They want to be sure that those who finally reach the mythical ‘Golden Door’ will be of sound stock. “You are seeds to be planted in a more fertile land,” announces one of Salvatore’s

friends before he undertakes this cultural exodus, but he isn’t informed that it’s also a land which is thoroughly raked and weeded before its seeds are allowed to flourish. Standing out from Crialese’s lucid vision is Agnès Godard’s elemental cinematography (reminiscent of her work on Clair Denis’ Beau Travail), which perfectly captures the tonal drift from the rugged topography of the naked Sicilian hillsides to the oppressive cast-iron schooner in which the Mancusos naïvely glide to their land of milk and honey. Indeed, as with his underrated previous film Respiro, Crialese uses swimming as a metaphor for rootlessness and loss, and in the film’s heartbreaking final

shot (gorgeously synched with Nina Simone’s ‘Sinnerman’) we see a swarm of émigrés breast-stroke aimlessly through a sea of milk, without a drop of honey in their sights. David Jenkins

Anticipation. Had a decent run on the festival circuit with good word-of-mouth reviews. Three Enjoyment. A tiny,

tiny bit episodic, but highly pleasurable nonetheless. Four

In Retrospect. Funny, moving and gorgeously photographed with a moral anger burning at its heart. Five

buy it now RELEASED July 20

Society has gone to

shit – forget AD, we live in an era best termed ‘AP’ (After Paris), where celeb culture has emulsified the brains of the young, leading to the apocalyptic downfall of man. Chelsea Magan, a 16-year-old Manhattanite, is one of the victims. With wholesome role models like horny Hilton and breakdown Britney adorning her bedroom walls, Chelsea’s decision to sell her virginity on eBay is, like, a totally awesome idea. She’ll spend the cash on a hot Gucci bag, and she’ll no longer be the only girl who hasn’t ‘done it’. Haha, lol ;-) Buy It Now is a faux documentary done right. The first

DIRECTED BY Antonio Campos STARRING Chelsea Logan, Rosemarie DeWitt, Christopher McCann

half, a montage of home video shabbiness, will have you asking, ‘Is this for real?’ – thanks, in no small part, to flawless improv from break-out talent Chelsea Logan. The second half, meanwhile, delves headfirst into the seediest of realities, feeding voyeuristic minds with a dramatisation of the ‘purchase’. Sifting through a heady mix of self-harm, teen therapy, illegal drugs (the problem), prescription drugs (the solution), absent dads and mindless moms, director Antonio Campos does a shitload of finger-pointing without laying blame at any one door. By shedding light on a social climate where this not only could happen,

but actually does, his message is clear: the kids are not alright. Andrea Kurland

Anticipation. Okay,

so is this for real or what? Two

Enjoyment. Totally messed up, yet

frighteningly plausible. Three

In Retrospect.

The Pussycat Dolls must burn on top of a flaming heap of celeb mags. It’s society’s only salvation, seriously. Three

Daratt DIRECTED BY Mahamat-Saleh Haroun STARRING Ali Barkai, Youssouf Djaoro, Djibril Ibrahim

In the immediate

aftermath of a civil war, Atim (Ali Barkai), a young man from rural Chad, sets out to find his father’s killer, Nassara (Youssouf Djaoro), and avenge his death. After travelling to capital city N’Djamena, Atim finds the elderly Nassara running a bakery. The two immediately strike up a skewed relationship; Nassara sees Atim as a surrogate son, while Atim becomes increasingly disgusted with himself for growing close to the man he has sworn to kill. You don’t have to look too far to find the film’s central metaphor – the pressure on the younger generation to continue the cycle of violence, and the importance of breaking it. Atim is a reluctant avenging angel, and his childish satisfaction as he

RELEASED July 27

bakes a batch of bread is a sign of what he might become were he not bound by vengeance. Yet the older generation stick to the assertion that, “A man needs a gun,” and the cycle continues. Director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun – a survivor of the 14-year war in the ’60s and ’70s – shows an Africa very far from the groomed colonial lawns of recent war tourist The Last King of Scotland. This is a country as seen by those who live there: a dustbowl of dirt tracks and gutter merchants still bearing the scars of conflict. Haroun’s cinematic language is as foreign as the country of his birth. His frames are carefully composed, and the pace reflects the meandering and sometimes

frustrating nature of African life; not for him the whip and crackle of Western editing and composition but rather stately, reflective filmmaking. The result is a beautifully understated study of male relationships. Its tempo may test your patience, but if you disengage your Hollywood-trained expectations and immerse yourself in it, Daratt will be a richly edifying experience. Dan Stewart

Anticipation. Could be dull, and where exactly is Chad again? Two Enjoyment. It’s

certainly slow, but as it goes on you’re drawn in. Three

In Retrospect. A redemptive experience refreshingly unbound by genre. Four 067

Amber Heard, the hotterthan-hell star of All The Boys Love Many Lane, actually talked to us. Over the phone. Dammit. LWLies: The film has the same sense of aloofness and alienation to it that was there in The Chumscrubber. Why do you think that’s so prevalent right now? Heard: I think that it’s art imitating life – it’s very relevant. It’s very alienating to be a different kind of person today and live in a teenage environment. It’s part of life right now.

All The Boys Love Mandy Lane It’s not just the boys

who love Mandy Lane (Amber Heard); Jonathan Levine’s camera seems pretty damn enamoured too, forever Baywatch-ing this inscrutable cutie with the flashy, fetishising trills of a shampoo advert. Exactly why Mandy causes her classmates such trouser tizzies that they jump off roofs to impress her is just one of many unanswered questions in Jacob Forman’s script. It seems all you need is an air of virginal mystery and a decent rack to inspire a horror film these days. After a promising (and largely irrelevant) prologue in which a Stifler-like suitor pays a high price for a pop at Mandy’s ‘lane’, our heroine accepts an invitation to a raunchy ranch party where the greatest dangers seem to be the barbed comments and barely concealed libidos of her peers. Indeed, little looks likely to interrupt the keg-stealing, skinnydipping merriment until one of the assembled sluts and stoners finds themselves on the wrong end of a shotgun blowjob. Nasty – or at least it would be if the filmmakers knew when to let what lies beneath the film’s benign, bottleblonde exterior explode into seething life.

068 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

RELEASED August 10 DIRECTED BY Jonathan Levine STARRING Amber Heard, Anson Mount, Michael Welch

So desperate not to blow their collective load are Levine and Forman that they remain content to tool around with these telegenic teens, hopscotching over genre clichés (red herrings, power cuts, loud noises) in lieu of the sort of postmodern pay-off that genre benchmarks such as Wolf Creek should have put to bed forever. When the Big Twist finally happens, it sends the narrative into a tailspin from which no amount of crap- and corpsestrewn finales can save it, revealing that what purported to be an indolent, intermittent horror is actually about something completely different. Something that, on closer scrutiny, makes no sense whatsoever. Back to slasher school for all concerned. Matt Glasby

Anticipation. The thinking man’s April Fools’ Day? Three Enjoyment. It’s like

American Pie without the pastry humping – or the tension. Two

In Retrospect. Drifts from the mind like a playground crush. One

LWLies: How difficult was it playing a part like Mandy Lane where you’re really exploring that kind of pathology? Heard: It’s very difficult. I did a lot of studying for the part of Mandy Lane – I read a lot of books and I watched a lot of documentaries about teen killers. It’s very difficult to get your head into. LWLies: There are lots of hot, young, blond actresses in Hollywood right now – what makes you special? Heard: Well, there aren’t that many young, blond actresses in Hollywood right now. When you’re in the audition process you see the same faces there every time. It’s a very small group of girls, and all of us can actually act. It makes a change from all the girls you see who are trained to be pretty and nothing else. That’s why I’ve looked for roles that are not the pretty, popular girls that everyone loves. LWLies: Is there a degree to which you’re walking a tightrope between the kind of roles that you want to play and the kind that people expect you to play? Heard: I’m constantly walking a tightrope. LWLies: How do you manage that balance? Do you find yourself thinking, ‘Fuck it – I’ll just play this dumb airhead for the cash because it’s easy’, or do you have to stick to your guns? Heard: I have to stick to my guns because if I just took the parts that I was given I would be a mediocre actress. LWLies: Do you feel any pressure about the way you look? Heard: Well, my whole life there have been people expecting me to be a certain way because of the way I look, expecting certain things out of me, expecting me to be a certain intelligence. As I’ve got older I’ve put less pressure on myself. LWLies: How has life changed for you since breaking into movies? Are you all about the house in the hills and the designer clothes from here on in? Is Lindsay Lohan your new best mate? Heard: No, it’s never going to be like that for me. I mean, I may enjoy myself, but I don’t need to live like that and I don’t need the consequences of that lifestyle. Matt Bochenski

Sketches of Frank Gehry DIRECTED BY Sydney Pollack STARRING Frank Gehry, Barry Diller, Michael Eisner RELEASED June 29

Levent Kerimol, a final year student at the Architecture Association in London, casts a professional eye over Sydney Pollack’s portrait of an artist.

Frank Gehry has been

enshrined in the international league of ‘starchitects’, an image-stoking cult of personality that dates back to the Renaissance. This documentary examining the Great One’s life and work – most notably the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Disney Concert Hall in LA – is thus in thrall to the notion of the architect as artistic genius. Throughout, Pollack’s film appeals to the mystification of Gehry’s talent: a grandmother’s sack of wood, a handwriting horoscope, a rabbi who foretold of his ‘golden hands’, and discussions with the therapist who allegedly delved into the subconscious of his genius. Expert witnesses (Bob Geldof, Dennis Hopper, etc.) are brought forward to attest to his greatness, which single-handedly revolutionised the linear confines of architecture, or so Pollack would have us believe. To its credit, Sketches inadvertently captures the bumbling character of Gehry and, with certain irony, reveals him to be a rather humble and unassuming star. Scenes in the office portray the gradual and collaborative process of design, no doubt familiar to all architects great or small. Indeed, his interest in the spaces in and around the building contrasts with the common criticism that Gehry’s structures are oversized sculptures which are difficult to inhabit. And the point

that good architecture requires good clients again keeps his grandeur in check. But as one exuberant folly leads to another, and millionaire patrons and museums expect ever more expressive buildings for their buck, the film shies away from the idea that Gehry is as much a commercial designer label as he is an artist. Put plainly, the orthodoxy of the film is one-sided in its argument for Gehry’s greatness. The lone naysayer is an art critic with a worryingly effeminate accent, painted in darkness with a stone backdrop reminiscent of Blofeld’s lair.

In concentrating on the man, however, the film misses the opportunity to discuss the work and its implications: what does chain-link fencing say about the paranoia of the wealthy? How have attempts to replicate the ‘Bilbao effect’ left many post-industrial towns littered with white elephants in the name of regeneration? Admittedly, such questions aren’t as exciting as trying to present the architect as celebrity. But in missing these opportunities for a fuller discussion, Sketches lacks the clout of Nathaniel Kahn’s recent My Architect, which told a better story by intertwining

different personalities and their journey of architectural experience. Levent Kerimol

Anticipation.

Architecture documentary? Eh? When’s Transformers out again? Two

Enjoyment. Well wrought and innovatively shot, if a little plodding at times. Three

In Retrospect. A missed opportunity to examine the work of a man loved and hated in equal measure. Two 069

Shrek the Third

DIRECTED BY Chris Miller STARRING Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz, Eddie Murphy RELEASED June 29

The promise of

summer continues to evaporate with yet another cynical ‘threequel’. What to say about Shrek the Third? Clearly, the eight-man writing team wasn’t sure. Devoid of ideas, they decided that what kids really want to see is an ogre dealing with his mid-life crisis. What we’re left with is a $100million popcorn flick with a preachy subtext about right-wing family values. Yeah! They’ll love that shit. In fact, shit is precisely what they will love. As ever, Shrek is rammed full of fart gags and the kind of pop cultural asides that will be embarrassingly dated by the time the film hits DVD. Running at a merciful 92minutes, it could have been worse, but even at that length you’ll be begging for the end long before the final reel assaults you with a woeful song-and-dance number. Enjoy the respite – Shrek 4 will soon be dragging its rotting green carcass into a cinema near you. Matt Bochenski

Anticipation. Possibly the most overrated franchise of all time (after James Bond). Two

070 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

Enjoyment. One point for every good joke. So... One

In Retrospect. Shrek

the turd. One

That’s what we thought, but hell – what do we know, anyway? There’s only one opinion that counts on a film like this, and it’s definitely not ours. We found a child, surgically removed her from a bag of popcorn, and asked her what she thought.

