Fri
19-Oct-2007

one hundred nails

After Valzer, we saw another Italian film, this time a subtle humorous anti-Christian tale of a young theology professor who looks exactly like Jesus, and the film doesn't try to hide that everyone thinks he looks like Jesus too. It's hard to take away any one message or point the film might have been trying to make, but it seems that the professor decides his life spent poring over religious books is meaningless and in one magnificent act of vandalism he drives nails through a hundred priceless books in the lofty library that he and his colleagues share. The rest of the film is about him as he flees to stay with a small squatter community by a village on the banks of the River Po, who fall in love with him as the police close gradually in.

The film is actually quite funny and light, but shot through with amazing moments of lyrical beauty, where the professor will rise to the occasion and bring forth some biblical or anti-biblical truth about life and authentic experience. There's a great line where he asks the sergeant questioning him: "how many books have you read? ten? in your whole life? when you look back through your life what do you see? when I look back, all I see is books"

At that moment I think all of us in audience who have read far too many books suddenly had a pang of abject existential fear!

valzer

Alex and I met up with Charles and his friend Fabio at BFI Southbank last night to see Valzer, a cool Italian film shot in one take over the course of a day in a hotel.

The central characters are the hotel staff, particularly a maid having an interesting and emotional confrontation with the father of one of her ex-colleagues. The father has been in prison for years and has been exchanging letters with the maid thinking that she was his daughter. The hotel staff are all doing their best to live meaningful lives on low wages, surrounded by a range of extremely rich corrupt guests, from big Italian busty models to football magnates discussing how to rig their games to a sociological expert who lectures the football magnates on how best to manipulate the common people through sport and TV so that their lives become so cold and empty that they will do whatever they are told.

The film is really good at painting a comic but depressing world of bleak corruption that the drama of the humble central characters is played out against. The decision to shoot it all in one take makes for a particularly engrossing feeling of being sucked into one tight evolving story.

Fri
24-Aug-2007

transylvania

Met up with Matt and two colleagues from his work, Eva and Nick. to see Transylvania, the latest Tony Gatlif film. Like Exils, Transylvania is visually breathtaking, drawing you into a bleak cold hard misty eastern European landscape. Gatlif can make a rubbish dump look beautiful and moving.

In Transylvania, an intense pregnant French girl, Zingarina, is looking for her Romany lover, who she thinks was deported from France but who actually left to escape from her. When he tells her this, she goes a bit mental and starts alternately latching on to people and abandoning them. She's interesting because on the one hand she is completely unable to look after herself, on the other, she's strikingly independent, wandering off into Transylvania in a trance by herself, relying on her ability to be adopted by people she meets. At one point she is teamed up with a little beggar girl, who looks after them both but exasperated at Zingarina's trance-like divorce from reality keeps shaking her and shouting: "wake up!"

It all ends quite well, with Zingarina getting together with an itinerant trader, who seems to feel both pleased and somewhat trapped by this fate...

Sat
18-Aug-2007

i for india

Matt and I saw a lovely film last night at the ICA – I for India. It's a documentary following an Indian family who moved to Darlington in the 1960s, made by one of the daughters of the family and drawing on an amazing wealth of footage from England and India. The father, Yash Pal Suri, wanted to keep in touch with his family back in India after he moved to Darlington, so he bought two Super 8 cameras, two projectors and two reel-to-reel recorders and sent one set back to his parents and siblings in India. Hence there are all these amazing scenes of English and Indian life from the 60s and 70s, and then the 80s, all skillfully put together into what is both a documentary about immigration and the painful necessity of separating from parents and home, and a sentimental domestic drama that draws you so close to the family that many of us were quietly sobbing by the end of the film.

The weirdest thing was that as the lights came on and we turned to get up, we saw that the mother from the film was sat right behind us in the audience, along with other members of the family from the film! I really recommend seeing it if you have a chance.

