I have broadband in my flat for the first time ever, so I streamed some recent movies. Then I went to meet Sigourney Weaver.



A Most Violent Year (J. C. Chandor, 2014)− A superb, low-key crime film set in New York during its most violent year, 1981, as immigrant oil boss Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) tries to protect his truck drivers, his family and his fortune, against attacks, bailing banks and a crusading D. A. (David Oyelowo).

The movie's unpredictability, grubby realism and tersely credible dialogue reminded me of two of my favourite movies, Cry Danger and The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and its moments of tension, violence and revelation are all gloriously understated and offbeat.

It's the polar opposite of something like De Palma's Scarface, made in the meticulous, slow-burn style of Sidney Lumet, and more interested in the minutiae of human relationships than in excess of any kind. Most impressive and rewarding is the way it presents the marriage between the pragmatic, persuasive, Pacino-esque Isaac, in his mustard coat, and his wily, wary wife (Jessica Chastain), the daughter of a Brooklyn gangster and usually two steps ahead of everyone else.

It's a movie about moral relativity, decisions made in a moment − and their arbitrary impact − and the American Dream, and probably more literate, mature and interesting than any crime film released in the past five years. (3.5)

See also: I have so much time for Isaac and his chameleonic stylings. I've reviewed quite a few of his others, including Ex Machina, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the borderline-miraculous Inside Llewyn Davis.

***



The Great Hip Hop Hoax (Jeanie Finlay, 2013)− In 2004, Californian rap duo Silibil N' Brains looked set to be the next big thing. Signed to Sony and managed by industry heavyweight Jonathan Shalit, they opened for D12 at Brixton Academy and recorded a session for MTV, where they were interviewed by Dave Berry. There was just one problem: they were really Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd from Dundee.

It's a fantastic story, but Jeanie Finlay's documentary, which gets to the root of the matter, isn't the knockabout, throwaway fun you might expect. Gavin and Billy weren’t pranking the music business: after being dismissed by execs looking for the next Eminem as "the rapping Proclaimers", this ruse was the only way they could see of cracking the industry, and as they threw themselves wholeheartedly into the scheme, their immersion into their personas and their fear of getting found out began to drive a wedge between these best friends, and to drive them steadily insane.

This 2013 documentary, made for Storyville and inspired by Bain's memoir (released first as California Schemin', and then Straight Outta Scotland) is a film about the cruel collision between dreams and reality, an indictment of the music industy's obsession with image, and an exploration of two fascinating characters: Gavin, a shy, obsessively driven creative force whose perfectionism ultimately lays them low; and Billy: charismatic, fun-loving and yet ultimately devoted to his wife and children.

Those personas were blown up into Silibil N' Brains (Silly Bill and Brainy Bains, if we deconstruct them slightly), but it's the way these characters stagnate, intensify or transform over time that's most fascinating, reminding me a little of the protagonists of my all-time favourite documentary, Hoop Dreams.

At times the relentless, sub-Busted goofing of the American alter-egos, documented in innumerable proto-YouTube skits, becomes a little wearing, but that's kind of the point. When you see just how passionate, how lyrically inventive and how well-versed in their art these two performers were, it's depressingly illuminating to see the only way that the music industry would accept them was as baseball-cap wearing, crotch-grabbing pretend Americans, washing their faces with Bill's piss. I'm less certain about the animations, which seem at times to simply be filling in those sequences for which no other materials exist: I had a similar relationship with the stylised cartoon inserts in The Filth and the Fury and the recent Tickling Giants. But, taken as a whole, it's an exceptional film.

I was expecting something disposable and fun, but given the director (who also made last year's excellent documentary about another musical imposter, Orion) I should have known better: The Great Hip Hop Hoax is an immensely moving film, and its ruminations on fantasy, compromise, creativity and chance are universal. I also have quite a crush on Gavin, the broken-nosed raconteur whose mixture of talent, apparent sweetness and unreliable narration melds effectively with Billy's chubby ruddiness and down-to-earth honesty, recalling the ferocious chemistry that almost catapulted them to super-stardom, when they were pretending to be American. (3.5)

***



Creed (Ryan Coogler, 2015)− I was expecting a bruising, stylised, self-consciously credible African-American update of Rocky. Instead I got Rocky VII. But that's fine. Kind of nearer my comfort zone.

Michael B. Jordan is Adonis "Donnie" Creed, the illegitimate son of former heavyweight champ Apollo, who moves from L. A. to Philly (a 'reverse Fresh Prince') to train with restaurant owner Rocky Balboa, and − would you believe it − gets a shot at the world title.