My Shrek the Third Review by Maisie Pomphrey, aged five-and-a-third I really liked it when the Disney princesses started fighting and the Queen head-butted the wall. My favourite character was Fiona. It was very sad when the frog died. The worst bit was when Rapunzel fell in love with Prince Charming, and when he stuck the sword into Shrek’s tummy – that was a bit mean. The worst people were the two baddie trees, and the beginning was great with the Prince galloping everywhere.

die hard 4.0

RELEASED July 4

DIRECTED BY Len Wiseman STARRING Bruce Willis, Justin Long, Timothy Olyphant

It’s ironic that in a

summer ruled by nameless nerds and their CGI creations, the season’s most authentic action spectacular should focus on the threat of an ex-CIA computer geek. John McClane (Bruce Willis) is still still a police officer, still having family problems and once again in the wrong place at the wrong time. As he tries to patch things up with his daughter (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), an impressive feat of improbability draws the detective into a national crisis instigated by avenging angel, Thomas Gabriel. After rescuing counter geek Matt Farrell (Justin long) from a breathless shoot out that grabs you by the scruff of the neck and screams, ‘There ain’t no CGI here, bitch!’ the pair set out to thwart the evil genius trying to shut down the nation. Die Hard 4.0 sets off at warp speed, ticking most of the action/adventure boxes that count. Len Wiseman takes a huge step up from Underworld, throwing all sorts of shit at the screen from a stunning tunnel pile-up, to exploding helicopters, to a free-running kung-fu expert beating the hell out of McClane in classic Die Hard style. What the film lacks, however, is sophistication. It desperately wants to be a contemporary political allegory, but all we’re really taught is that us lousy Gen X slackers don’t know how lucky we are and need to belt the fuck up and respect the police, mmmkay? As the far-too-hot-for-acomputer-geek Gabriel, Timothy Olyphant has motive but no charisma. He makes all the usual cock-sure pronouncements (“You have no idea who I am or what I’m capable of!”) but compared to Hans Gruber (“Who are you? Just another American who saw

too many movies as a child. Another orphan of a bankrupt culture who thinks he’s John Wayne.”) he’s a nobody. But we’ll always have Bruce. Wise-ass Bruce. Smirking Bruce. Shit-eating Bruce. Who else would drop a car on the girlfriend of the world’s most dangerous man then tell him that the last time he saw her she had “an SUV up her ass”? The problem, though, is that this is Die Hard with its nuts cut off. For all that the action scenes have the metal-on-metal wallop of real life (except for a True Lies interlude in which the film flirts with heavy CGI and comes a cropper) Willis and Wiseman have little in the way of artistic freedom. Though the body count is high, the lack of bloody squibs becomes jarring after a while. Oddly, it looks like the decision to tone things down may have been taken mid-shoot. A lot of the dialogue has clearly been over-dubbed and is noticeably off from what the characters are saying on screen. This is a worrying trend – it’s like paying to watch an ITV edit in the cinema – but it does hint at the possibility that Fox might realise a beefed-up version. As it stands, the producers had the opportunity to make a tough, gritty, intelligent action thriller for adults. They got half way there then decided they wanted an action adventure for teenagers. Surprising? No. But still disappointing. Jonathan Williams

Anticipation. Hope over experience. Four Enjoyment. Bruce is tough as fuck. Three

In Retrospect. Not the Die Hard film we hoped for, but still a cut above the action crop. Three 071

Transylvania DIRECTED BY Tony Gatlif STARRING Amira Casar, Asia Argento, Birol Ünel

Amidst a barren and

inhospitable vision of modern-day Transylvania comes a love story about two people who don’t want to fall in love. Both are halfcrazed, emotional, spiritually confused products of their environment looking for answers to questions they can’t articulate. Director and writer Tony Gatlif offers little in the way of dialogue, plot or aesthetic appeal, but Transylvania is very much a film of its place, with a cultural message that resonates through a sea of chaos. We follow Zingarina (Asia Argento) and Tchangalo (Birol

072 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

RELEASED August 10

Ünel), two lost souls looking for a purpose. Zingarina is heartbroken and wants to escape the world. Tchangalo escaped a long time ago and is starting to realise that he might never make it back. It’s at this point that their journey together begins. It seems strange to say that Transylvania is driven by character, but actions speak louder than words in what becomes a road movie without end. The story gets lost in parts along the way (Gatlif had no script and only a vague idea of where the film was going while shooting), but there is hope beneath the

helplessness. Hope and music. This film about spiritual exploration has a musical soul. Gatlif and collaborator Delphine Mantoulet spent six months in Transylvania sourcing local musicians, and they use music in almost every scene, never in the background, always inescapable, even when you wish it wasn’t. As one particularly relevant line belts out, “Music is for life, not for destruction”. For Gatlif, music represents life in all its guises: inspiring and passionate, as well as soul destroying and oppressive. Music is the message, and the

message is that this film represents the climax of Tony Gatlif’s years of cinematic explorations of gypsy culture in Eastern Europe. Jonathan Williams

Anticipation. The lure of another dynamic Asia Argento performance. Two Enjoyment. Confused

passion and twisted emotions make for a captivating ride. Three

In Retrospect.

Life and love set to rhythm. Three

An interview with Tony Gatlif, director of Transylvania. LWLies: Transylvania sees you returning to familiar themes; do you feel that the Roma people are still misrepresented in cinema? Gatlif: Yes, Roma culture isn’t represented anywhere, not even in music. Gypsy music is a fanfare, it’s like a dance. In cinema, there is no gypsy music or gypsies. Today, it’s very important to speak about them. LWLies: The musicians in the film are fantastic, where did you find them? Gatlif: I wrote the script at the same time as I was writing the music. We chose 80 native musicians, put them into the studio and played for a few weeks to make the music for the film. LWLies: What did you say to the lead actors, Asia and Birol, about their relationship? It’s a complicated dynamic. Gatlif: I didn’t tell them they had a love story, but they ended up creating it. I like to destabilise actors. It’s necessary to do this – if not it’s too rigid. LWLies: Do you think there’s a message of hope in the film? Gatlif: Yes. Birol doesn’t want to love, he wants to drink and go about his life. But Asia’s character falls in love very quickly and with a great passion. It’s always Amira’s character who brings her out of it. When Amira leaves her she closes herself off from everything. That’s the opposite of what happens to Birol. He’s taken over by this love without wanting it. LWLies: That scene actually has a great line – the violinist says, “Music is for life, not for destruction”. It puts the film in perspective. Gatlif: The film leads up to that one scene. I needed to do everything else in the film to get to that one line. Music has to be respected. LWLies: You’ve made a huge number of films now but you’ve never gone to Hollywood. Ever been tempted? Gatlif: They wouldn’t like my way of working. I like US actors but there are very few people I can work with. Maybe Benicio Del Toro, Johnny Depp... I give people the story but no script. Often I draw pictures to tell the story. I don’t think I could do that with Johnny Depp. But Johnny Depp likes my films, he often says so in interviews. LWLies: What do you love about film? Gatlif: Friends, eating badly, going on an adventure. But it’s a big trip with friends. I don’t have a special chair, I’m not the leader, but I love it. Afterwards it’s painful – the screenings and everything. But making the film is wonderful. I love it. Jonathan Williams For the full transcript head over to www.littlewhitelies.co.uk.

Knocked Up RELEASED August 24

At some point over

the last decade, comedy decided to get smart, creating that most hideous of compound nouns: the dramedy. While there’s nothing wrong with this approach, it’s hugely refreshing to find that writerdirector Judd Apatow is a gentleman of the old school. Knocked Up has its fair share of indie irony, but tonally it sits somewhere between John Hughes’ ’80s classics and the classier moments of the Farrelly Brothers. Ben (Seth Rogen) is a lazy stoner attempting to launch a porn site with his flatmates; Alison (Katherine Heigl) has just landed a presenting role for a high-profile TV channel. Their paths collide on a drunken night out, and an awkward morning after sees the couple part ways. But Mother Nature has other ideas. Alison soon discovers the bun in her oven, and the scene is set for an unusual will-they-won’t-they. The film’s strength is a generous helping of charm. Ben may be a waster, but he’s a good person – a loveable grizzly bear with a great big heart. Alison, too, is easy to like – responding to her

DIRECTED BY Judd Apatow STARRING Seth Rogen, Katherine Heigl, Paul Rudd

situation with a resolve that overcomes her understandable fears. Together they make a credible pairing, and this helps to smooth over a mildly improbable plot. Knocked Up understands the necessary ingredients of a romcom, but has the self-conviction to toy with the formula. The observations on male/female differences largely ring true, but these never come at the expense of a decent gag. There’s not a single bad performance – from Alison’s extended family to Ben’s pothead friends to a tender cameo from Harold Ramis, everybody hits exactly the right note. Most importantly it’s just very, very funny. Neon Kelly

Anticipation. Looks a bit cheesy, but The 40Year-Old Virgin was well received. Three Enjoyment. Warm, funny, smart. The best rom-com in a long, long time. Four

In Retrospect.

Slightly too long but so much fun that you really won’t mind. Four 073

Sherrybaby RELEASED July 27

Director Laurie

Collyer’s first feature film tackles the difficulties experienced by women and mothers emerging from prison without a social safety net of supportive rehabilitation. It would make a great documentary – one as relevant to parole issues here as in the States – but in deciding that her film is fiction rather than fact there is a dramatic loss of impact. What Sherrybaby has, however, is a magnificent central performance from Maggie Gyllenhaal. Her ex-addict Sherry Swanson is all brittle brass and

074 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

DIRECTED BY Laurie Collyer STARRING Maggie Gyllenhaal, Brad William Henke, Giancarlo Esposito

gauche attention-seeking. Tripping along in her candy wedges, mini skirt hoiked over her visible panty line, she heads blithely into parole and AA after three years inside, eager to re-establish a relationship with the toddler she left in the care of her brother and his wife. What she enters, however, is a system that obstructs her employment; a halfway house rife with confrontation; a family who know her daughter better than she does; and a plethora of men, her father included, who only respond to her sexually. And as her frustration and fury grow – cue

crashing of kitchen cupboards and pelting barefoot through the suburbs – she has to choose whether to dive back into her first love, heroin, or strive to win the love of her second, her child. Gyllenhaal is mesmeric. Her sensuality glistens like a light sweat while her body manifests her mental naivety – that of an innocent emerging into the world, full of hope and bruised by constant rebuttal. For her alone Sherrybaby is worth seeing. The remaining film lacks either her lustre or the hard-core exploration of its argument. Lorien Haynes

Anticipation. After a career of supporting roles, is this proof at last that Maggie can carry a film singlehandedly? Three Enjoyment. You’d

sleep with the star but happily sleep through the rest of it. Three

In Retrospect. The entire film is eclipsed by Gyllenhaal, to her advantage and its detriment. Two

Taxidermia DIRECTED BY György Pálfi STARRING Csaba Czene, Gergely Trócsányi, Marc Bischoff

Be warned: Taxidermia isn’t a film; it’s sensory GBH. Ostensibly the story of three generations of Hungarian men – a First World War soldier, a champion speed-eater and a pallid taxidermist – in reality this loose structure is an excuse for Hungarian director György Pálfi to indulge the sickest synapses of his evil mind. Taxidermia shuffles from horror to horror like a reanimated corpse. Witness the miserable wretch Morosgoványi (Csaba Czene) spying on his Lieutenant’s family while furiously masturbating. He dreams of fire shooting from his penis and his sperm speckling the stars like

RELEASED July 13

flecks of diamond. Which is fitting because Morosgoványi is a 24carat mentalist who deals with the loss of his only friend, a pig, by violently sodomising its carcass. Throughout these episodes, it’s impossible not to admire Pálfi’s sly humour and slick moves. There’s a delightful pan into the pages of a pop-up book, only for Morosgoványi to emerge onto its backdrop. It’d be a lovely moment if only it didn’t look suspiciously like the set-up for an under-age rape scene. If nothing else, Taxidermia keeps you on your toes. In the second chapter, oceans of greasy vomit puddle the floor in an unwelcome introduction to

communist speed-eating. But this is just the prelude to the film’s final fling. Put it this way: unless you’ve seen a taxidermist extract his own organs and turn himself into a human sculpture, well, you’ve just not really lived, have you? While these are squalid, unlovely images, it’s hard not to be impressed as well as disturbed. The period detail is finely tuned, and Pálfi has a great eye for exaggeration. He knows when to push the darkly comic and when to go for the out-and-out grotesque. However, after grabbing your attention, it eventually dawns on you that the film doesn’t have a lot to say

beyond its shock value. As the last shot drifts into a dead, dark navel, you suspect that Pálfi knows, and doesn’t care. Matt Bochenski

Anticipation.

Nobody does madness like those Central Europeans, but Pálfi is a virtual unknown. Two

Enjoyment. If ever

there was a film to be ‘admired’ rather than ‘enjoyed’, this is it. Two

In Retrospect.

You’ll need to drag it kicking and screaming from your mind. Four

075

An interview with Asger Leth, co-director of Ghosts of Cité Soleil.

Ghosts of Cité Soleil RELEASED July 20

We’re all used to

watching pictures of a messy war being fought on ramshackle streets, but nothing can prepare you for Ghosts of Cité Soleil. In 2004, Danish filmmaker Asger Leth secured widespread access to Cité Soleil, a slum of crushing poverty, Haitian hip-hop, voodoo magic and state-funded thuggery that the United Nations has called ‘the most dangerous place on earth’. It’s clear from the first frame that the director is in his element. 2Pac and Bily are charismatic brothers, two of the five leaders of Cité Soleil’s ‘Chimères’, or ‘Ghosts’; a secret army of violent young men armed by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to provide cut-throat enforcement against rebels, rivals and protesters. Theirs are harsh and tawdry lives confusingly split between political allegiance and basic survival. 2Pac is proud of his special powers, yet sings illicit protest songs against the man he fights for. Similarly, Bily has political aspirations and dreams of peace, but his idea of disciplining one of his ‘soldiers’ is to put a bullet in his foot. The slums bristle with old guns and even older grudges, and the film’s sense of embedded authenticity – all tinderbox tension and whistling bullets – is testament to Leth and co-director Milos Loncarevic’s incredible bravery. Yet this is not so much a piece of front-line journalism as it

076 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

DIRECTED BY Asger Leth STARRING Winson ‘2Pac’ Jean, James ‘Bily’ Petit Frère, Éleonore ‘Lele’ Senlis

is a celebration of the brothers, particularly 2Pac with his musical aspirations and languid, lyrical patois. Long close shots of his high cheekbones and the taut muscles on his naked torso betray the filmmakers’ swooning fascination with their subject. In this respect they are not unlike Lele, a French aid worker who is happy to be filmed in 2Pac’s bed. She implores the brothers not to fight for Aristide, but is, at the same time, drunk on the romance of their lawless world. Amongst the swagger, however, and the naïve glamour of boys’ own adventure, are scenes of incredibly lucid reality. A baby is pulled from its mother’s body and marched away by its feet, a metal clamp still hanging from the umbilical cord. It is an inglorious introduction to the world for a potential Chimère; a person who may make bad decisions and do terrible things, but who is damned from the start by a vicious cycle of poverty, violence and corruption. Steve Watson

Anticipation. Surely this can’t really be a documentary? Three Enjoyment. Goes beyond front-line journalism to show the men behind the guns. Three

In Retrospect. Less than objective but hugely revealing portrait of a little-known conflict. Four

LWLies: What first drew you to Cité Soleil? Leth: My father is a film director who spends six or seven months out of every year in Haiti, so I’ve been into Cité Soleil on a number of occasions. It’s always been a poor slum but there wasn’t the violence until maybe 10 or 15 years ago. LWLies: In the film you pinpoint Aristide funding the Chimères as a major source of the problem. Is that where the violence came from or was other stuff already going on? Leth: It was other stuff that happened first. You know, when the Americans helped Aristide back into power after he was exiled they felt like they owned the right to send back all the illegal immigrants from the States, so they started emptying the prisons and sending these guys back to Haiti. With them came the gang mentality, and once you do that to a country it’s basically impossible to unwind the clock. LWLies: Your film isn’t the standard documentary that aims for a wholly objective picture of what’s going on. What were you trying to achieve? Leth: I think mine is pretty objective, but I know what you’re talking about. I know it’s arrogant in a situation like this and in a place like this to entertain in a sense, but I feel it’s important to open the story up to a wider audience. LWLies: So you’d say the documentary is objective, but it’s objective and it’s entertaining? Leth: Yeah, I think so. A lot of people are going to attack me for being not objective just because I’m allowing these gang leaders to talk. They don’t do that in Haiti. They’re just like, ‘These guys have to be killed’, and the whole point of the story is that, look, you can kill them all you want, but they’re just the symptom of a problem that you should fix. I had to make people understand that these guys are human. LWLies: What was the scariest moment for you while you were there? Leth: I’m not a ballsy guy in any way. For me what was really scary was the tenseness and the atmosphere when everything was really hot. The rebels were coming in and the Chimères were barricading the whole capital – you couldn’t go out without getting a gun in your face and being shot at. That was scary. We were chased to the airport by a car with guns – there were dead bodies on the streets. I got a seat on a plane and I was like, ‘I’m never fucking going back to this place. Never, ever going back.’ But then we looked at the material and it wasn’t finished. So I went back. Steve Watson

For the full transcript head over to www.littlewhitelies.co.uk.