Wed
02-May-2007

sunshine

Went with Phil and Jordan earlier to see the new Danny Boyle film, Sunshine. Lots of bright white brightness with extra white. Great tense build-up, and the sun looks and feels amazing, blasting out great crashes of angry power, an ever-present immensity throughout the film. I wasn't particularly annoyed by the science. I did rather wonder though at how any human being would ever choose to name a dangerous mission to the sun "Icarus" ... twice!

Fri
20-Apr-2007

dirty ho

Tom P and I went to see Dirty Ho (Lantou He) by Lau Kar-leung last night. In this splendid 1979 movie, the Manchu prince hero Wang teaches his thief disciple Ho the art of pure orthodox exquisitely-choreographed kung fu. There are a few wonderful action set pieces where the prince is set upon by assassins disguised as civilised wine merchant or art dealer, who attack him under the guise of civilised manners as they handle china vases or sip expensive wine, Wang defending himself with an equally scrupulous regard for polite protocols. Check out this wonderful YouTube clip which shows the Zen delicacy of the footwork, and the funny intense staring look Wang adopts as he fights off his opponent.

Mon
09-Apr-2007

el topo

Today saw us back in Regent's Park, meeting up with Juicy, Ed, Pierre, Phil, James G and Alex, though Matt and I went to see Jordan's fabulously urban artwarehouse flat in Haringey first.

Jordan, Alex and I took ourselves off to see another Alejandro Jodorowsky film at the NFT, the deeply surreal and almost excessively allegorical El Topo.

It was marvellous, with striking opening scenes where El Topo rides through the desert with a black umbrella and his naked seven year old son sitting in the saddle behind him. However I was so drunk that I fell asleep during the second quarter of the film, waking up to be more fully engaged for the second half where the mystic son of god cowboy El Topo awakens from years of being tended and worshiped as a god by an underground community of cripples, and vows to tunnel an exit for them from the cave to the decadent frontier town outside. There's lots of powerful Christian imagery, and a final searing Buddhist image near the end when El Topo sits crosslegged, douses himself in oil and immolates himself.

I need to watch it a second time though, which I'm sure I'll have the chance to do at some point.

Afterwards, Al went home, and Jordan and I walked into town to G-A-Y Bar, just in time for me to rescue Matt from a bit of a situation. He and Benjie had been putting the G back into G-A-Y and Matt had made a bit of a mess at the front of Mary Poppins, and round the side, as a result of what Juicy would call a misg’alculation... Still, it was all OK, we headed home in a taxi with a lovely taxi driver who provided a carrier bag and Matt was soon tucked up in bed fast asleep.

Fri
06-Apr-2007

the holy mountain part 2

Took Phil, Jordan and James G to see The Holy Mountain again on Thursday night.

For me, it was even better the second time!

Sat
31-Mar-2007

rainbow's end

After our Thameside walk from the Thames Barrier to Cutty Sark today, we saw an early afternoon film at the NFT. It was a documentary called Rainbow's End, which explored the ambiguous picture of LGBT rights across Europe at the moment, showing how there have been gains in some places and setbacks in others, particularly in the Netherlands and across Eastern Europe.

It was very good, and a timely reminder that queer rights, like all human rights, can never be taken for granted, even when you are living somewhere as gloriously liberated as London. It's a German film, and lots of it focuses on Germany and Poland. There are some very moving scenes where this German girl travels to Poland to march on Gay Pride marches in solidarity with queer Poles in Krakow and Warszawa, in the face of skinhead counter-demonstrators hurling abuse and rocks. Still, there are enough interviews with ordinary people in the crowd calling for "tolerance" and "acceptance" to make you feel heartened, despite others like the old woman who said: "I'm 85, I didn't live through the war to see two women kissing in the street!"

The Polish LGBT campaigners also travel to Auschwitz in the film, to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camp, even though they were the only group that were not invited to the official ceremony. There's a scene where a group of gay Jews sing to commemorate the pink triangle victims where I just had tears streaming down my face.