Considering that I don't think the original Rocky movies are very good (my favourite is Rocky III, because at least it has few pretensions), I found both this movie and Rocky Balboa to be very affecting in their utilisation of the series' very definite mythos. And, by adding a further undercurrent of wistfulness and melancholia caused by Donnie's emotional displacement and need to connect with the father who died before he was born, Creed does make you care about its characters.

Without giving too much away, it also provides Rocky with a powerful, very well-imagined storyline, trades amiably enough on the fact he's entering his dotage, and fashions an agreeable romance between Creed and a musician named Bianca (Tessa Thompson), who as this is a Rocky film, is obviously going deaf. Add to that the series' usual mix of fight-night clichés, rousing training montages and persuasive villainy − in the shape of a Scouse boxer whose dialogue is well-researched enough not to make British people howl with incredulous laughter − and it's got everything you need for an entertaining but also agreeably substantial two hours.

It's not in the same league as something like Body and Soul, Fat City or Raging Bull, but it's a different kind of film. It's also unusually well-acted, without the somewhat trivial paraphrasing that blights other Rocky films, and has several moments that lift it well above the other movies in the series, particularly a When We Were Kings style run-around − but with the kids on bikes! − and a flashback sequence on the canvas with a denouement as overpowering as a punch to the temple.

It isn't for the most part a daring or dynamic film, and I find the critical bouquets flung in its direction somewhat confusing, but it's actually better than the movies it homages, taking a tried-and-trusted formula, amplifying its more successful elements and creating a crowdpleaser with a bit of heft to it. (3)

***



Foxcatcher (Bennett Miller, 2014)− I presume whoever produced this owns shares in prosthetics, as Mark Ruffalo's false hairline, Channing Tatum's cauliflower ear and Steve Carell's Dick-Tracy-villain nose are the most distracting appendages since Nicola Kidman's false schnozzola won an Oscar in The Hours.

It's the true(ish) story of Team Foxcatcher: essentially Behind the Candelabra with Matt Damon replaced by a wrestler, as eccentric multi-millionaire John Du Pont (Carell) brings Olympic gold medallist Mark Schultz (Tatum) to his isolated ranch with promises of glory, and things promptly start to get a bit weird. Ruffalo is Mark's older brother, Dave, a beloved, bearded star athlete who's initially suspicious but eventually acquiesces and takes his place on the farm.

The performances are excellent, and the paring down of the story to these three characters, in this shortened time-frame, makes it a disorientating and creepy ride, with echoes of Faust and wider resonances about the nature of greatness and America. At the same time, though, the film doesn't get to the heart of Du Pont's neuroses and madness, lessening the story's natural intensity and reducing its ultimate emotional impact. We see the tragic ending coming simply because 'why would they have made a movie of this story otherwise?' and not because there's a thread of fatalism running through it.

As with director Miller's over-praised Capote, its methodical pace will turn some people off, and its deliberate re-imagining of reality for its own ends is questionable, but Foxcatcher does unsettle and intrigue, thanks to a good performance by Tatum, an award-hungry portrayal of creeping oddness from Carell, and Ruffalo's excellent turn as the much-loved, decent Dave. (3)

... and then I watched this:



Team Foxcatcher (Jon Greenhalgh, 2016)− Solid documentary about the true story behind Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher, which distractingly omits Mark Schultz from the story, focusing instead on the relationship between increasingly eccentric multi-millionaire, John Du Pont, and a slew of other US wrestling stars, including their figurehead: Mark's brother, Dave.

This Netflix film, essentially presented through the eyes of Dave's wife, Nancy, does a good job of filling in all the context omitted from the movie, which is critical really to understanding what happened, as it charts Du Pont's mental breakdown, his increasing paranoia and his conspiracy theories about how Dave was living in his walls.

Much of the footage of the Foxcatcher Ranch used was shot on one day, eight years before the events it's often describing, which is somewhat disingenuous and distracting, but the usual mixture of archive clips and talking heads works fairly well, provided you can stomach the use of 911 calls from immediately after a murder.

I can't help but think that this film could have been a lot more arresting and memorable if it had started as a sports story and then changed tack, rather than foreshadowing its central tragedy, but it's convincing − fast-moving, yet sufficiently detailed − and its more creative moments, including a heartbreaking sequence in the ruins of Dave and his family's house, soundtracked by old video of their idyllic lives, are beautifully rendered.