Eagle vs Shark Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth – or indie filmmaking, at least. Granted, the big JC may not have been predicting celluloid’s revenge of the nerds while astride his mound, but this offering from New Zealand’s Taika Cohen is confirmation enough that geekchic’s gone global. Not to be confused with Bear v Shark, a Gillette-sharp satirical novel by McSweeney’s favourite Chris Bachelder, this apparent clash of animals is, in

DIRECTED BY Taika Cohen STARRING Jemaine Clement, Loren Horsley, Taika Cohen

fact, a heart-warming romance between a pair of social misfits – burger flipping Lily (Loren Horsley) and shop patsy Jarrod (Jemaine Clement). Naturally one thing leads to another and the two outsiders fall for each other while duelling over a Mortal Kombat-esque video game. Cue Kiwi hick comedy and love against the odds. Oh, how kooky! But mean-spirited mockery this is not. Yes, the characters are played for laughs, yet – and

RELEASED August 17

here credit must go to writerdirector Cohen for his genuinely tender touch – it avoids tipping over into cruelty. Indeed, the man behind the brilliant 12minute Two Cars, One Night has announced his glorious escape from the shorts ghetto. Sure, it may be hard to shake the feeling that Jared Hess and Jon Heder’s Napoleon Dynamite conquered similar territory, but that is not to say that Eagle vs Shark can’t be embraced on its own terms.

This is an adorable, funny and gentle slice of loserville whimsy. Rom-com just went deep into the leftfield, and there’s not a hipster sneer in sight. Adrian Sandiford

Anticipation. Losers

fall in love. Two

Enjoyment. A deadpan delight. Four

In Retrospect. New Zealand’s answer to Napoleon Dynamite. Four 077

sparkle RELEASED August 17

The third feature

from writer-director team Tom Hunsinger and Neil Hunter following Boyfriends and the highly acclaimed, Eric Rohmer inspired The Lawless Heart is another intriguingly shaped ensemble piece that offers a thoughtful and appealing take on modern life and the frequently all-too-complex intricacies of love. The film opens in Liverpool where a chance encounter with Vince (Bob Hoskins), a somewhat forlorn but loveable bachelor, leads to mother and son Jill and Sam Sparks (Lesley Manville and Shaun Evans) moving to London and the less than salubrious basement of Vince’s modest home. The change of scene sparks their ambitions, with Jill seeking work as a cabaret singer, and

078 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

DIRECTORS Tom Hunsinger, Neil Hunter STARRING Stockard Channing, Shaun Evans, Bob Hoskins

Sam, a handsome schemer prepared to do what it takes to haul himself up the career ladder, finding himself hired – following sexual relations – as the personal assistant to a successful public relations magnate played with steely, high-heeled resolve by Stockard Channing. Sam’s life grows ever more complicated when he meets a beautiful young woman (Amanda Ryan) only to find his ambitions and intentions ambushed by love. Developed through Hunter and Hunsinger’s now customary improvisatory process in which the actors are encouraged to develop the motivations and machinations of their characters, Sparkle may lack the immediacy of its predecessor – one of the finest home-grown films of recent years – but it’s still an

astutely observed and admirably bittersweet yarn that refuses to hurry its (over) elaborate narrative. The filmmakers have justifiably accrued a reputation for getting the best out of their cast, and their inclusive working methods again pay dividends. Playing against type, Hoskins – who has balanced his lucrative Hollywood excursions with a keen eye for emerging British talent, working with the likes of Shane Meadows – brings depth and dimension to his part while Manville, a veteran of the workshop approach through her association with Mike Leigh, is pure gold, belting out Dusty Springfield numbers with aplomb. This is a film that’s not afraid to tackle some of life’s weightier

subjects while also balancing its considered ruminations with a bright and undeniably breezy approach to entertainment. Sparkle reveals both a clarity of vision and an undeniably infectious charm. Jason Wood

Anticipation. They may be unheralded in the mainstream, but a new movie by Hunsinger and Hunter is always an event. Four Enjoyment. Yet

another hugely confident outing. Three

In Retrospect. A film that grows upon reflection, and is to be admired for not simply being The Lawless Heart 2. Four

Enlightening Cinema 15 - 26 August 2007 Programme launches 11 July

www.edfilmfest.org.uk ‘One of the finest film festivals on the planet… So good your head will hurt…’ The Herald

Paris, je t’aime

DIRECTED BY Walter Salles, Gus Van Sant, Alexander Payne, more STARRING Elijah Wood, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Juliette Binoche, more

RELEASED June 29

There’s something

pointedly French about this sprawling poem to the City of Love. Unfortunately, it’s the aroma of mouldy fromage. Paris, je t’aime is a collection of 18 vignettes, many based on the jaundiced views of foreigners, that offers little in the way of insight, nor any real feel for this favoured European city. Instead, language and miscommunication are key. For the Coen brothers that means Steve Buscemi doing his fish-outof-water shtick at Amélie’s tube stop; for Alexander Payne it’s a neat take on the clichéd American tourist. Along with Bruno

Podalydès’ tale of an unhappy man who ends up practically kidnapping an equally lonely woman, these sections undoubtedly lead the way, proving that it’s humour that works best in this format. Elsewhere, Paris, je t’aime is dreadfully tedious. With so little time, most of the skits either resort to stereotypes (Gurinder Chadha’s trite liberalism), melodrama (Juliette Binoche as a mother mourning her son) or cliché (Gus Van Sant indulges his worst New Wave fantasies). Worst of all? Alfonso Cuarón’s misjudged featurette, which breaks the most fundamental

Sugarhouse Lane RELEASED August 24

Red Road and London to Brighton ushered in a new era of British crime films – taut and determinedly lo-fi, they’re a world away from the comic book buffoonery of Lock Stock. Now there’s another contender to add to the list. Based on a play by Dominic Leyton, Sugarhouse Lane sees homeless crack addict D (Ashley Walters) and manicured businessman Tom (Steven Mackintosh) doing a deal in a gutted warehouse on a Dagenham estate. Meanwhile psychopathic hard nut Hoodwink (Andy Serkis) – the local kingpin – discovers that he’s been burgled. The collision course is set. This is an unflinching look at the rotting, graffiti-scrawled underbelly of the capital. The camera work is mostly handheld,

080 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

rule of short filmmaking: never cast Nick Nolte. Jonas Milk

names. What could go wrong? Four

Anticipation.

Enjoyment. Plenty, it

Eighteen ‘neighbourhood romances’ set in Paris, directed by and starring a host of big

seems. One

In Retrospect. Paris,

tu m’ennuies. One

DIRECTED BY Gary Love STARRING Ashley Walters, Steven Mackintosh, Andy Serkis

and the film is a lovely contrast of crisp grey exteriors and hazy, claustrophobic interiors. Former So Solid Crewman Ashley Walters brilliantly portrays D as a twitchy, shambling mess, but this is Hoodwink’s film. Serkis amply demonstrates his freaky ability to bring characters to life, and is justly rewarded with some peachy scenes – check out the intro where the camera lovingly follows his hairy, tattooed arse as he stumps up the corridor of his flat like some naked barbarian. The big problem is that the second act just doesn’t ring true. There is no good reason for the characters to hang around a warehouse waiting for a confrontation they could easily avoid. And the dialogue gets a little preachy – D had a bad upbringing, guns aren’t the

answer, blah blah blah. Sugarhouse Lane redeems itself with a great conclusion, however, and the last sweeping shot of a bloodied Tom hobbling up a hillock at the centre of the estate is powerful. Aaron Davies

Anticipation. Gangster boredom. At least Andy Serkis is watchable. Two

Enjoyment. A grimy,

twitchy, rage-filled film. Shame about the middle bit. Three

In Retrospect.

Almost very good; its dirty vision of London and Walters’ excellent performance stick in the mind. Three

transformers So this is it. The

summer’s hot ticket isn’t a theme park pirate ride; it’s a rocket-powered nostalgia trip. Transformers triumphantly evokes the childhood memories of yesteryear; it’s just that, in the sense that it feels like you’re being yelled at for two hours, they’re the wrong ones. The planet of Cybertron has been decimated by war between the Autobots (hurray!) and the Decepticons (boo!). Quite why the Autobots ever trusted the cannily named Decepticons in the first place is a mystery, as is how they managed to lose an asteroid-sized power source called ‘The Cube’. When the cube turns up on earth, both robot races follow in hot pursuit and the stage is set for a final showdown. We’re going to need slo-mo. Lots of slo-mo. Behind the camera is the man

DIRECTED BY Michael Bay STARRING Shia LaBoeuf, Josh Duhamel, Megan Fox

with the ultimate fetish for boys’ toys, Michael Bay. His supporters will tell you that Transformers is a great popcorn film if you can switch off and enjoy the ride. But if you believe that the normal rules of filmmaking don’t apply to blockbusters, then Transformers is the inevitable conclusion: a shambolic act of visual masturbation that ignores logic and narrative in service of the one, great question: does it look cool? And yes, it does look cool actually. Bay has the budget to spunk on fighter jets, aircraft carriers and citywide carnage, but does he know what to do with it? No he doesn’t. He shoots in close-up on handheld cameras, a quick-fire aesthetic of on-the-run combat thrills. The result is a film whose big moments feel like they’ve been shot on nostril-cam; they

RELEASED July 27

lack geography and cohesion, descending into a series of unfathomable takes in which, if you’re lucky, you might just make out a robotic limb before we’re charging off to the next shot. The human actors try their best against this onslaught but are undone by a script that has no interest in them. Shia LaBoeuf has decided he’s in an improv comedy; Josh Duhamel drops in and out at random; and Megan Fox is subjected to the same juvenile misogyny as all Bay’s women. And the Transformers? They’re shiny and the effects are solid, but they’re poorly designed in robot form to the degree that it’s practically impossible to tell them apart in battle. They lack personality, but worse, they lack humanity, which renders the final act’s dewy-eyed ET rip-off totally

pointless. Remember how you cried when your microwave broke? Oh. Exactly. Hasbro, owners of the Transformers brand, will sell a shitload of toys, though, and the film will be a massive success. You can’t blame them. In the end, you get the summer movies you deserve. Matt Bochenski

Anticipation. A mindless popcorn movie, or will there be more to Transformers than meets the eye? Four Enjoyment.

Entertainment by volume – a concussive, cacophonous spectacle of visual junk. Two

In Retrospect. SOS – save our summer. One

081

Molière RELEASED July 13

Certain words just

don’t look right when you put them next to each other. Like ‘German’ and ‘cuisine’. Or ‘American’ and ‘culture’. Or, for that matter, like ‘French’ and ‘humour’. Ah, but Laurent Tirard has something to say about that with this biopic of a treasured comic hero. No, not Jerry Lewis, but legendary playwright JeanBaptiste Poquelin, aka Molière. Though he’s hardly a household name on this side of the Channel, in France Molière is an icon – the father of French comedy. After all, he was more or less the last Frenchman to say

082 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

DIRECTED BY Laurent Tirard STARRING Romain Duris, Laura Morante, Fabrice Luchini

anything funny, and seeing as he died almost three-and-a-half centuries ago, it’s become a bit of a cultural sticking point. It’s a delicate task that Tirard has taken on, so it’s some surprise to see him turn to that most indelicate of actors, Romain Duris, for his starring role – the same Romain Duris whose smile could freeze hell. It really shouldn’t work, but it does, gloriously, with Duris romping through this period farce despite looking like he might attack the cameraman at any minute. There’s not much to the plot besides a slight re-working of Shakespeare in Love. Tirard

reimagines a missing chapter in the life of the young Molière when, on the brink of bankruptcy, he is spirited away to the home of a rich merchant (Fabrice Luchini) who requires acting lessons to woo the heart of an icy aristocrat (Ludivine Sagnier). All that stands in the way of true love is a greasy courtier (Edouard Baer) and the merchant’s saucy wife (Laura Morante), who’s soon teaching Molière a trick or two herself. Fast-forward a few years and this sordid tale will be the playwright’s springboard to fame and fortune. Molière is an exceptionally likeable period comedy, powered by impeccable performances

from Luchini and the wonderful Laura Morante. It’s as sweet and light as a French fancy, but damn if you don’t just want to stuff it all down and go back for more. Matt Bochenski

Anticipation. French comedy, you say? Run for the hills! Two Enjoyment. A pure,

unadulterated pleasure from first to last. Four

In Retrospect. There’s not much in the way of depth, but it deserves to be a massive hit. Three

An Interview with Laurent Tirard, the extremely pleasant director of Molière. He’s a gent. LWLies: For the benefit of a non-French audience, can you explain the position that Molière holds in French culture? Tirard: I’m tempted to say that the place that Molière holds in French culture is the same as Shakespeare holds in Anglo-Saxon culture. We say ‘the language of Molière’ in France – he has become an icon. LWLies: It seems odd that a comedian should be the voice of the French language when you could choose from Sartre or Voltaire or people like that. Tirard: It’s true. But what people like about Molière’s comedies is that in a way they’re not really comedies at all. Louis XIV himself said that Molière made comedies about things that normally would make people cry. He said, ‘When I watch a play I don’t know if I am supposed to laugh or cry’. I think that’s because he writes things that appear to be comedy but very often he’s writing about very serious matters. LWLies: That seems like quite a modern, almost cinematic, sensibility – you think of somebody like Billy Wilder and The Apartment. Would you say that Molière is a ‘modern’ writer? Tirard: Absolutely. Until a few years ago I thought that my mentor was Woody Allen – to me he was the master of that kind of modern, psychological comedy. Then I rediscovered Molière and I suddenly realised that what Woody Allen is doing today, Molière was doing 300 years ago. It’s exactly the same. He’s taking very obsessional characters, and very modern in that sense, exactly like Woody Allen does. LWLies: Given Molière’s status as a cultural icon in France, what were the greatest pressures in bringing him to the screen? Tirard: Even though he’s a comic writer people take him very seriously. I knew that some people were not going to like the fact that I was making a comedy about his life, or that I was taking a lot of liberties. Some people couldn’t stand the idea that I was playing with history and with his life. But we absolutely didn’t want to make a film for Molière specialists. I wanted to make a film so that people who have never read Molière, or those who thought they had read Molière but had not ‘got’ it, could actually finally get it. LWLies: What kind of relationship did you have with Romain? He’s not an obvious choice for a comic actor. Tirard: Oh, he’s not a comic actor. I chose Romain because I wanted someone who the younger audience could see in the film and relate to. I wanted him to be a young romantic hero, and I wanted an actor that had enough screen presence to be believable as an icon like Molière. But Romain is not a comic actor, so that we had to work on. Matt Bochenski Check out the full transcript in the usual place: www.littlewhitelies.co.uk.