The parts of the film that focused on Poland were particularly interesting - I kept thinking back to times I have spent there. I remember at our holiday in Hotel Tulipan when around 3am on New Year's Eve, this middle aged Polish man at the hotel came up and told me, as Ema translated for me, how he had never met a gay person before, but that he liked me and wished me well.

I also remember walking with Michal around 7am on New Year's Day up the road towards the mountain and we chatted about the Catholic religion as we passed a big church on the way. I was kind of being positive about Catholicism and he was being very negative ... I remembered that talk when during this film someone was describing how a priest in Poland was saying in his sermon how wonderful it was that the young people of Poland these days were prepared to actively fight back against "sick" (gay) people.

I've come away thinking quite hard about the fact I work with a lot of religious people in anti-poverty campaigning. I know that there are debates within Christianity and Islam and that individuals who profess a faith may dissent strongly from the established authority of that religion, but I sometimes think that if you are part of a faith you are associated with its dominant tenets and perhaps partly responsible for them. At times like that I start thinking like Richard Dawkins: if you are liberal and believe that people should be allowed to love whatever sex they like, then why bother trying to change Christianity from within, why not just abandon it? Don't compromise. But most of the time, my gut feeling is that religious faith is much like sexuality. You mostly don't choose it, you just are that way. Queer Christians feel like people who believe in god and don't want to rule that out because they are gay. It doesn't take too much intelligence to see that that the Abrahamic religions are social institutions that although at the forefront of progressive social attitudes in some respects are severely lagging behind in others and are struggling to get to grips with a modern understanding of human sexuality and gender.

Mon
26-Mar-2007

pink narcissus

James G, Mark H, Matt and I went to the NFT last night to see the 1971 James Bidgood luminous erotic classic Pink Narcissus.

I really enjoyed it. It's a film without dialogue about this beautiful young boy who lounges around his violently kitsch pink apartment in a strange hellish fallen city dreaming of sex in elaborate fantasies all centered on himself. It's all shot in otherworldly bright lighting, vivid and elven, and was actually made over seven years and produced in its entirety, including outdoor scenes, in Bidgood's small New York apartment...

After the film, there was a filmed interview with James Bidgood which, as Matt said, was almost as enjoyable as the film itself.

Sat
24-Mar-2007

llgff with dan and james

Matt and I got up rather too early on a Saturday to see James G and Dan M at the NFT for an 11.30am showing of Follow My Voice: With the Music of Hedwig, basically a documentary about the making of the Wig In A Box album and the Harvey Milk High School (for LGBT youth) that the album's sales raise money for.

Yoko Ono, who did a song with Yo La Tengo, was my favourite bit of the film. She was very professional and craggy, and took her song very seriously, whispering her part at the start before building up to a screaming yowling barely human finish...

After that, we started drinking, then Dan, Matt and I went to a collection of shorts called Made In Britain. Then Matt and Dan went on to see the gloriously titled Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds, while I headed off for Alex's birthday.

Wed
24-Jan-2007

casino royale

Went to see Casino Royale late last night with Jordan at Shepherd's Bush. We popped in on the Polish Enclave in Bush Court, and Michal let us use his room to get stoned before watching the film. Agata and Ema were there too, and Agata has just received her successful English exam results and so, shockingly, had been drinking!

Casino Royale was fun - big, stylish and mildly dark. I thought it was a real improvement on most Bond movies. I like Bond's new hard, determined manner, offset by those charming blue eyes, and the general exploration of his callous misogynist character. The colourful psychedelic title sequence was also very cool. And M had lots of good lines. The glory of Judy Dench!

Tue
12-Dec-2006

pan's labyrinth

Al, Matt and I went to see Pan's Labyrinth last night at the Barbican. The Barbican suits a film as dark and quirky as this.