Viewed here, the events of the film seem less abrupt and more inevitable, their obvious avoidability heightening the sense of tragedy and loss. The effect was to make Foxcatcher seem curiously false and unconvincing: more a Rothian meditation on the unknowability of man and the state of America than a chronicle of what actually happened on the ranch. (3)

***


Give me strength.

Trumbo (Jay Roach, 2015)− The astonishing story of the Hollywood blacklist, which has fascinated me for decades, becomes an astonishingly bad film, telling its story through the life of Communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) and playing like a Walk Hard-style parody of itself, as every character introduces themselves by reciting their name and profession.

It's plodding, monotonous and moronically irresponsible: a cartoon in which – contrary to the findings of Victor S. Navasky's searing moral audit, Naming Names, which indicted almost all of Hollywood – the people to blame were just J. Parnell Thomas, Hedda Hopper and Edward G. Robinson.

If you want a totemic figure, why not Ronald Reagan (glimpsed briefly in archive footage), the president of the Screen Actors' Guild, who secretly betrayed his own members to further his career? Or indeed director Edward Dmytryk, the member of the Hollywood Ten who turned on his friends – including Trumbo.

It's that kind of incomprehensible decision-making that prevents us from getting close to either the issue or the central character. There's one scene where we see him laid bare by the dehumanisation of prison that's all in the acting, but otherwise both he and the film are tedious and aloof.

We should blacklist whoever wrote this. (1.5)

***


I literally took this picture.

Aliens Live at the Royal Albert Hall (James Cameron, 1986)− A trip back to LV-426 in the company of the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra, who brought James Horner’s ominous, throbbing, clanking, frenetic, discombobulating score to vivid, terrifying life at the Royal Albert Hall (disclaimer: that’s where I work).

It is, of course, a textbook action film, full of vivid archetypes, snappily quotable dialogue and pulsating, adrenalised suspense scenes, edited with jaw-dropping bravura. And in Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, it has probably the greatest female action hero of all time, her DNA in everyone from Rey to Furiosa to Holtzmann.

The audience loved it, laughing at Hudson's doom-laden whining, whooping at the climax of those densely inventive action set-pieces and hollering at Weaver's insistence that the Alien Queen get away from little Newt, "you bitch".

Cameron, producer Gale Anne Hurd and the film’s star all came to London for this world premiere of Aliens Live, which meant that I got to hear Cameron talk about what "a Cameron film is” (he didn’t realise until someone pointed it out to him that his heroes are almost always reluctant ones) and to Sigourney about feminist actioners, Avatar and physiotherapy. My job is cool and weird. (4)

***

Thanks for reading.

Plus: Jimmy Joyce's laugh riot and a load of rubbish starring Ryan Gosling.



CINEMA: Arrival (Denis Villeneve, 2016)– This cerebral, mind-bending and emotionally devastating sci-fi film takes a while to reveal itself, but absolutely floors you when it does.

After vast, charcoal-coloured alien pods appear at 12 spots worldwide, the US army sends linguistics professor Amy Adams − still reeling from the death of her daughter − to the one hovering in Montana, tasked with finding out what the visitors want. With the help of good-natured physicist Jeremy Renner, she makes contact and begins to decipher the inky circles of text being cast into the air, as the world loots and panics.

It opens like Up (see #26 in my all-time Top 100), with a breathtakingly beautiful, vividly universal montage of Adams' life with her daughter, then threatens to fall away, as you wonder if it will have anything to it at all. That's a false impression: Villeneuve is zoning in slowly but unerringly on the film's emotional centre, and when that grabs you, you can't get loose.

His movie blends the literate, sun-dappled nostalgia of The Tree of Life, with Gravity's sense of nervous wonder and Moon's freaky but human edge, but it meant a lot more to me than any of those films, and it's still commandeering my brain now, almost a day later, with its rich tapestry of emotions, Adams' characteristically immersive performance and a reveal that you won't forget in a hurry. Without giving anything away, you realise that the ordeal awaiting her is really what life is.

As La La Land and Certain Women aren't on general release here until 2017, I think we can comfortably call it the movie of the year. We never did learn why Portuguese is different to the other romance languages, though. (4)

***


The Nicholas Brothers managing to steal the limelight from Cab Calloway's trousers.

CINEMA: Stormy Weather (Andrew L. Stone, 1943)– The last five minutes of this film briefly made me forget President Trump. They are that bloody good.