Firehouse Dog DIRECTED BY Todd Holland STARRING Josh Hutcherson, Bruce Greenwood, Bill Nunn

Saddam Hussein’s

psychopathic son, Uday, was apparently such a fan of Disney’s Air Bud, the story of a basketballplaying golden retriever, that he had no less than three copies of it in his video collection. Deploying many of the same devices as that masterpiece, who knows how many copies of Firehouse Dog might have found their way into the toothy tyrant’s Billy bookcase. The film is the salutary tale of Rexxx, a pampered canine film star who, when a stunt goes wrong, finds himself living with a rebellious 12year-old boy and his fire captain dad. A variety of narrative strands ensue, taking boy, man and dog on a journey of self-discovery via the values of a good, honest, American life. Of course, there are knowing nods to the adult viewer. The film pokes fun at the superficiality of Hollywood, and flaunts the selfdeprecatory twists seemingly so essential to contemporary kids’

RELEASED July 20

cinema with its film-within-a-film structure. The all sub-plot story is a veritable self-help manual for tweenies – a sort of Se7en for ages seven-and-up – with greed, pride, sloth and envy bested by humility, team work and fair play. One memorable scene even has Rexxx triumphing in an existentialist allegory, narrowly escaping a dogcatcher in a diabolical back-alley where graffiti quotes Picasso after de Sade after Shiva: ‘Every act of creation is first an act of destruction’. But above all, Firehouse Dog is about the corrupting influence of power and money. If only it had received its Baghdad premiere a few years ago, who knows how things might have panned out. James Bramble

Anticipation. Stay. Enjoyment. Sit.

One

Three

In Retrospect. Good

dog. Three

083

Waitress

DIRECTED BY Adrienne Shelly STARRING Keri Russell, Jeremy Sisto, Cheryl Hines

RELEASED August 10

The Legacy

DIRECTED BY Géla and Temur Babluani STARRING Sylvie Testud, Stanislas Merhar, Olga Legrand

RELEASED August 24

Dear, sweet Jenna (Keri Russell) is your all-

Georgia, 2007 – a naïve French woman inherits a

American, pie-baking sweetheart, trapped in an abusive marriage to Earl (Jeremy Sisto), a loutish creep. Jenna seeks solace waitressing in a diner, creating pies to suit her daily moods, and serving up slices of her life to customers. One day it’s ‘I Hate My Husband’ pie or ‘Kick In The Pants’ pie, until she discovers, to her horror, that she’s pregnant. Cue ‘I Don’t Want Earl’s Baby’ pie. Waitress is a simple tale of a girl’s determination to dig through the bitterness, and find a layer of sweetness just waiting to be enjoyed. Monisha Rajesh

castle and, accompanied by two friends, arrives in the former Soviet Republic to claim her prize. Armed with stolen film cameras and a hesitant translator, they meet all kinds of crazies on the two-day bus ride out of town from a mountain-dwelling mute to a sombre grandfather and son who board with an empty casket to the sounds of a mournful live band. Taking a stab at insular communities and the unwelcome addition of moneyed Westerners alike, The Legacy is a slow-burning tragedy well worth 83 minutes of your time. Georgie Hobbs

Seraphim Falls

DIRECTED BY David Von Ancken STARRING Liam Neeson, Pierce Brosnan, Xander Berkeley

RELEASED August 3

Les Petites Vacances

DIRECTED BY Oliver Peyon STARRING Bernadette Lafont, Adèle Csech, Lucas Franchi

RELEASED June 29

Seraphim Falls is an old-fashioned western,

It takes a while for this slow-burning character

albeit one that flirts with the fantastical. Liam Neeson is Carver, a wordless gunslinger stalking a blood-soaked nemesis from the Civil War (Pierce Brosnan). A revenge epic it may be, but a rip-roaring rampage it’s not. Instead, the film takes its sweet time on a journey across a nearmythical American West. With two solid performances, it’s just a shame that the dark secret that links the pair is not only predictable, it’s also watered down to give Brosnan’s Gideon an ill-deserved moral escape route. This staunch and serious western deserved better. Matt Bochenski

study from Olivier Peyon to fully reveal its hand, but when it finally does it evolves into a sombre study of loneliness and old age. Despite a robust performance from New Wave alumnus Bernadette Lafont as the lonely grandmother who lures her grandkids into an ever-extending trip to the countryside, the main problem lies with the idea that what we are witnessing is a narrative which is being endlessly protracted by its main protagonist. Lets just say that after 90 minutes, you really start to feel for those kids. David Jenkins

084 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

The Walker

DIRECTED BY Paul Schrader STARRING Woody Harrelson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Lily Tomlin

RELEASED August 10

The Seventh Seal

DIRECTED BY Ingmar Bergman STARRING Max von Sydow, Bengt Ekerot, Gunnar Björnstrand

RELEASED July 20

How to convince you that it is your responsibility

‘walker’ – a professional hag-fag employed to squire the wives of Washington DC’s powerful from opera house to Canasta game and back again. When one such wife, Lynn (Kristin Scott Thomas) discovers a murdered body, Page is forced to questions his loyalties. Harrelson is an entertaining mix of Old South camp and quiet pathos (think Truman Capote with a larger Adam’s apple) but neither he nor the script’s desultory attempts at post-9/11 commentary are enough to elevate it above the level of a pretentious John Grisham adaptation. Ellen E Jones

to go and see The Seventh Seal, re-released for its 50th anniversary? Threats? Promises? Maybe it’s just best to trust the film to do the talking. In short, Ingmar Bergman’s classic sees a knight return from the Crusades struggling with his faith, only to be confronted by Death, with whom he plays a series of chess games for his immortal soul. The Seventh Seal is an existentialist masterpiece packed with stunning symbolism and mordant humour. It’s also far more accessible than you might think. Go see it. Or else. David Jenkins

For all the latest reviews of films that didn’t quite make it into the mag this issue, check out www.littlewhitelies.co.uk.

Carter Page III (Woody Harrelson) is a society

Écoute le Temps

DIRECTED BY Alanté Kavaïté STARRING Émilie Dequenne, Ludmila Mikaël, Mathieu Demy

RELEASED August 17

Running Stumbled

DIRECTED BY John Maringouin STARRING Virgie Marie Pennoui, Johny Roe Jr, Stanley Laviolette

RELEASED July 27

A glimpse of Émilie Dequenne’s furrowed brow

A tough but rewarding watch that comes across

will throw some viewers back to that bleak caravan park in the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta. Here she is again at the edge of a maternal drama; but this time, instead of flipping burgers, she’s recording sounds from the past to uncover the mystery of her mother’s death. This is a high-concept thriller full of earthy symbolism – water, cracks, broken glass and dying animals abound – that slides into unexpectedly dark territory. If anything, the concept is a little too high, but fans of Dominik Moll and the Dardennes will find much to enjoy. Lucy Muss

like Meet the Parents as imagined by Abel Ferrara, this documentary (which occasionally mutates into fiction) follows US director John Maringouin as he returns home to visit his deranged parents, only to see them endlessly bickering over their meds and threaten to kill each other. Charming. With its bevy of truly vile ‘characters’, the film also calls into question the role of director-as-observer (much like last year’s The Bridge) as Maringouin rarely offers to lift his parents from their deep, deep rut. David Jenkins

085

086 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

087

Darren Aronofsky was 27-years-old when he made ∏ – announcing to the world that this kid from Brooklyn had come of age, that he was going to be at the forefront of… something. Exactly what, we’d have to wait and see. After ∏, Young Hollywood came calling: pretty faces lining up to be rubbed with fairy dirt. Aronofsky obliged. Requiem For A Dream was the confirmation of early dreams, the whisper of promises to come. That was seven years ago. Aronofsky is now 36-yearsold. He got married to an A-List star, Rachel Weisz. They have a child. She won an Oscar. He… He… Disappeared. There were occasional sightings, like Elvis; rumours of pre-production on some crazy project or other. Big dreams. Big stars. This project was The Fountain, some kind of time travel epic spanning 1500 years. They were talking about $70 million and Brad Pitt. But that didn’t sound like Aronofsky. Others agreed. In 2002 Pitt walked out seven weeks before shooting. The crew was fired. Production halted. Eighteen million dollars had been spent for nothing. It took three years and a budget cut of 50 per cent before The Fountain was back on track. Another two before the film’s release. And now it’s here on DVD. The Fountain is the most divisive film in this magazine’s brief history. It’s our generation’s 2001: perhaps the harbinger of a new cinematic vocabulary; perhaps a tragic act of self-indulged hubris. It remains the recipient of the highest and the lowest marks we’ve ever awarded. One thing is certain, when Aronofsky came to town, we just had to be there to talk exclusively about his experiences over the last few years. Enjoy.

LWLies: So you make ∏ and Requiem For A Dream, two of the most well-received films that anybody could wish to make, and you disappear for years. What the hell? Where were you? Aronofsky: I was trying to make The Fountain. You know, we came real close to mounting it in ’02, and then it fell apart at the last minute and it took a few years to get it back together. Is there a residual bitterness about that? You know, you gotta live life without regrets. I know I tried the best I could to get it up at that point but there were a lot of forces that were not under my control that made it collapse. I’m just proud that we got it finished. Was it always clear that this was going to be a very different film not just thematically but stylistically from any you’d made? It was a very conscious effort. In ∏ there were a lot of things we couldn’t pull off because we were limited by time and money, and one of the reasons I was attracted to doing Requiem For A Dream was because there were a lot of similar ideas of subjective filmmaking that I knew I could apply. And because I had more money I knew that I could push some of the techniques that I had started to work on in ∏, you know, bring them to life in Requiem For A Dream. But when we started The Fountain we made a very clear effort – okay no more cameras attached to the body, no more hip-hop cutting. We really wanted to get away from all that stuff and come up with a new visual language. Do you worry that if you get all the money in the world your creativity will suffer? I think so. It’s always a concern as to how you put yourself in a place where you’re constantly forced to push yourself and to take chances. I think a big problem with, you know, people who create content is that you fall into a pattern and you end up making the same thing over and over again. I think it’s important to be curious and reinvent yourself. I mean, David Bowie is the best example of that; for 20 or 30 years he just completely rocked the boat. Is that the kind of filmmaker you see yourself as? Well, I hope I can constantly keep making films that are unique and personal but, you know, find an audience.

088 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

o w

r dar m

sky

ig b

nof

e th

aro

g in k n a w

d r

n a

How prepared were you for the reaction that The Fountain got in Venice last year? First from the critics, whose negative reaction was widely reported, then from the audience screening where it received a standing ovation? Well, what I witnessed was the standing ovation because I wasn’t with the critics. With the critics there was a fight: half the audience booed and half the audience applauded, then some of them got into a pushing match, which didn’t get reported. What got reported was the fact that there were boos. We sort of approximated what happened at Venice in our office. Our Dep Ed, who was there, hated it… If anything I think that people who walked in there expecting to see a normal, science-fiction, big Hollywood production are gonna be stunned because that’s not at all what they’re getting. You go in more understanding what my work is… Don’t you think people would have been equally surprised if they walked in expecting to see a Darren Aronofsky movie? That’s what our Dep Ed was expecting, and that’s not what he got. It’s interesting, you know, because I think it says a lot about the people who see it. It’s a very earnest film, and touches on senses which most people really, really shut down. For me, it’s a fairy tale but for adults – you have to be open to eternal love and fighting for that. But for a lot of people, the second they see a man cry they just… They don’t want to see that. The Fountain was your first experience with that kind of negativity. Has it affected you? And has it affected the way people treat you professionally? I’ve always welcomed the controversy. If you’re pleasing everyone then you’re not pushing the boundaries of what you as a person are truthful to. What are you working on right now? I’m working on a bunch of films; I haven’t committed yet but we’ve been pushing a lot of things up the hill. The thing I’m writing right now myself is an adaptation of Noah’s Ark.