It's a Spanish Civil War movie revolving around a girl's fairy tale world which becomes gradually more real as the world around her becomes steadily crueller. It could be a film for young children, were it not so dark and brutal. The fantasy sequences are as dark as the real events unfolding around her in the war, including a pretty horrific child eating monster with eyeballs in its palms.

I really enjoyed it. I particularly liked the way it was a well observed historical drama rather than just being a fantasy horror. The different elements balance together really well.

Check out Colin's review!

Thu
02-Nov-2006

ten canoes

Matt and I joined Charles, Miranda and Pete to go and see Ten Canoes at the London Film Festival. It's a stylishly told Aboriginal story set in Australia's ancient past, narrated by David Gulpilil, a well known ambassador of Aboriginal culture. It mostly moves slowly, with beautiful cinematography bringing alive the sounds and sensations of the lush waterholes and swamps of indigenous Australia, at times it can be tragic, at times funny, with coarse sex and fart jokes.

The film revolves around a story being told in the present about an annual goose egg hunting expedition during which an old man tells a story to his younger brother, who covets one of the older man's three wives. This part of the film is shot in ethnographic style black and white, but the story that the old man then tells his younger brother, set in the mythic distant past, is told in beautiful colour. There's lots of musings on the art of telling and listening to stories, with a recurring image of the story as a tree with many branches, each of which has to be followed for a full understanding of the story.

It's a film I will remember for a long time, and a really intense clear picture of a human culture that feels an incredibly long way away from my own...

Sat
28-Oct-2006

the holy mountain

Alex and I went to see a cool late Friday night London Film Festival offering at the NFT: Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain. It's a 1973 cult Mexican classic, recently colour-corrected and restored under Jodorowsky's supervision, and truly one of the most intense and fascinating films I've ever seen.

The Holy Mountain is most striking for its jaw dropping barrage of hallucinatory images, at times grotesque, at times beautiful. The first third of the film has no dialogue, just a breathless and bizarre narrative following a Christ-like thief figure in a loincloth as he is befriended by a cheerful limbless dwarf and they go to a big city full of gaudily dressed tourists taking pictures of various bizarre scenes.

The profusion of images is just astonishing: a man lying motionless on a rubbish heap as masses of flies crawl all over his face; a horde of naked children with little fig leaves hurling stones at the thief hung on a cross, who climbs off, chases them away and then shares a spliff with the dwarf; the solemn face of a chimpanzee amidst a crowd of identically dressed prostitutes sitting staring at a statue of Christ bleeding from his crown of thorns; one of the prostitutes washing green goo from the feet of the thief-Christ figure; what seem to be the skinned bloody carcasses of chickens or dogs nailed up and crucified on crosses and paraded around by a crowd of people as another crowd of well dressed men and women in expensive evening wear shuffle forwards through the street on their knees, arms extended to their sides, palms up in ominous supplication; a street circus scene with a gruesome battle between loads of frogs and chameleons that I don't think you could have got away with filming in the UK, staged on a model of an Aztec city, with the chameleons dressed up as Aztecs and the frogs dressed as little invading Spaniards - they blow up the model at the end and the Christ-thief sits among the ruins croaking loudly like a frog; a room full of fascist gasmasked soldiers dance homoerotically with civilian men in a basement bar; a line of civilians are shot dead by soldiers and a small bird emerges from one of the wounds; an old man gazes into the eyes of a pre-pubescent prostitute, before rather disgustingly taking out his squishy false eye and placing it in her hand; the Christ-thief is made to get drunk by a gang of fat centurions and while he sleeps they make a plaster cast of his whole body, so he wakes up in a really powerful and disturbing scene surrounded by endless replicas of himself outstretched as if on a cross.

The Holy Mountain is full of Biblical fragments and images and seemed to me to turn around a sort of hallucinatory spiritual grail quest, with a similar resonance to TS Eliot's The Wasteland. Halfway through the film, the Christ-thief ascends a huge tower to visit a God-alchemist figure played by the film's director, who speaks the first line of dialogue in the film after the thief defecates into a glass bowl: "You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold."