I've lost count of how many times I've watched this film over the years, though this was the first time on the big screen, with soul singer and Wire actor Clarke Peters choosing it (via a fascinating if confusing intro) for his 'screen epiphany', as part of the BFI's Black Star strand.

For all its flaws, it's unmissable entertainment: standard studio escapism but with an all-African American cast, including many of the leading jazz, blues and dance stars of the era. The comedy is dated, some of the racial elements are wince-inducingly offensive (black female dancers with golliwog caricatures on the backs of their heads, anyone?) and the plot is just a frail thing to hang the numbers on – as 65-year-old Bill "Bojangles" Robinson vaguely romances smoking hot Lena Horne, 26 – but this was a relatively positive, modern and aspirational film for black audiences (previous attempts, Hallelujah! and Cabin in the Sky, were superbly done but dripping with patronising, cod-Biblical archetypes), and the music is simply sensational.

There's Fats Waller doing a playful Ain't Misbehavin', Horne performing a succession of standards – including a breathtaking version of the title track – Bojangles belying his age with some fine hoofing, and the pièce de fucking resistance: Cab Calloway's exuberant Jumpin' Jive, which segues into a Nicholas Brothers routine that's nothing short of the greatest dance number of all time, according to me and – more significantly – Fred Astaire.

It's almost like minority communities contribute a huge amount to society, and to the arts which make living worthwhile, even when they're being treated like shit. (3.5)



***



CINEMA: No Way Out (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)– What a film to see today*: an uncompromising, perceptive and prescient film about a blonde, furious, self-pitying white supremacist (Richard Widmark) railing against elites and PC language as he turns the life of a black doctor (Sidney Poitier) into a living hell.

Mankiewicz's film – released just three months before his All About Eve!– is of its time in terms of the terminology and studio trappings, but remarkably relevant and resonant in its presentation of racism as a social disease afflicting the disenfranchised, with some typically fine dialogue, and standout performances from a credible Poitier (in his screen debut) and a silkily charismatic Widmark, whose ability to turn resentment into race hate chillingly foreshadows this fucking binfire of a year. (3.5)

*it was the day of Trump's victory

***



Only God Forgives (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2013)– Appallingly pretentious, plot-free wank. Like Wong Kar-Wai directing a story by a drunk guy at a party who won't leave you alone. The music's gorgeous, though. (1)

***

And here's a review of Ghostbusters from 7 August, as apparently I never put it up on the blog:



Ghostbusters (Paul Feig, 2016)– I'm so glad this film exists. The decade has seen a rebirth of mainstream films dominated by strong female characters – from Gravity to the magnificent Mad Max and Star Wars– and rebooting a boys' toys concern as a feminist buddy movie was about the only thing that could have dragged me into the cinema to watch a Ghostbusters remake.

The direction of cinema shouldn't be determined, though, by one film. If, as an action comedy fronted by women, this one had turned out badly, that doesn't mean the whining, furiously wanking teenage sexists were right, it just means that lots of movies aren't very good and this would have been another one.

It's actually pretty good, though. The central dynamic is refreshing, its adapted iconography can be spectacular when not tying itself up in smug, post-modern knots, and there's a fantastic character in Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon), a scientist, weapons manufacturer and all-round badass, with an unstudied cool, an infectious sense of silliness and at least one superb action sequence. Most importantly - and enjoyably - she isn't a pubescent masturbation fantasy or a manic pixie coming to save the main character, she's a proper woman, a self-sufficient person defined by herself and her job, who spends her time inventing, hanging with her friends and shooting ghosts.

My issue with the film is that it doesn't feel finished – the last movie I saw that came off as this slapdash was The Green Hornet– with a dull, hackneyed plot, a dire villain and a script that gives Kristen Wiig almost nothing good to do, while forcing the 'the busters to regurgitate reams of dialogue consisting only of scientific and supernatural jargon. What's the point of that? As vengeful janitor Rowan, Neil Casey is a desperately uninteresting foil, and Chris Hemsworth's idiotic secretary - while sometimes quite funny in himself - overbalances the movie. The worst performance is probably by Dan Aykroyd, who does an incredibly dated, unfunny bit about New York taxi drivers who won't take you where you want to go (diddums, did the millionaire not get to his next engagement quickly enough?), but at least it's only a cameo.

I'd also quibble with Feig and co-writer Katie Dippold's decision to hold a pivotal action sequence at a rock show: I'm not very easily offended, but I presume everyone else was also just thinking: "I really hope there isn't lots of carnage, as lots of people were murdered at the Bataclan less than a year ago." There isn't much. Just the CGI gubbins that fits this film to bursting.