You’ve made one, kind of, secular spiritual epic and now you’re moving to a Biblical spiritual epic. Does it make you nervous revisiting that? I think that, you know, the story of Noah is part of the zeitgeist now. It’s the first story of apocalypse, and right now as a race we’re facing our own apocalypse. So I think, for me, it’s really something I want to make because I think the parallels to what’s going on right now on the planet are really, absolutely there. For our very first issue we laid out a manifesto of filmmakers we believed in who represented a new generation – you were in it. Do you feel part of a community that’s doing that? And do you feel like you have to push against the people who have gone before? I don’t feel like I’m struggling with the filmmakers that came before me. I think if anything they’re more of an inspiration. It’s not a competition. It’s interesting because I think that independent film back then shows you that at that time audiences were allowed to discover a film and they were open to seeing something new and different. In today’s world, a film has to do a ridiculous amount of money on its opening weekend to get support beyond that opening weekend. In general to get that support it has to be something that’s very, very, very easy to sell. Do you see yourself now as a studio filmmaker? And do you miss not being seen as an independent filmmaker? I love the opportunity to work with the studio but I would just as quickly work independently. I don’t care where the money comes from. It’s all money. You wouldn’t be afraid to go back to three million dollars? No, no not at all. In fact that’s what I want to do next. Well, thanks for your time. Thank you. Really, thanks for the support. Thank everyone at the magazine for me and tell your friend who was at Venice that he’s a schmuck. Matt Bochenski

089

Ba n k

c k

th e

u th

Fro mH eav ie n n e

Far in

Saint Etienne co-writer and producer Bob Stanley spoke to LWLies about his latest film, This is Tomorrow, which marks the end of a year-long residency at London’s South Bank Centre. LWLies: Describe This Is Tomorrow for us. Stanley: Well, it’s a documentary about the history of the South Bank Centre site, mainly the Festival Hall, going back to the 1951 Festival of Britain. Though it’s a straight documentary, it wasn’t always going to be. We were going to have a secondary storyline following a character who was basically us [Saint Etienne] at the South Bank. That would have been a thread running through the film but we thought it would just make it too messy. Your film’s been described as Altman-esque, are you happy with that? God, yes! It is quite episodic; there are swooping shots of the building as well as up and down the Thames. I’d never have thought of it. I don’t know if Paul [Kelly, director] is particularly a Robert Altman fan. We’re certainly all fans of Truffaut, the French New Wave in general, Patrick Keiller and British kitchen-sink directors like Ken Loach. What was the highlight of making it? Meeting the original architects from the Festival of Britain was really special. They were all very charming, very intelligent and very old; all obviously still full of enthusiasm for what they did then, what it could have led to, and where it’s going now. Trevor Dannatt [architect who worked with the late Peter Moro and Leslie Martin to design the Royal Festival Hall] is the main interview in the film, he was really great. And the frustrations? There’s a lot of bureaucracy – everything has to be cleared by people who aren’t necessarily involved in the creative process. But that hasn’t really restricted the film, it’s been more restrictive on what we’ve done in the year we’ve been at the South Bank. It’s funny – we interviewed Jeremy Deller, who won the Turner Prize in 2004, and asked, ‘What do you think

090 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

an artist-in-residence should do?’ He said, ‘Well, for a start, avoid the people employing you as much as possible,’ and we thought, ‘Oh shit, maybe we should have interviewed you last July!’ You’ve been artist-in-residence at the South Bank Centre, now you’ve made the definitive film about the area – has your fondness for London’s murkier parts paid off? Yes, I suppose so. The residency came about because Jude Kelly, the South Bank’s artistic director came to see our film about the Lea Valley, What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? and really liked it. It’s a direct result of that. It’s funny because the first film we made was about the whole of London, the second was about an area of London and the third one is about a building in London, so I don’t know what the fourth one’s going to be. We’re definitely going to do another though. Such as? We’re going back to a film we started but had to suspend for the residency. It’s about 1980s underground music in Britain called Hungry Beat. Do you get annoyed by big budget films set in London? They can be quite amusing – I saw Match Point and that other Allen film that didn’t even get a cinematic release over here, Scoop. I don’t mind it when it’s someone from abroad making a film about here and getting it all wrong. I’m sure if I went to New York I’d get it wrong. We’re just a completely different thing, it’s not what we’re going for – the Odeons or whatever. It’d be nice if that happened but I’m not expecting This Is Tomorrow to get that sort of release. What’s next? We’re all going to take the summer off. I’m going to borrow the P-150 camera and go round Croydon getting the hang of it. I want to try to become Paul’s secondary man because he directs and shoots all by himself – he doesn’t trust anyone else. I’ve got lots of ideas, I’m definitely more confident now. I want to branch into TV, maybe do a three-part series on architecture and social engineering for BBC 4. Oh, and we’ve been meaning to put some smaller films onto YouTube too, maybe we could do that this summer. Georgie Hobbs

LWLies: What have you got planned this year? McGill: We have an overarching theme for the first time. There’s so much material for people to pick up on these days, and there are so many film festivals, that I feel there’s a responsibility to the audience to keep working to make your festival a bit different and not just a catalogue of new films. We’re looking specifically at screenwriting and the written word, which basically means a retrospective of a screenwriter rather than a director, and talking as much as possible about issues of writing. It fits in with Edinburgh because it’s a UNESCO City of Literature. We also have a new UK talent showcase called ‘Trailblazers’, which is about presenting our pick of up-and-coming people, in association with the Skillset Screen Academy, and providing some bridging-of-the-gap between graduating from a screen academy and making your first film. What’s the festival opener? I’m very happy to be opening the festival with Hallam Foe, David Mackenzie’s film, which is very important to us because we’ve screened every single one of David’s films right back to his shorts, and it’s a film set in Edinburgh, adapted from a novel by an Edinburgh writer. It’s a very smart film but it’s also a very ‘up’ film, and a nice way for us to kick off the festival.

L VA INTERNATIONA STI FE

EDINBURGH

LS TIVA M FES FIL

The 61st Edinburgh International Film Festival takes place from August 15-26. As we went to press, details were as embargoed as uranium for an Iranian power station, but we collared Artistic Director Hannah McGill and gave her the full Hans Blix.

The first film can often be a bit of a downer. Yeah, we’ve certainly done it in the past, opening with David’s more depressing film, Young Adam, and we also opened with The Rat-Catcher. What can you tell us about Tilda Swinton’s involvement? We’ve got a new patron, Tilda Swinton, joining Sean Connery, lending us her unique presence, so that’ll be nice. We’ve had Sean since the ’90s. Prior to that we’ve had other patrons, but I don’t think we’ve ever had more than one. What does a patron actually do? It’s an advocacy position – it’s a bit difficult to define. It’s really just cementing your friendship and making it official. Rather than just, ‘Tilda’s our mate’, she’s actually on our letterhead as our mate. It really reflects her support of us over the years, and our support of her, I suppose. It’s a two-way street. She came over here at the start of her film career, and prior to that worked at the Traverse Theatre, so it recognises her career-long affiliation with the city. It’s the same kind of relationship that we have with Sean, where he’s our friend in the world and we welcome him here as much as we can. James Bramble Go to page 105 for a chance to win a luxury overnight stay at the festival. www.edfilmfest.ork.uk

091

BRITDOC

FIL M FES TIVA LS evolved to become one of the Set up two years ago, Britdoc has making events in the world – a film most important documentary league film and TV contacts, cocktail of talented filmmakers, bigWe spoke to Beadie Finzie, the ies. part t grea and rons beautiful envi what makes Britdoc special. t abou ctor, Dire effervescent Festival filmmakers, so we give cash away “We’re not just a festival. We fund ers to make documentaries mak film all year round to all sorts of ranging from shorts to features. new, sustainable model “What we’re all about is creating a ers in the UK. I believe mak film for independent documentary the most important, of passionately that documentary is one is. Because of the nature e ther that es genr ting exci interesting, you can’t get anything of the commercial pressures on TV sy format, and that’s fine, chee commissioned unless it’s a very nt to be fighting for another orta imp y reall it’s that k thin we but platform. which is an opportunity for a “We have this event in the summer, find out about the alternative and thousand people to come together to look at some brilliant works, sources of distribution and funding, invigorated, with some and ired insp y awa and hopefully come films. contacts and some cash to make their

into the marketplace beyond the “Very few UK filmmakers get out vals the whole time and if you festi onal nati UK. We tour the inter a Brit!’ Telly has served us so re’s The see one there it’s, ‘Come on! has come to an end. It’s not a od well for so many years but that peri

092 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

depressing picture. It’s very exciting. You can make the most ambitious, the most important films but you’ve got to learn the new rules of the game and because the Brits won’t go out, we have brought the world to Britain. “We’re advocates of campaigning films, which is quite an unfashionable, unBritish thing. People go, ‘Eurgh! Campaigning films!’ but no, bollocks, let’s make films that change things. What’s not to love about that? We are big advocates of the power of film not just to change Joe Public’s behaviour, but also change corporations’ behaviour, governments’ behaviour. Hopefully every year we will be backing a project which does just that. “We put money into the most rarefied, esoteric, willfully artistic pieces, which may be seen in an art gallery, and we put money into the most rampantly commercial documentary projects which are backing the most important causes of the day. We believe in both ends of the spectrum. I think people are crying out for that sense of direct energy and action. If we’re not having those discussions or debates, as a society we’re really in trouble.” James Bramble Britdoc runs from July 25-27 at Keble College, Oxford. www.britdoc.org

STER

LS TIVA M FES FIL

MANCHE

INTERNATIONA

STI

The Manchester International Festival describes itself as ‘the world’s first international festival of original work’. This year’s programme focuses on new music, including an Orchestral Suite by William Orbit, as well as Chen Shi-Zheng and Damon Albarn’s ‘circus opera’ Monkey: Return to the West. In keeping with the theme, the festival commissioned Greg Hall to cut a film to an original score by composer Steven Martland. Hall’s gritty first feature, The Plague, about drugs, clubs and urban lowlife, led to Variety calling him ‘the new Shane Meadows’. His collaboration with Martland, Kapital, is a dark tapestry of Manchester life. We got him to spill the beans. LWLies: Kapital has been called a Gothic film. Hall: Yeah. Every story in it is very dark, it’s people on the edge, breaking. It looks into the crevices of characters’ minds, and examines how they live in a way that we wouldn’t normally get to see. It takes you on a real journey through these lives, where you really experience the emotions of these people. How did the collaborative process work? Steve would write the music before he saw any of the film, and we’d then cut the film to his music. It’s about artists working out of their comfort zones, working differently. None of the actors had met each other, none of them knew what was happening in the film, and when we shot, we shot in chronological order so they only knew what was happening the day of the scene. I was using a Finnish cinematographer called Jussi Syrjä, who has a very Gothic and structured look to his work, and I showed him paintings by Joseph Wright and Henry Fuseli as a kind of palette. It sounds a bit pretentious but I don’t know how else to say it. It’s like an art house social realist horror.

So what’s your message? Is it political? I generally say that the way I look at society is an anarch ist perspective. All my films put humanity over the state and social structures; kind of showing the way that human beings are alienated within this consumer world we live in. We don’t live by our emotions, we’re all very much locked up in our own little worlds running around to make money, to pay the rent, get food. We’re all trapped on different levels of this labyrin to th. I’m left wing but I’m not a Marxist. I don’t believe in any state structures. Did anyone feel that the Manchester International Festiva l should have commissioned a filmmaker from Manchester? I think people might have levelled that accusation at the festival itself. I mean [Festival Director] Alex Poots is very bold to say that as well as having locally based projects, he wants to have artists who create a resonance on a world stage. I tell you, one time I did go up there I met some people who actually said to me, ‘You’re from London, you should make films about Londo n’, and I turned around and was like, ‘I kind of agree, my first film was about London, it was about how I grew up and the things I experienced, but are you willing to tell me that I should never leave my city, and are you also willing to tell those young people that you’re teaching to make films that they’re never allowe d to leave Manchester? With that we wouldn’t have Ken Loach making The Wind that Shakes the Barley.’ James Bramble The Manchester International Festival runs from June 28 – July 15. www.manchesterinternationalfestival.com

093

IC CIF LK

SPE a S

JON b y

GENRE

094 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

It’s an odd corollary of giant rabbit movies that everyone involved seems preoccupied with just how big their bunny is. And generally they’re about the same height. “Six feet high. Or is it six feet three-anda-half?” queries Veta Louise of her brother Elwood P Dowd’s constant companion, Harvey. “Six feet,” comes the answer from Donnie Darko. You’ll have to judge for yourself the size of the creature that looms large in the nightmares of Gal (Ray Winstone) in Brit gangster flick Sexy Beast. But then this is one mean hombre of a rabbit, who rides into Gal’s desert dreams on the back of a donkey, and then opens fire with a machine-gun. The obvious conflict here is with our preconception of rabbits as frolicking, floppy-eared furballs generally preoccupied with procreation – fecund symbols of springtime and abundance. “I like rabbits an’ all,” says Donald ‘Donnie’ Darko. “They’re cute and they’re horny.” Not so Donnie’s imaginary friend Frank, a sort of Terminator-bunny, albeit one who saves Donnie’s life by persuading him to leave home moments before an errant jet engine obliterates Donnie’s bedroom. It’s October 2 1988, 28 days before the end of the world according to Frank, who then launches Donnie into a series of suitably apocalyptic acts, including fire (at the home of paedo life coach Patrick Swayze) and flooding (at Donnie’s school). And then there are the rabbit references: Echo and the Bunnymen on the soundtrack, and Watership Down on video in English class. “Maybe you and Frank can read this one together,” teacher Drew Barrymore suggests to Donnie of Richard Adams’ book. In the clip we see, Fiver predicts a bloody future for furry kind at the paws of General Woundwort – certainly the nastiest 2D rabbit around.

Though separated by nearly 40 years, Bob Hoskins’ experience of acting opposite thin air for Who Framed Roger Rabbit? must have mirrored that of James Stewart in Harvey, although in the latter case the only visual hint the audience gets of Stewart’s long-eared sidekick’s existence is a hat with two holes in the top, a gag that was probably too hard to give up for the film’s makers. They should have resisted temptation; after all, Harvey doesn’t exist, does he? We’re told that Harvey is a ‘Pooka’ who, rather like Donnie’s Frank, “protects him”, and we’re led to understand that he represents loveable drunk Elwood’s (Stewart) alcoholism. But could Harvey instead be a signifier of Elwood’s homosexuality; the fluffy-tailed equivalent of Paul Newman’s plastercast leg in the film version of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof? A sweeter natured drunk you never will see. “He was a great home boy,” we’re told; a man who became “the biggest screwball in town” after his mother’s death. Briefly, Harvey leaves Elwood for another man, but the philandering bunny almost immediately returns to his old chum. “I prefer you too,” Elwood replies to Harvey’s unheard statement. And all the time poor Veta Louise is trying to marry off her daughter. We’ll probably never really know what Rob Reiner meant by putting Bruce Willis in a giant pink bunny suit in unexpected 1994 mishit North, where Willis plays Elijah Wood’s conscience (Willis appears at other moments as a delivery driver and a cowboy – maybe he just likes the outfits). The most prevalent ‘man-sized’ bunny in current culture is the ‘Rampant Rabbit’ vibrator – no wonder all the men in these movies feel so intimidated. And what about the bushy tails and floppy ears on Playboy bunnies?