The Alchemist-God figure leads the film from this point on, assembling a team of disciples to accompany him alongside the Christ-thief. Each disciple hails from a different planet of the solar system and are mostly engaged in outrageous immoral occupations. "Isla/She whose planet is Mars" manufactures hippy weapons such as brightly coloured grenade necklaces and poptastic electric guitar machine guns and keeps a harem of naked male secretaries. "Fon/He whose planet is Venus" manufactures textiles and has hundreds of wives dressed in orange outfits who he uses and discards at will, his father who is deaf, blind and mute makes all major decisions to do with their textile empire by putting his finger up his wife's pussy, if it is moist the answer is yes, if not then the answer is no. "Berg/He whose planet is Uranus" is financial advisor to some ornate Treasury, advising that 3 million citizens must die to make the economy function. It is all quite funny and weird.

The motley crew of disciples are led by the alchemist up the mountain through various rituals of death and rebirth, with a humourous final twist to the revelations at the top of the mountain.

Wed
25-Oct-2006

shortbus

Matt and I have just got back from Shortbus at the London Film Festival. It's John Cameron Mitchell's follow-up to Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

The film's title refers to a salon where all the characters converge at various points to have public sex, chat and listen to music. The film began without a plot, and the actors, producer and director built the film together out of improvised workshops based around the characters. There's masturbation and sex in the film, all explicit, often quite funny and sometimes erotic. I don't think I've ever seen a film with sex that is so true and relevant to my own life. The nearest thing is the sex in the film Don't Look Now, but that was very monogamous and heterosexual. This is modern sex!

There's a particularly good gay threesome scene that perfectly captures how funny and warm sex can be with three people when it goes well. This is part of a long term threesome relationship in the film and I really liked the fact that it was portrayed as a plausible situation rather than some fucked up aberration.

The film doesn't shy away from the difficulties of conducting modern relationships either, and it is often quite sad and wistful. All the characters are thinking about how they connect to other people, and the recurring question of whether they are to be alone or not in the end.

The music is glorious, much of it by Yo La Tengo, and the film ends with an amazing scene of utter euphoria during a powercut, with a brass band stomping through the Shortbus salon as the various characters all gather there one last time.

Fri
30-Jun-2006

cabaret

Matt took Lopa to dinner last night - it was her birthday - and then we met up by City Hall for an outdoor showing of Cabaret, in that amphitheatre style seating they have right by City Hall. It was a rather fabulous urban location, and the crowd were fun and engaging, whooping and clapping through the film like a Rocky Horror crew. There's all kinds of cool coloured lighting now at that end of the South Bank, including London Bridge floodlit in bright pink, turning the Thames an atmospheric bloody red below.

Tue
25-Apr-2006

the crowd

Matt, Charles and I went to the NFT last night for an audacious double bill of The Crowd, a 1928 silent film directed by King Vidor, and Orson Welles' Citizen Kane.

Citizen Kane was glorious on the big screen, as ever, but I was also really impressed by The Crowd, which I'd never heard of before. The initial period of adjustment to the conventions of silent films was very short for this one - I was quickly able to look past the overexcitable acting and heavy makeup to the glory of an incredibly astute observation of modern American city life. The film is about an average office worker everyman trying to make it with his wife in a stylised big city and finding that life is rather more boring and unexceptional than he thought it would be as an ambitious child.

Much of the film is shot in New York, and I don't think I've ever seen the exciting bustle of the streets and the thrilling, looming buildings of the city captured so well on film. The camera whirls around through the crowded pavements and zooms high above the thoroughfare, everything feels immense and solid, everything is so new and modern - and it was filmed in the 1920s!

There is this incredible opening sequence in which the camera tracks up the side of a huge skyscraper, before zooming into a single window and into a massive room filled with hundreds of rows of identical office desks and workers, moving down towards one of the obedient clerks, the hero of the film.