An almost incomprehensible post-credits sting sets up the possibility of a sequel. I hope both that it happens and that they iron out all the wrinkles in the script before they make it, because there's real potential here: not just to stick it to the fucking twats on the internet, but to do something pretty special. (2.5)

***

BOOK


Pic from Slate.

Dubliners by James Joyce (1914)– Have your heart broken every eight pages by James Joyce's most accessible work, which was two years in the writing and took a further seven to navigate its way past nervous editors who balked at its sexual frankness. Rooted in a repressed city that finds escape only in booze and self-destruction, it's a collection of 15 short stories: 14 ironic, distinct and yet stiflingly similar, and the final one, The Dead, perhaps my favourite piece of writing: a portrait of the artist as a young man effortlessly evoking nostalgia, pity, shame, sexual longing and the fragile impermanence of existence. Following mere fragments of prose that distill the perfect essence of a greater whole, the 50-page closer is a work of clarity, genius and extraordinary openness: haunting and heartbreaking. Dubliners is bleak and sometimes difficult, its vernacular specific and its frame of reference obscure (thank goodness for Penguin's lengthy notes section!), but its lack of linguistic deconstruction, its universality of themes, and Joyce's compassion and patience with the human condition make it easier to take to – and understand – than many of the books that followed. It took me a while to read it (and this was my second go round!), but it's both a remarkable snapshot of a time and place, and an unforgettable commentary on humanity's capacity for self-harm, with a final chapter that's gorgeously lyrical and chokingly sad. (4)

See also: John Huston's adaptation of The Dead is one of the great book-to-film translations, and was at #12 in my list of all-time favourite movies. I'll revisit it at greater length some time soon.

***

LIVE



Paul Simon at the Royal Albert Hall (Tue 8 Oct 2016)– One of the best 10 shows I've seen (and I've been going to gigs for 23 years now, and work at a music venue). Simon's voice has held up better than anyone else's of his generation − with the possible exception of James Taylor − and this show, which ran to over two-and-a-half hours without an interval, was a stunning, moving, exultant tour of one of the finest back catalogues in popular music.

He gave us much of Graceland, that seminal 1982 record infused with African rhythms, spotlighted greatest hits from 'Still Crazy After These Years' to 'Me and Julio...', their melodies tweaked and modernised yet still timeless, and drew on the Simon and Garfunkel years a full seven times, with highlights that included a poignant 'America' (I woke up the next morning and realised we've never needed it more), a sing-along take on 'The Boxer', and a delicate, heart-stopping, acoustic 'Sound of Silence' which rendered that unique and magnificent song utterly fresh.

Dylan is a contrarian and McCartney a crowdpleaser, but Simon's something else: a man at peace with his legacy who'll give you the hits in a new way, and knows you'll love it. The show brought us to our feet and dancing countless times, prompted four standing ovations and included both the best ('Stranger to Stranger') and worst ('Wristband') of his current record, but it was his haunting hymn to serenity and sorrow that really took my breath away. (4)

***

Thanks for reading.

Here's what I've been consuming of late:

BOOK



Huey Long by T. Harry Williams (1969)– This is a political biography of rare brilliance: a heavyweight chronicle of the life of Huey P. Long, one of the most extraordinary figures of the American century. A humble-born native of Louisiana, Long found work as a travelling salesman and a lawyer before entering politics and proceeding to dominate the state like no-one has ever dominated a state. By the time of his assassination in 1935, the senator for Louisiana was one of the most popular – and reviled – figures in America, and preparing to run for president on a radical platform of wealth redistribution.

Williams’ epic, Pulitzer-winning biography, two decades in the writing and clocking in at 900 pages, is a work of uncommon clarity, insight and poetry, drawing on 275 interviews, archive memos, newspapers and private letters, and painting a rich, vivid portrait of the man. Williams dismantles claims of fascism, despotism and racketeering, but his clear-sighted analysis does acknowledge Long’s egomania, vindictiveness and increasingly erratic decision-making, while illustrating at length the brilliance of his subject’s mind, the quality of his oratory and the sincerity with which he went about changing the lives of the state's – and the country’s – poorest and most vulnerable people. It’s also a work of stunning breadth, detailing the unique character of Louisiana, establishing its political scene and examining the context that made Long’s rise to prominence possible, while leaning on the ‘great man’ theory and maintaining that while someone would have come along to grasp this mantle, it did not have to be a Huey P. Long.