Korine’s As costume designer on Harmony gster youn sed dres gny Sevi e Chlo mo, Gum for ears ny bun felt , pink in ell Jacob Sew ern his role in the cat-baiting Midwest using freakfest. His appearance is as conf out, s hang ell Sew – h Nort in is’ Will as or serves skateboards, plays the accordion like play who kids as a target for two the queer homophobic Elmer Fudds: “Kill wabbit!” Lewis As far back as Alice in Wonderland, in Carroll linked bunnies with travel it rabb are se The lds. wor us culo mira last the r Ove . ious onsc subc the holes into s to 10 years, director David Lynch seem to splash have been on a one-man mission big the over he psyc his of ents cont the s of room the der wan we as screen. And we have his latest, Inland Empire, what do ed to here? Giant bunnies, who first hopp web attention in Lynch’s hare-brained y to short Rabbits. From bats in the belfr quite bunnies in his living room. It’s been a ride. Jonas Milk

Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit! Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the WereRabbit (2005)

dir. Nick Park One of Aardman’s final forays into giant Hollywood with Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks corporation. 2) Night of the Lepus (197

dir. William F Claxton terrorise Ginormous mutant killer rabbits stars it and – est h-w sout n rica Ame the Janet Leigh! 8 Mile (2002)

dir. Curtis Hanson bit’ Mile-a-minute rapper Jimmy ‘Rab rise Smith, played by Eminem, aims to s in above his Detroit trailer trash root Curtis Hanson’s movie. 095

d n ess o o g o vi e m it h w

DVDS

pa c k ed

d is c s y in sh

Artemisia (1997) Dir: Agnès Merlet Available Now

There’s no reason why costume dramas shouldn’t occasionally let the costumes drop to the floor. But although it worked fine for such romps as Tom Jones or Dangerous Liaisons, it sits rather unhappily in director Agnès Merlet’s take on the life of groundbreaking Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Valentina Cervi is undoubtedly hot stuff as the young woman who discovers her talent for art just as she’s discovering her body, and in Merlet’s reading, it’s not long before young Artemisia is getting it on with another painter. But Artemisia’s father, who so far has supported her in the sexist art world, cries rape – with disastrous results for all involved. Picturesque and intriguing – if only because you may feel you’re not getting the whole story. Jonas Milk Jean-Luc Godard Collection Vol. 1 (1960-1982) Dir: Jean-Luc Godard Available Now

Four or five things you ought to know about Jean-Luc Godard: 1. À Bout de Souffle (1960) was written by François Truffaut, who was also supposed to oversee JLG’s debut. Jean Seberg is the student who falls for hoodlum-on-the-run Jean-Paul Belmondo, thereby providing nearly half-a-century of free advertising for the New York Herald Tribune. 2. Five years later, Godard’s love for Paris had dimmed and he used locations around the city as the setting for a dystopian sci-fi vision of the future, Alphaville (1965), starring Eddie Constantine as an intergalactic spy. 3. Political movie Made in USA (1966) was made simultaneously with Deux ou Trois Choses Que Je Sais d’Elle (not included here), shooting one in the morning and the other in the afternoon. First wife Anna Karina is the girl with a gun in this technicolour noir film. 4. In the extras to Made in USA, Anna Karina says that Godard isn’t just an intellectual but also a keen sportsman. He appears in children’s film Shéhérazade: “The beggar walking on his hands is Jean-Luc Godard, in disguise of course, and without his glasses.” 5. By the time of Passion (1982), narrative, sound and image are fragmented. Other themes and appearances can be traced across the films – including, crucially, a preoccupation with pinball machines. Jonas Milk

Frágiles (2005) Dir: Jaume Balagueró Available: July 2

Ally McBeal star Calista Flockhart plays a night nurse in a condemned hospital on the Isle of Wight. The children, who are the last remaining patients, start suffering inexplicable injuries they attribute to a ghostly ‘mechanical girl’. Balagueró serves up a concoction of horror stereotypes (the silent movie on an old TV, decrepit clockwork dolls, a black and white photo of a dead child) with some verve, and the result is better than expected. There is a distinct whiff of ham as Flockhart starts emoting (hitting her head repeatedly reveals Deep Distress), but there is a decent sting in the tail. Keep your eyes peeled for a cameo from the young star of Pan’s Labyrinth, Ivana Baquero. Aaron Davies 096 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

The Hamiltons (2006) Dir: The Butcher Brothers Available: July 2

The bloody sepia-toned cover promises a Hostel-like splatter fest. Instead, The Hamiltons offers a mash-up of American Beauty and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, minus the subtlety of the former or the gore of the latter. Cory Knauf is the emo teen growing up in a strange and murderous family. He has to deal with an overbearing, repressed brother, ‘the thing under the house’ and a pair of evil twins. The problems start with the siblings; a walking bag of incestuous, murderous, psychopathic horror clichés – you’ve seen them before in countless films. The rest is just a clumsy metaphor for puberty – all repressed desire, sexual awakening and incoherent lashing out. Disappointing. Aaron Davies

Hannibal Rising: Uncut (2006) Dir: Peter Webber Available Now

This is a prequel to the sequel of the re-make of a prequel (or something), and manages to deaden whatever fear we ever had of Mr Lector via unnecessary back-story and the help of 10 previously deleted scenes. Sadly, the more we know about the iconic monster and his blood-soaked past, the more ambivalent we become. Gaspard Ulliel steps into shoes best worn by Anthony Hopkins, and, try as he might, bites off more than he can chew. Boo. Simon Mercer

Labyrinth of Passion (1982) Dir: Pedro Almodóvar Available Now

Almodóvar shoe-horns as many outlandish characters into this 1982 film as there are tight-trousered crotches in the opening scene, and that’s a hell of a lot. There’s a ‘biogynecologist’ with a nymphomaniac rock star daughter named Sexilia, a gay emperor-in-exile who joins a glam rock band, multiple father-daughter sex romps and a young Antonio Banderas with a superhuman sense of smell. Hampered by its own overindulgence, Labyrinth nonetheless entertains, serving up some hilariously early examples of what are now hallmarks of Spain’s favourite director. Simon Mercer

Family Life (1971) Dir: Ken Loach Available Now

1971 story of a young girl The re-release of this harrowing a shocking yet painfully dated is py thera ntal undergoing experime in a poignant performance as piece of work. Sandy Ratcliff puts when her uptight parents apart falls life e whos troubled teen Janice, subsequent counselling. the and ion abort an force her through techniques make for ng filmi ary ment docu Loach’s reliance on into psychological turns a dram t realis l socia his awkward viewing as between the preast contr g estin inter an on horror. Though he plays bers footage of num r-bystone h’s Loac n, ratio and post-hippy gene audience as the ’s today to istic hron anac as s seem the young dropouts little more sents repre Life ly Fami end, the In ‘squares’ were to him. Josh Widdicombe tor. direc g youn thena of ls than the old-skool mora 097

Screen Icons: Jean-Paul Belmondo Boxset (1960-1981) Dirs: Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais Available Now

Jean-Paul Belmondo rose to fame through his iconic performance as a fugitive in Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle. This 1960 film casts a shadow over this five film set, but Belmondo’s role in À Double Tour (a garish but sinister tale of a family torn apart by infidelity) the previous year remains another fine example of his early work. Unfortunately the rest of the collection highlights the fact that age has wearied Belmondo’s sense of adventure, driving him down a narrowing career path that has effectively lead to a creative cul-de-sac. It’s hard to imagine either 1974’s Stavisky inspiring ‘Belmondism’ (a Parisian micro-movement that saw the city’s art students copying Belmondo’s sharp dress and ice-cold demeanor) in the way that À Bout de Souffle did. That’s not to say he didn’t remain influential – you can see awkward approximations of his steely glare in Le Professionnel (1981) (itself a significant homage to Bogart circa The Big Sleep) - it’s just that his urge to experiment petered out. The change is evident in Godard’s Pop Art homage Pierrot Le Fou (1965). Here, Belmondo plays Ferdinand, one half of a murderous young couple alongside the beautiful Marianne (Anna Karina). Throughout, it feels as if Godard is looking for a suitably larger-than-life performance from his leading man, one which Belmondo, already with one eye on mainstream acceptability, is unwilling to offer. Belmondo got what he wanted. By taking the commercial route he’s carved out a career as one of France’s best-loved actors. On this evidence you can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if he’d gone the other way. Henry Barnes Orchestra Seats (2006) Dir: Danièle Thompson Available Now

Paris is the setting for this light comedy which features a pianist, an actress and an art collector who are all dissatisfied with their lot in life. The film’s awkward linking thread is the tomboyish Jessica (Cécile de France), but the closeness she develops with all the film’s major players is so implausible that it borders on silly. With endless scenes of Paris’ beauty set to a soundtrack that could only be more French if it came with a complimentary garlic necklace, the film feels like little more than an extended advert for the French capital. However, it is saved by endearingly bitchy typecast soap star Catherine (Valerie Lemercier), the only character who never lapses into overwrought sentimentality. Thom Gibbs Blood Diamond (2006) Dir: Edward Zwick Available Now

Following the fates of two Africans and an American reporter, Zwick’s blockbusting slice of ‘issue-tainment’ vividly depicts the results of greed on a global scale. When the RUF militia wrench Soloman (Djimon Hounsou) from his family and force him to mine rivers, he unearths a rare diamond which he swaps with smooth-talking smuggler Leo DiCaprio for information about his son. An unlikely partnership follows but it’s not until hot tomboy journalist Maddy (Jennifer Connelly) rocks up that their cross-country trip really takes off. There’s some heroics and some schmaltz, but, for the most part, Zwick’s screen is alive with death. Showering big issues with bigger budgets, Hollywood’s ‘done’ Africa in preachy but powerful style. Georgie Hobbs Vampire Diary (2007) Dirs: Mark James, Phil O’Shea Available Now

With lots of blood and plenty of girl-on-girl action, if ever a film was desperately angling for cult status, Vampire Diary is it. Yet a subtle hand stops it veering into Christopher Lee territory. Prickly documentary maker Holly (Morven Macbeth) thinks she’s making a film about London’s ‘weekend vampires’, but when the mysterious Vicki (Anna Walton) arrives with bolt gun in hand and bloodthirsty bun in the oven, things start to get messy. Presented as a video diary, it feels irritatingly contrived at times, but manages to sidestep budgetary issues as well as give a knowing nod to Bram Stoker’s original. The DVD’s ‘making of ’ documentary confirms the film’s authenticity; a legion of London Goths were enlisted to help out with the fake fangs. Laura Swinton 098 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) Dir: Monte Hellman Available Now

Rumour has it that Brazilian director Walter Salles is in the process of adapting Jack Kerouac’s On The Road for the big screen. It’s a shame that Monte Hellman beat him to it all of 36 years ago. Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop is as close to a movie version of the classic Beat novel as you’re going to get – an expertly told exploration of man’s love affair with the freedom of the open road. Not much is said, very little happens, and even the presence of Beach Boy Dennis Wilson goes largely ignored. What’s left are lovingly crafted shots of the mighty American freeway. There’s a countless number of them yet, somehow, still not enough. Henry Barnes

Fitzcarraldo/Burden Of Dreams (1982) Dirs: Werner Herzog/Les Blank Available Now

Herzog took his crew to the Amazonian rainforest and, joined by a largely native cast plus crazy Klaus Kinksi, moved a 340-ton steamboat over a small mountain, filming all the way. Thankfully, Herzog didn’t let trivialities such as war, extreme weather and the odd death put him off his stride. The brilliant but insane Kinski went so far off the rails that a Peruvian chief offered to have him murdered. It was all worth it; the shot of the boat inching its way up a mountain like a steam-powered behemoth to operatic strains of Caruso is astonishing. The accompanying Burden of Dreams is Les Blank’s documentary of the whole process, neatly forming Herzog’s very own Heart of Darkness. Both films mesmerise. Aaron Davies

A Guide To Recognising Your Saints (2006) Dir: Dito Montiel Available: July 2

If you like your American coming-of-age movies with a dash of gang warfare and produced by Trudie Styler, this autobiopic’s got the whole lot covered. A whole heap Raising Victor Vargas and a bitpart Kids, A Guide To Recognising Your Saints traverses broken hearts and homes in the small neigbourhood of Astoria, NY. Set between the 1980s and the present, young Dito is played by implausibly named 20-year-old future megastar Shia LaBeouf, with Robert Downey Jr as his emotionally-scarred adult self. Chazz Palminteri shines as Dito’s hard-headed father, Monty. A cameo from the real Monty lends an authenticity to Montiel’s self-penned piece as well as being testament to Palminteri’s acting class. Georgie Hobbs

Senso (1954) Dir: Luchino Visconti Available: July 9

Like his subsequent masterpiece The Leopard (1963), Visconti’s Senso weaves human drama out of the revolutionary upheaval of Italy’s Risorgimento period. An infatuated Countess (Alida Valli) and a caddish Austrian officer (Farley Granger) are consumed by private passions at odds with very public change, leading to inevitable self-destruction. It is hardly coincidence that Senso begins with a performance in Venice’s La Fenice, for the amour fou at its core represents domestic melodrama at its most operatically shrill. But there are also glimpses of the open battlefield to remind us what the lovers’ intimate acts of betrayal cost the renascent state. Alas, no extras for the film’s UK DVD premiere. Anton Bitel

099

Olivier, Olivier (1992) Dir: Agnieszka Holland Available Now

When nine-year-old Olivier disappears without trace, his already tension-wracked family falls apart. Six years later, the investigating policeman thinks he recognises a cocky teenage rentboy (Gregoire Colin), claims that he’s the missing boy and sends him back to his country home to the delight of his neurotic mother (Brigitte Rouan) and suspicion of his sister (Marina Golovine). Is this the real Olivier, an opportunistic impostor, or an altogether more supernatural revenant? Holland expertly teases ambiguous performances from her cast to create a haunting dramatic thriller, inspired as much by 1982’s The Return of Martin Guerre as by real events. Superb. Anton Bitel