The metaphor of the crowd is evoked throughout the film. John, the hero, struggles with it, trying to become part of it, and to rise above it, but is always thwarted by his ordinariness. At the point in the film when he and his family are beset by tragedy, he loses ambition and quits his job as a clerk and strikes out alone. There is a great line printed on screen at this point: "We do not know how big the crowd is, and what opposition it is...until we get out of step with it."

The film conveys really well how being part of the crowd dooms you to anonymity, yet being excluded from the crowd takes away your support.

It is only when John is able to scrabble his way back on to the job ladder that he is able to cope and rebuild his life. At the end he takes his wife and son to a show and they are a reunited happy family. There is this amazing closing scene where you see the three of them laughing together and the camera pulls back above them, away from their row in the centre of the theatre, up and up until they are lost in a sea of laughing faces, safe in the comfort of the crowd again.

Sun
09-Apr-2006

le temps qui reste

We've been to see a few different films from the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival this year. Last night I saw Le Temps Qui Reste, or Time to Leave, a lovely film by François Ozon, in which a young man is given the shocking diagnosis that he has terminal cancer and only months to live. It is a painfully honest look at how one might cope with dying. Romain, the hero of the film, withdraws from everyone around him except for his aging grandmother, sees fleeting hallucinations of his childhood, and becomes increasingly calm as he moves closer to death. It is hard to explain how exquisitely the film conveys the sadness and terror of impending death while also maintaining a light tone and touching on many moments of happiness.

In the final scenes of the film, Romain goes to a beach to swim and lie by the sea, surrounded by families and children playing. He stretches out on a towel and as the families all leave and the sun goes down, he remains there. As the screen fades to darkness and the credits roll there is just the sound of the sea breaking and crashing on the shore. There is no ambiguity, but it is such a good scene. What a perfect way to die, listening to the sound of the sea. It is not just that the beaches are the widest, most open spaces, where you can feel your soul reach up and out to anything that might be there. It is that sound too, the endlessly chaotic play of a million different voices bubbling together in the waves. That is Om – the perfection – when you are listening to the sea, just following the sound of the waves which never form a pattern and never end, until you are completely concentrated on listening and completely empty.

Fri
10-Mar-2006

favela rising

After a boozy session with Alex, Tom P and Kate at the Porterhouse near Covent Garden, Matt, Daniel N and I went to see Favela Rising at the ICA. This is a documentary film about a band that uses hip hop and Afro-Brazilian dance to rally the community of one of Rio de Janeiro's most dangerous favelas against the drug lords and corrupt police that frame their lives.

It was an extremely inspiring film about a struggle for social justice, and a good introduction to the band in question, AfroReggae. One of the big points the film has to make, counteracting the glossy violence of films like City of God, is that though such favela communities are extremely poor and beset by problems, most of the people within them are good people trying to quietly hold their lives together in the face of extremely difficult circumstances. The drug lords and dealers are a minority, and no matter how powerful they become, they are never rich in any meaningful sense. In the end, it is the corrupt police that make sure the drugs keep coming into the favela who make the real money. Favela Rising is an attempt to make a positive story about what is generally seen as a dysfunctional social situation, it is a story about "a community that works", as the director said in the Q&A afterwards.

The film made me think about a certain revolutionary response to the totalising system that has created these incredible seas of urban poverty in countries like Brazil - i.e. market fundamentalism, or the willingness to put considerations of profit above any human concern. I mean the kind of revolutionary response that a modern 'another world is possible' globalised anarchist might describe, not to directly confront the capitalist state or try to capture state power, but to ignore the system and go ahead with creating alternatives in your everyday life. This is a strategy of engaged withdrawal to found different communities through small acts of resistence, hoping that you remain far enough below the radar so as not to challenge state and police power and wind up slaughtered, but visible enough to inspire others to create insurrectionary spaces. Favela Rising conveys that balancing act very well.