Beyond that, it’s also an extremely funny and entertaining work, not only in its recounting of the innumerable colourful stories involving Long – from greeting foreign dignitaries in his pyjamas to threatening a rail company with exorbitant taxes unless it gave all LSU students cheap passage to a football game and his fabled stump speech about ‘High Popalorum and Low Popahirum’– but also thanks to Williams’ wonderfully dry sense of humour, his prose peppered with ironic commentary on the hypocrisy of both Long’s supporters and his nemeses. The overall effect is astonishing and enveloping, placing you at the scene of some of the most remarkable political happenings of the 20th century, from filibusters on the floor of the Senate to deals in smoke-filled rooms and the devastating assassination that naturally closes the book. By the time it comes, you’re so invested in Long, and in his programme for change, that you can barely turn the pages.

There’s no question that Long was a great man, but what surprised me is that he also comes across as a good man. There are times when he oversteps the mark – threatening a newspaper editor with blackmail, trying to utterly destroy (rather than just beat) his rivals and leaning occasionally on race prejudice (though Williams makes it clear that he did less of this than any of his Southern contemporaries) – but it’s also true that he’s one of the few left-wing leaders in the Western world who, when faced with the pitiless onslaught that faces anyone trying to change things for the better, fought his foes with everything at his disposal, until they were nothing but dust. There are times in 1934-5 when his local power-grabs and recourses to martial law are utterly contrary to democracy, and I found that disillusioning and difficult to swallow, but Long really was trying to change the lives of poor people for the better, he was just greedy for every bit of credit that went with it. His story is astonishing, inspiring and also critical to understanding the Roosevelt years, for without him, FDR would never have been dragged so far to the left, and become – for many, myself included – America's greatest president. (4)



Expect that to figure prominently in my books of the year round-up, one of three review collections coming up, as ever, at the end of December (the other focus on films and live events).

***

FILMS



CINEMA: Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016)– A film about emotional violence, cruelty and revenge, as disquieting and unpleasant as any mainstream Hollywood movie I can remember, and for that reason both an experience that I can’t recommend and that I must. It’s a collision of three stories, three universes: an antiseptic art world, where curator Amy Adams and her Tom Ford glasses live a cool, detached life contorted by compromise; a headily romantic Hollywood film in which her younger self flirts with old acquaintance Jake Gyllenhaal and then flirts with giving him up; and a horrifying slab of Southern gothic – rendered by the current day Gyllenhaal, in which his ‘weak’ husband is run off a Texas road by mutton-chopped psychopath writ large, Aaron Taylor Johnson.

The start of its horror thread – long, unflinching and uninterrupted – is particularly arresting: hypnotically, seductively awful; a harrowing, caricatured journey into man’s dark heart, a panic attack in film form. But this strand isn’t new. None of them are. Where this dazzling, dizzyingly surefooted movie astounds is in its outlandish, hugely ambitious juxtapositions: an ingenious, incisive structure; a combination of the cerebral, sentimental and utterly visceral that tosses you about the theatre like a ragdoll. At first you wonder if Ford can tie these threads together properly, if the knot will be tight enough without pulling the individual stories out of shape. He can: the cumulative effect is far greater than the parts, three stories of one dimension adding up to a whole that’s in three.

Where the film does fall down is in hitting its emotional and dramatic zenith a half-hour from the end – while its final five minutes are haunting, certainly the gothic part plods onwards for some time after it’s become submerged in lacklustre familiarity – but it’s an extremely unusual and refreshing reworking of genre clichés, novelistic but also invigoratingly cinematic. It’s a model of how to utilise cinematic grammar (particularly abrupt, busy but restrained editing) to tell a story, and to layer that story so densely and virtuosically that it embeds itself in you. The performances are great too, with Johnson fine in a big performance that doesn’t slip from showy dynamism into hamminess, and Shannon absolutely superb as the intense, taciturn and unsmiling sheriff called into action by Gylenhaal’s tale of terror.

Don’t miss it, and don’t come crying to me after you've been. (3.5)

***



The Big Short (Adam McKay, 2015)– An audacious, counter-intuitive and richly entertaining polemic about the financial crisis, its raw anger cooked up into a fun old caper movie, studded with vividly sketched characters, sourly profane dialogue and a heap of meta gags: a few of them overdone, but most melting in the mouth before leaving an aftertaste akin to charred vomit. McKay knows what he’s doing, and even if he’s sometimes doing it too loudly or just with tits, it’s ultimately worth it.