The Red Shoes (2005) Director: Kim Yong-Gyun Available Now

When a recently divorced single mother discovers a pair of shoes on the subway, she enters into a world of strife. The cursed shoes soon leave her, her friends and her ballet-dancing daughter venomously coveting them. Setting out to unravel the mysteries of the shoe, she finds herself descending into schizophrenic madness with a murderous spirit not far behind. Despite being a little slow at the beginning, the film holds a darkly atmospheric and stylistically creepy quality throughout, giving fans of Asian horror yet another solid title to add to their collection. Ed Andrews

Hélas Pour Moi (1993) Dir: Jean-Luc Godard Available: July 9

Hélas Pour Moi is the story – in the loosest sense – of a man, Simon Donnadieu (Gérard Depardieu), in a state of divine possession and how this impacts on his relationship with his wife, Rachael. Throughout this imaginatively shot film, you are constantly bombarded by surreal musings upon the nature of God and religion from a variety of different characters. These often overlap each other to create a cacophony of philosophy which some may find inspirational; others will be put off by the film’s aloofness and self-indulgence. Ed Andrews

A Touch of Spice (2003) Dir: Tassos Boulmetis Available Now

This lavish family drama sets out to convey the plight of the minority Greeks deported from Istanbul in 1964 but plays out like a creaky daytime soap. Our hero and narrator is Fanis, who inherits from his grandfather a love of cooking, and spends most of his formative years pining after a girl he met as a child. His nauseatingly sentimental voice-over is crammed with ludicrous culinary metaphors, which at least adds a soupçon of unintentional hilarity to what is otherwise a relentlessly tedious affair. A Touch of Spice was a domestic box-office smash, but flies the flag for Greek cinema about as effectively as Michael Winner does for the British art house scene. Paul O’Callaghan

100 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

Saadi Yacef is a freedom fighter. Or a terrorist. He’s an Algerian senator who has murdered with bombs and bullets. He’s distinguished and respectable. He’s been arrested and tortured. In 1954 Saadi was 17-years-old when he joined Algeria’s National Liberation Front to fight a war of independence against the French government. In 1966 Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers enshrined that war in legend. Produced by Saadi and shot with non-professional actors, it remains the essential document of urban resistance. In 2003, a special Pentagon screening was set up to give an insight into the tragedy in Iraq. Saadi is in London for the DVD re-release of of the film. Scheduled for August at the time of going to press, and taken from a newly re-mastered print, it’s the history of his own life re-visited. Saadi was radicalised early by his experiences in the Kasbah where 80,000 Algerians were crammed into a space of two square kilometres. It was, he says, a “disguised apartheid” where anger bred on the streets like disease. Algeria had been a French colony since 1830, and was home to over a million French citizens. To the government in Paris there was “no question” of Algerian independence. With the empire falling apart in Madagascar, Tunisia and Vietnam, “to lose Algeria would be the worst of all,” says Saadi. “It was important to France, and they didn’t think we were capable of ruling ourselves.” With war brewing, Saadi is adamant that the Algerian militants looked for a peaceful solution, only to be rejected out of hand by the authorities. In the end, he says, “the Algerians were being treated like slaves – violence was all we had.”

It’s a scenario played out again today, in Iraq and around the world. Yet Saadi, a liberal poster boy of radical idealism, is critical of this new wave of anti-occupation violence. “I am very much against suicide bombing,” he reveals. “It is done in the name of Islam, but in the Koran suicide is forbidden. In that sense what people are doing today is very wrong. When we sent someone to place a bomb during the battle for Algiers, we expected to see them again. There is no question that they would die while doing what they were doing.” But isn’t there a moral relativism at work here? After all, the Koran doesn’t condone putting bombs in restaurants either. In both cases – suicide or not – the result is the same: innocents are killed. Blood is blood, regardless of religious blessing. “There isn’t a difference,” Saadi concedes, “but the suicide bombers that people are talking about today have completely different reasons to those that I had when I was young. Someone who commits suicide thinks they are going to Paradise, but we had a struggle; we had an aim that we wanted to achieve and we couldn’t afford to lose anyone. It was no use to us if someone went to Paradise.” Though Saadi is equivocal about his belief in non-violent revolution, he is honest about the legacy of independence in Algeria: “We wanted to create a modern nation but it didn’t work that way. No matter what you do you can’t really foresee what will happen afterwards.” The consequences have been unhappy ones. In April, 24 people were killed and over 200 were wounded when a suicide bomber struck outside the Prime Minister’s office, one of a number of attacks over the last decade. “There are failures,” Saadi admits, “and today Algeria is a sick country.” When asked about the new generation growing up on the streets of the Kasbah, he answers ruefully: “They’re more angry than I was.” Matt Bochenski

101

Lila Says (2004) Dir: Ziad Doueiri Available Now

Hormones wreak havoc for all in this provocative, sexually charged coming-of-age romance, based on a controversial novel from several years back. French Algerian teen Chimo (Mohammed Khouas) is your archetypal disaffected youth, dividing his time between committing petty crimes in his derelict neighbourhood, and moping around complaining about his lot. All that changes when foulmouthed nymphet, Lila (Vahina Giocante), arrives on the scene. Chimo’s smitten, but the couple’s blossoming relationship begins to cause serious resentment among his friends. The young leads do a fine job, and the film succeeds in sustaining an atmosphere of erotic tension, but wastes time building towards an inevitable and rather distasteful climax. Paul O’Callaghan Duelist (2005) Dir: Lee Myung-Se Available: July 2

Korea in the late Chosun Dynasty: Namsoon (Ha Ji-won) is a manic young detective trying to crack a counterfeiting ring with the help of her partner. Clues suggest a link to political conspiracy, but suspects keep dying at the blade of a mysterious, emo-styled swordsman (Kang Dong-won). To make matters worse, Namsoon rather fancies the cut of his jib. Duelist is a baffling experience: sexy and balletic, yet impossible to follow. It is funny, inventive, oddly romantic – and yet it seems determined to alienate the viewer at every turn. Is it simply a nonsensical mess? Possibly, but there’s something hugely endearing about it all the same. It’s the finest buddy-buddy romcom martial arts mystery slapstick art house period thriller of the year, bar none. Neon Kelly

Shortbus (2006) Dir: John Cameron Mitchell Available Now

Did you cum in the cinema the first time round? No? Well, back for a second time (but even harder), John Cameron Mitchell’s post 9/11 sex-fest now comes with added sauce to lend a hand. As well as an insight into his unique approach to casting, Mitchell and Canadian actress Sook-Yin Lee join cabaret act Justin Bond to offer some unrivalled bitchy commentary atop the film’s loose plot. With an achingly hip soundtrack and handpicked cast of fresh acting talent, this sweet love story offers the uninitiated a ticket to the romanticised world of sexual liberation usually limited to the East Coast’s queer art scene. Slurp it up. Georgie Hobbs

A shortburst from John Cameron Mitchell

LWLies: If you had to be stuck on a desert island with anyone in the world, but you couldn’t have sex with them, who would you choose? Mitchell: Samuel Becket. I actually met him long before I made Shortbus while working on a film in Eastern Europe that I’m too embarrassed to tell you the name of. He actually gave me a first edition of one of his books but he was really old and seemed exhausted so when I asked him to sign it he kept saying, “John Cameron Mitchell? Do I really have to write the whole thing? Can’t I just write ‘John’?” But he was so kind. Do toilets tell you a lot about a place? They do, especially in restaurants. If you go in after the wait-staff and they haven’t flushed, you know a little about that restaurant. I should, but I don’t quite get… Sex. Having made a film about sex, I don’t understand why I don’t get enough sex, that’s for sure. 102 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

EXy b

REN S

VIE

ELL

LEEDA

m da

Peter Yates Director: Ken Marshall Starring: Lysette Anthony Freddie Jones Box Notables: Classic RCA red box ‘A world light years Tagline: beyond your imagination’ Space Hunter Trailers: The Ballad of Shameface Timeclock “Odds goblets! That Cherry pick: man has raisins in his braincase!” Bilbo Bagshot: I was like you once. Blonde hair. Scraggy little beard. Childlike ears. Full of beans and spunk! I punched a bloke in the face once for saying Hawk the Slayer was rubbish.  Tim: Good for you.  Bilbo Bagshot: Yeah, thanks. But that’s not the point. The point is, I was defending the fantasy genre with terminal intensity, when what I should have said was, “Dad, you’re right. But let’s try Krull for tonight, and we’ll discuss it later.”  With the fanfare of James Horner’s back-peddling Star Trek theme still ringing in our ears we alight upon Castle Forcedperspective in the friscalating plains of Krull. Here, Ken Marshall’s Prince Colwyn – an eminently dislikeable, deep-space Dexter St. Jock type – is to be hitched to dubbed mannequin Lysette Anthony’s equally unappealing Princess Lyssa in a ceremony pitched between the high comedy and low camp that only self-penned wedding vows declaimed in second-hand fetishwear can ever hope to produce. Luckily for all concerned, this rhapsodic mare’s nest is interrupted in the nick of time by the uninvited arrival of Berwhale the Avenger – a bipolar demigod who flies around the galaxy in a big stone head much like the one in soft-core Sean Connery nappy riot, Zardoz. Coming across like the nouveau riche offspring of the Rancor monster and the Toxic Avenger, Berwhale, for all his vaunted omnipotence, seems unable (or unwilling) to conquer a planet without first marrying into money, and so smashes the place up, kidnaps the bride-to-be and imprisons her in the Vaseline-lensed brainwrong of Stevie Nicks’ dream archive until such time as she succumbs to his swampy charms. After a failed attempt to cop off with one of the few bridesmaids still in one piece, Colwyn amasses a stock band of starving British character actors and sets out to rescue his immortal beloved. The (horny) hero has thus been called to adventure… Cannily identifying the need for a weapon gimmicky enough to compete in the audience’s minds with Beastmaster’s ferret army and Hawk the Slayer’s baddie-bewildering disco soundtrack, Colwyn must now enter the dark depths of The Pine Wood (read: a Pinewood Studios soundstage, after hours) to

seeketh/steal the mythical ‘Glaive’ – a flying swastika made out of sharpened shoehorns. Totally preposterous and seemingly designed with both eyes on the Commodore 64 spin-off game, the Glaive does however obviate the need for yet more bloody sword fighting and did, to be fair, go on to spawn that short lived weak sister of fantasy sub-genres, ‘Swastikas and Sorcery’ (RIP). The rest of the film is about as enjoyable as a naked donkey ride to hell in a sandpaper saddle. There’s some protracted, dialogue-free business with a giant crystal spider, over which noise baron James Horner goes totally loco with a Theremin/ jackhammer duel; we suffer the most insulting deus ex machina since the Theory of Evolution (rapidly acquired, hitherto unmentioned flying – Shire! – horses); and witness the worst Glaive fight, well, ever. Otherwise it’s Star of the War Rings executed with every bit of the precision and delicacy you would expect from the director of Mother, Jugs & Speed. Produced by hallowed film titans Barclays Mercantile Industrial Finance, Krull (aka Internal ComDev Equity B-M671/ K), though fondly remembered as one of the decade’s nobler failures, is merely an example of an ERH living high on the taxdeductible hog. Whereas the previous year’s Tron was a brainjacking acid-catapult into a viable futurama, and ’81’s Dragonslayer did exactly what it said on the box, the unique fantasy selling point of Krull is an incident free, 90-minute stroll from Point A (Castle Forcedperspective) to Point B (Berwhale Towers) with an unutterably smug TV movie actor in a blow-dried codpiece. They’ve thrown a bit of folding money at it, sure, but the overriding feeling is that, like so many of its poorer cousins, Krull existed purely because there were shelves to be filled. 103

A VIE S

O ’ MO F

VI WATCHIN SION

ISION

COB

RAV

KINDA WHI LS L T IKE YOU HA ’R VIN e OUT’ THE

’S COBRAIT

Like Cobra Beer itself, CobraVision goes from strength to strength. Having screened hundreds of high-quality five-second films before and after the advert breaks during the movies on ITV2, ITV3 and ITV4, the competition has demonstrated the sheer variety of effects that can be achieved in a short space of time. In June, a star-studded (well, Danny Dyer, Ian Hart, Martin Freeman and June Sarpong) soirée was held at the BFI to recognise the best of this year’s entries. While all, understandably, were comedic, they included

104 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

a satirical think piece on the banality of apocalypse (Judgment Day) and The Relay, an almost Buddhist meditation on one man’s futile struggle to wipe his arse. Sam Roger’s Doodled, a dark and brilliant animation that set a high standard early on in the year, took top prize. The five-second slots will now be replaced with a 50-second film before the movies on ITV4, providing filmmakers with a far more substantial and uncut opportunity to get their films seen by a national audience. www.cobrabeer.com/cobravision

ION

WIN

ABOUT SAY IT

THEY TO IT

WHATIN

it PET

KNOW BEING

COM

YOU

Win a VIP trip to the Edinburgh International Film Festival. LWLies has teamed up with Edinburgh International Film Festival to offer one lucky reader plus guest a trip to ‘Best of the Fest’ – where the very best and sold-out films are crammed into a one-day last-chance screening extravaganza. The festival takes place August 15-26, and the programme for 2007 will be announced on July 11. You can see it via the power of the internet at www.edfilmfest.org.uk The Prize – Your pass will get you and a friend entry into your choice of the films screening on the day, which kick off at 10am and continue throughout the day at venues across the city. You can break for dinner at chic eatery Peckham’s Underground restaurant, and you’ll spend a night in the lap of luxury at the Caledonian Hilton hotel, right in the heart of Edinburgh’s Prince’s Street. To be in with a chance of winning this fantastic weekend away, just e-mail your response to this easy-peasy question to editorial@littlewhitelies.co.uk by August 10: What is the name of this year’s closing film at EIFF? Best of the Fest is on Sunday August 26, so you’ll have to be free that day, and you’ll have to make your own way to Edinburgh and back. Winner and guest must be 18 years or over. Good luck, innit.

105

We’ve taken our damn sweet time, but we’re ready to ask the question: Cannes you dig it? This issue we bring you an Incoming special, with our own unique take on a selection of this year’s most interesting offerings. Finally, the truth.