It’s the story of a one-eyed maths whiz (Christian Bale, superb), a smarmy, roguish narrator (Ryan Gosling), a bereaved, self-loathing fund manager (Steve Carell, never better) and two naïve kids trying to get onto Wall Street with the help of a gloomy neighbour (Brad Pitt) – all of whom see the financial crash coming, and start betting against the market.

A few left-leaning critics have questioned its morality, but that’s such a blinkered, reductionist view. If you make a film about a poor guy losing his house or a morality play condemning bankers, you might win an award, but you won’t find a mass audience. The Big Short made over $133m (Inside Job, the brilliant, Oscar-winning documentary dealing with the same story grossed under $8m) – and in that context it’s pure dynamite. The punters may be so wowed by the shiny, Ryan Gosling-patterned paper they won’t realise they’re holding a textbook, but the film is nimble enough to make its viewpoint clear. It’s like The Wolf of Wall Street if it wasn’t a nasty, incoherent shambles.

More than that, though, it’s intellectually daring. Like Reitman’s Thank You for Smoking and Up in the Air, it trades not in heroes or spoonfeeding, but in ideas and shades of grey. Oddly, this is actually McKay’s second stab at a financial crisis comedy. While The Other Guys is my favourite Ferrell film and probably the funniest mainstream comedy since Team America, its attempts at social comment were hapless, with only the end credits PowerPoint landing any blows at all.

The Big Short may be playful but it’s pointed enough to draw real blood, asking you to question your preconceptions and priorities – while being ferociously funny and quite ludicrously fun. (3.5)

***



*SOME SPOILERS*
West of Memphis (Amy Berg, 2012)– A powerful, polemical documentary about a notorious miscarriage of justice, in which three eight-year-olds were murdered, turtles nipped at the bodies, and ambitious, blinkered public officials ill-equipped to deal with the case decided that these injuries could only have been caused by satanists, robbing 14 years from the lives of three teenage outsiders: damaged Damien Echols, softly-spoken Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, a mentally handicapped young man whose ‘confession’ formed a key part of the case.

For anyone gripped by Making a Murderer, this is more of the same, but ahead of the fact and without the same doubt in your mind: these three were knowingly fitted up by the state, and that should chill your blood. Unlike Making a Murderer– and indeed the first two Paradise Lost documentaries previously dealing with this case – it’s all told in retrospect, so it becomes a clear-sighted indictment of the American legal system, rather than the campaigning piece needed so desperately in previous years.

As a film, Amy Berg’s condensed account is fast-moving and often forensic, though with an eye for an entertaining aside or celebrity angle – among the campaigners interviewed are Peter Jackson, Eddie Vedder and Henry Rollins – as it paints a complete picture of the case, and posits a highly credible theory of its own (though if you think about it, that's pretty hypocritical!). It’s also, ultimately, an oddly uplifting film, as well as a gruelling and horrific one, as it depicts the selflessness of the West Memphis Three’s champions: including the girlfriend of Damien Echols, Lorri Davis, who took up his case after watching Paradise Lost.

Some people still think these three dunit, but when their evidence is things like “known history of mental illness”, it makes you wonder what the fuck. I have a known history of mental illness and have never murdered any children.

A chilling postscript is that Echols later had to meet Piers Morgan, surely more awful than any experience he endured in prison. (3)

***



My Scientology Movie (John Dower, 2015)– This is an amusing but infuriating documentary, in which Louis Theroux fails to speak to any Scientologists, except to explain that he has a filming permit and doesn’t see why he should leave. That’s the problem with making a film about an incredibly powerful, secretive cult. Sorry, religion. Sorry, obviously cult. If you don’t know anything about the subject, I suppose it’s mildly insightful – with various reenactions, interviews with ex-Scientologists and archive clips of Tom Cruise being weird and frightening – while Theroux’s façade of amiable bumbling makes for some funny encounters, but like his fellow posh, shambling English documentary-maker, Nick Broomfield, he thinks that being asked to leave somewhere is investigative journalism in itself. (2)

***



Brothers in Law (Roy Boulting, 1957)– A below-par legal satire from the Boulting Brothers that starts promisingly but gets sidetracked by broad, lazy set-pieces and bits of ‘business’ that surely someone must find hysterical, though I’ve no idea who. If you’re the kind of person who finds a nervous Ian Carmichael bumping into people funny, then get ready for the greatest night of your life. He’s a recent graduate of the bar trying to find his feet in the legal world of London, who finds an unlikely ally in selfish Dickie Attenborough, a powerful sponsor in Miles Malleson and a girlfriend in the charming Jill Adams, but bumbles haplessly through his first few cases and – in one interminable, laughless sequence – incurs the wrath of judge John Le Mesurier while playing golf.