108 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

new

4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days. new

Dir. Cristian Mungiu

Playing on the first day of the festival and known throughout as ‘That Romanian Film’, 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days is the small-scale stonker that went on to achieve glory by bagging the Palme d’Or. Set in Bucharest during the final days of the communist regime, the story concerns two female college roommates: one is pregnant and wants an abortion, the other – taking the notion of a friendly gesture to obscene lengths – is willing to go any distance to help her out of trouble. Though it’s a visually repellent film that uses cold backdrops, seedy characters and a bleaker-than-bleak set-up, the dramatic momentum is relentless, with each concurrent moment of dread lapping at the heels of the last. A deserving winner. ETA: Early 2008

Dir. Christophe Honoré

Being fans of director Honoré’s last film, Dans Paris, our expectations were high for this early morning screening. Alas, our enthusiasm was short-lived at the hands of a hyper-smug French musical that sees the undoubtedly talented director overloading on the whimsy that he’d tweaked to perfection in his previous film. Concerning the emotional journey of David (Louis Garrel) who must regulate his vivacious manner after his girlfriend drops dead in a club, the film is interspersed with a selection of sub-Jacques Brel ditties containing some of the most dreadfully embarrassing lyrics imaginable (though it’s possible that something was lost in translation). Garrel’s propensity for silly hand gestures, funny faces and general showing-off reminded us of cocaine-era Robin Williams (in a bad way), while not even that sultriest of sex kittens, Ludivine Sagnier, could raise our spirits. ETA: November 2007 new

Dir. Wong Kar-Wai

The kick-off to the 60th Cannes Film Festival was a bit of a kick in the teeth, as Hong Kong’s ‘Mr Reliable’, Wong Kar-Wai, came unstuck with his first attempt at English-language filmmaking. Norah Jones stars as the lovelorn dumpee Elizabeth, a ditzy loner who decides that a jaunt across America is the only way to purge the memories of her latest beau. Naturally, she bumps into a bunch of rootless nobodies – including David Strathairn, Rachel Weisz and Jude Law (good) and Natalie Portman (bad, bad, bad) – who offload various nuggets of fortune cookie wisdom along the way. While the film retains Wong’s intimate sense of colour and mood, Jones is as bland as a slab of Tofu. Let’s hope this is the first and last time she decides to take leave of the coffee table. ETA: December 2007

Les Chansons D’Amour.

The Banishment.

Dir. Andrei Zvyagintsev

A Russian rump punisher from the director of 2001’s The Return, this delivered little of the narrative and emotional coherence of its forebear as it charted the silent fury of a husband informed that his wife is pregnant by another man. The film is technically miraculous – one tracking shot that follows a stream down a hill then underneath a house is breathtaking – but if you were to take away the fluid camerawork and the director’s keen eye for imagery, you’d be left with little to occupy you for the two-and-a-half hour runtime. Festival jurors gave Konstantin Lavronenko the Best Actor gong for his efforts in the lead role. We can only suggest that there was something in the tea. ETA: 2008 new

My Blueberry Nights.

109

Dir. Eran Kolirin

new

Could director Eran Kolirin be the Middle East’s answer to Kaurismäki and Jarmusch? This bittersweet shaggy dog story about an Egyptian police band stranded in an Israeli nowhere town suggests that he very well may be. With a firm handling of tone and texture, the director weaves a series of delightfully deadpan situations as his motley band of players (decked out in absurd powder-blue suits) attempt to get the most from their bizarre stop-over. Sure, it’s light to the point of being featherweight, but if The Band’s Visit doesn’t enlighten you in some small way, then chances are you’ve got real problems. ETA: 2008

110 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

The Edge of Heaven.

Dir. Fatih Akin

A slight return for the fiery Turkish director of 2002’s Head-On, this moderately touching drama addresses the impact of death on two separate families – one Turkish, one German – but is too contrived and long-winded to really have any lasting emotional impact. The Edge of Heaven feels self-consciously mature in the way it chooses to omit the passion and zeal of Akin’s previous films, replacing them instead with a more measured (read: boring) view of its characters. We were shocked to see this pick up the prize for the best screenplay; of all its faults, it was the writing that was the worst offender. ETA: Winter 2007 new

The Band’s Visit.

Paranoid Park.

Dir. Gus Van Sant

new

Gus Van Sant returned to Cannes’ Grand Lumière cinema, the site where Elephant took home gold in 2003. Paranoid Park depicts the fractured conscience of a teenage skateboarder who decides to keep schtum after accidentally causing the death of a railway security guard. An unknown cast of young, non-professional actors and a typically simple, excellently paced screenplay imbue the film with a beautiful, natural quality. As the story slowly unfolds you’ll almost forgive Van Sant for the insipid mess that was Last Days. Almost. ETA: Late 2007

Return to Normandy.

Dir. Nicolas Philibert

new

Quietly making a name for himself as one of the world’s foremost documentary-makers, Philibert follows his 2002 crowd-pleaser Être et Avoir with an altogether more complicated but equally rewarding piece of work, heading off on a journey to reunite the cast of rural villagers from his late-’70s film Moi, Pierre Rivière. Never labouring over a point at the expense of some gorgeous imagery (the shot of a pig farmer balancing on his bike is one of the festival’s most memorable), Philibert’s latest achieves an intellectual depth which far exceeds its modest roots, touching on everything from the relationship between an actor and his/her character, to cinema’s effect on the different rungs of the social ladder. ETA: Early 2008

The Flight of the Red Balloon.

Dir. Hou Hsiou-Hsien

new

This new pic from Hou Hsiou-Hsien sees the master director relocate from his native Taiwan to the streets of Paris for a charming slice-of-life drama, taken from the perspective of the titular balloon. Juliette Binoche plays a rattled wife and mother attempting to hold together a long distance relationship; an impressive turn that binds together various sub-plots involving her son’s piano lessons, her new live-in nanny and her day job as a puppeteer. With its beautiful gold and red cinematography, the film is at once a statement on the nature of cinematic artifice (at one point, we are even shown how the drifting balloon is controlled) and a poignant dissection of family dynamics. ETA: TBC Dir. Carlos Reygadas

new

Of all the films at this year’s festival, none bowled us over more than Carlos Reygadas’ sublime enquiry into love and religion, rooting itself in the nonetoo-glamorous setting of a Mennonite community in northern Mexico (they’d be the non-violent Christian types). From its opening shot – a sunrise of stunning beauty – the film offers a series of simple long takes which endear us to the intensely mundane lives of its characters. Focusing mainly on a farmer who is caught in a love triangle between his wife and his God, Reygadas’ film generates an ambience of pastoral beauty that Malick would be proud of. The ending is a brazen rip-off of Dreyer’s Ordet – but dammit, it works. Best of the fest. ETA: TBC

The Man from London. Dir. Béla Tarr

If ever there was a film to sort the men from the boys, The Man from London is it, opening with a 26-minute scene that crawls off the screen at the pace of a snail with a limp. Miroslav Krobot plays a lowly railway switchman who witnesses a murder and nabs a suitcase full of banknotes from the crime scene. As he starts to question whether tipping the equilibrium of his meagre existence is worth the risk, his troubles mount up as an infuriatingly slow-speaking inspector begins to join all the dots. With its hypnotic sound design and abrasive photography, it’s worth having seen some of Tarr’s prior work to really ‘understand’ what’s going on here. ETA: TBC new

Silent Light.

111

new

No Country for Old Men.

Dirs. Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

Update

Calling this tragicomic western from the Coen brothers a return to form would be something of an understatement, as it easily stands up to some of the best work in their offbeat canon. Adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name, there is a real sense here that time and effort was spent achieving a perfect marriage of source material and directorial style. The story unfolds from three different perspectives: first there’s the slow-witted Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who’s decided to walk away with $2 million from a bungled heist in the desert. Then there’s Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem – excellent) the maniac with a pneumatic cattle prod who will stop at nothing to retrieve his loot. Finally, both of their stories are fed through the bruised mind of Tommy Lee Jones’ local sheriff. Both moody and manic, this is high-end stuff. ETA: February 2008

112 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

Dir. Daniele Luchetti

Sure to be a hit of Goodbye Lenin! proportions, this charming post-war family saga sees two Italian brothers perched on different sides of the political fence as their hormones run wild and the family home crumbles to pieces. At a young age, Accio (Elio Germano) is cajoled into the fascist party by his conformist uncle, much to the chagrin of his commie older brother (Riccardo Scamarcio) who deals out regular beatings and holds strikes at the factory where he works. Admittedly, there is a predictable dip from genteel political comedy into family melodrama, and the ending isn’t as curt as it perhaps should have been, yet expert pacing and plenty of laughs make this a difficult film for even the harshest of critics to dislike. ETA: TBC new

Dir. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi

Valeria Bruni Tedeschi parks her bum in the director’s chair for the second time for Dreams of the Night Before, in which she also stars as Marcelline, an actress haunted by ‘Natalia Petrovna’, her latest leading role. Tedeschi’s incandescent charm almost carries the film by itself as she struggles to come to terms with hitting the big four-zero without having become a mother. It’s an enjoyable if forgettable farce with great supporting roles by Mathieu Amalric and her real-life boyfriend Louis Garrel (mercifully sedated after his antics in Les Chansons D’Amour). ETA: TBC

My Brother is an Only Child.

Sicko.

Dir. Michael Moore

Michael, Michael – you ain’t no documentarian. Poor, self-aggrandising, Michael – why must you periodically shove your good, fat self in front of the camera? Tedious, overblown Michael, why must you come close to ruining your important, eye-opening films with pointless, theatrical nonsense? Yes, Sicko is exactly what you’re expecting it to be – a humane, engaging look at an issue genuinely worthy of discussion. Moore’s dissection of the US healthcare system is as entertaining as it is damning, but the film suffers at the hands of our hero’s shock tactics: witness as he leads his ailing comrades into Cuba to prove that their healthcare system is well wicked; gasp as the mere mention of his name causes one company to buckle and provide a young girl with a second hearing aid. A solid film then, but certainly not one from a maturing director. ETA: Late 2007 new

Dreams of the Night Before.

new

Persepolis.

Dirs. Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane Satrapi

new

One of the real treats at Cannes was Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi’s monochrome animation about the latter’s turbulent upbringing in Tehran. Coming across like a Middle Eastern riff on Amélie – but with more political bite – the film points a whimsical finger at the many idiosyncrasies of Iranian society during the ’80s and ’90s, yet is lightened considerably by a delightful strain of irreverent humour. Also of note is the expressive two-tone animation, which manages to draw the most complex of emotions from faces which are essentially two dots and a line. ETA: TBC

Blind Mountain.

Dir. Yang Li

Eliciting possibly the loudest spontaneous applause of this year’s festival (we’re not telling you why, but you need to check it out if this ever gets a UK release), Blind Mountain is the torturous but excellent story of a young Chinese woman tricked into marrying a simple villager. Hubby seems intent on beating and raping his wife until she has a child and submits to the idea that she’s stuck in his world. With escape attempts thwarted time and again (to be fair, they’re all poorly planned) the sense of desperation constantly verges on the annoying, but thankfully never quite gets there. ETA: TBC new

Dir. Ulrich Seidl

Austrian provocateur Ulrich Seidl delivered one of the festival’s most shocking comic moments with his film Import/Export, which looks at the world of work on the Austrian-Ukrainian border. About half-anhour in, the flaxen-haired Olga has decided to try her hand at the Internet porn business – only to have one of the punters repeatedly demand, “Stick your finger up your arse!” Mixing precisely framed photography with an atmosphere of documentary realism, many dismissed this as a Diane Arbus-lite freakshow with little depth beyond its exploitative tendencies. However, at its heart lies a tender tale of cultural displacement, and there’s much fun to be had connecting up Seidl’s visual parallels. The final word spoken in the film is ‘death’, which pretty much says it all. ETA: TBC

Control. Update

Import/Export.

Dir. Anton Corbijn

Meet Sam Reily, the young British actor who plays Ian Curtis in a new Joy Division biopic from rock snapper, Anton Corbijn. Our advice is to etch that name onto your mindplate now, as he’ll be on the front of every style mag from here to Des Moines by the end of the year. Recently Curtis has become something of a caricature of chronic depression, but Reily manages to flesh out his inner demons and deliver a credible and – most importantly – likeable character. If you’re looking for a pioneering and important piece of cinema, you’ve come to the wrong place. If, on the other hand, you’re after an expertly played and strikingly photographed drama, one that doesn’t play too hard-andfast with biopic conventions, then you’ve struck gold. ETA: October 2007

113

SUBSCRIBE & Win!

LWLies is a solid magazine – that’s a fact. You can’t wait to see the next issue, can you? You well want to get invited to all of our events and things like that too. You should totally subscribe. And despite this crazy materialistic

world, it doesn’t even cost that much either. Our humble publication is released onto the streets six times a year, and by subscribing you can receive those next six issues for £15. This issue, the first 10 subscribers whose names are picked out of the LWLies copper kettle will win copies of The Big Lebowski (RRP £9.99), a critical reading of the Coen brothers’ late-’90s screwball/noir crowd-pleaser by JM Tyree and Ben Walters. It’s part of the BFI’s Film Classics series. All you have to do is send a cheque for £15 to our all-new HQ address: LWLies Magazine, Studio 209 Curtain House, 134-146 Curtain Road London EC2A 3AR Cheques should be made payable to: The Church Of London Publishing Tell us your name, address and e-mail, and we’ll drop you a line to let you know everything’s sweet.

Issue 13, On Sale August 31 “I want to show my guy what a real designer looks like!”

114 THE tales from earthsea ISSUE

`e_d j^[ _dj[hdWj_edWb ÄbccWa_d] Yecckd_jo j^Wj ][ji oekh Äbci cWZ[ WdZ i[[d J^[ KA WdZ KI _dZ[f[dZ[dj ÄbccWa[hi½ d[jmeha El[h )'"&&& c[cX[hi El[h (+& d[m c[cX[hi `e_d ki [l[ho m[[a

lll#h]ddi^c\eZdeaZ#dg\

“STUNNING” ★★★★★ THE SUN “INCREDIBLE” LITTLE WHITE LIES

“ELECTRIFYING” THE OBSERVER

“ASTONISHING” SIGHT AND SOUND

“THE REAL LIFE CITY OF GOD” ★★★★ UNCUT

A film by ASGER LETH

THE MOST DANGEROUS PLACE ON EARTH STRONG LANGUAGE AND 15 CONTAINS REFERENCES TO VIOLENCE AND DEATH

Original music by

WYCLEF JEAN

IN CINEMAS JULY 20