Carmichael’s relationship with his parents, particularly his warm, proud father (Henry B. Longhurst) is delightful and touching, Malleson is quite amusing, and now and then there are some intelligent sideswipes at the law – particularly when Attenborough tries to avoid leading questions and cocky criminal Terry-Thomas enlists Carmichael’s assistance – but it’s too often unfocused and unfunny, without the teeth of the Boultings’ best comedies (the more I see of their later work, the more I wish it was all like Heavens Above!), and replete with irrelevant story threads that exist only for their unsatisfying and obvious pay-offs. (2)



***

SHORT: Come Together (Wes Anderson, 2016)– Anderson’s H&M advert (sorry, ‘new short film’) is droll, tender and really rather magical, with that undertug of disconnected, Keatonesque melancholia blossoming into selfless humanity that makes his films so deceptively substantial. It’s otherwise extremely straightforward and almost self-parodically designed, harking back to The Darjeeling Limited in its setting – a stylised, late-running train dominated by sad-eyed conductor Adrien Brody – and telling a Christmas story of impeccable (and arguably insulting) simplicity. One complaint, though – and I know my class warfare may be showing – must the kids in his films always look so preppy and spoilt? I appreciate that all children deserve a nice Christmas, and money isn’t necessarily a signifier of a life easily lived, but on the whole I can think of worthier subjects than some prep school Tarquin in his designer blazer. It’s still affecting, though, and one to pop on the list of brief festive films worth visiting and then revisiting: not a patch on The Snowman, Jolly Snow or Star in the Night– that miraculous Tex-Mex Nativity story directed by a young Don Siegel!– but blessed with a certain seasonal something. (3)

***

THEATRE



King Lear (The Old Vic, 19/11/16)– Glenda Jackson makes a triumphant return to the stage in this sparsely-staged version of one of Shakespeare’s most long-winded and inaccessible plays. The set is all white screens and functional tables, the effects done with lighting and a proliferation of bin bags, and across it Jackson rampages or creeps, dynamic and desperate as the king “more sinned against than sinning” as he loses his authority and his mind. There are great moments, and the acting is a treat – with a surprisingly effective Rhys Ifans as the Fool, and Sargon Yelda, Simon Manyonda and Karl Johnson putting bigger names Jane Horrocks and Celia Imrie to shame with nuanced, sometimes hilarious performances – allied to an energetic and bawdy reading of the text, but so much of it is just mad people shouting nonsense: if I wanted that, I’d just open my Twitter notifications. (3)

***

Thanks for reading.

We're at a quarter millennium of reviews, but they're not getting any better. This time: autobiography, corrupt cops and more (but worse) Huey Long.

LIVE



Stewart Lee: Content Provider at Leicester Square Theatre (02/12/16)− A show with all the virtues and vices of a remarkable, occasionally infuriating stand-up. It's been marketed as Lee's first full-length show in five years, but that's semantics: it's simply that he's no longer honing half-hour segments for a TV show, since that TV show's been cancelled. As he pungently points out, though, the BBC does still have the resources to fund a reboot of Are You Being Served?, which given the demise of the British department store should rightly be filmed in an Amazon warehouse, where Mrs Slocombe makes various oblique references to her cat, as a collection of Eastern Europeans look on in confusion.

And really it's no more coherent or cohesive than his previous shows, perhaps less so, without the through-line that his intro (or sporadic meta-commentary) suggests. He pitches it as a commentary on the life of the individual in this social media age, or says it would have been if Brexit and Trump hadn't got in the way. To be honest, that's to his advantage, as he's superb on politics, great at providing a dual-level experience − utilising a constructed persona who's vain, arrogant and contemptuous of his audience and his peers − and able to corral his audience's anger and angst into catharsis, without giving it an easy ride.

But whereas he deliriously, hilariously dismisses Game of Thrones without having seen it, his lack of understanding of modern technology critically undermines his deconstruction of it. There are many things wrong with social media, but if your starting point is that you don't understand the point of Twitter and you think Tinder is a paid-for app where you tick boxes about your interests, then you're fatally undercutting the significance of anything you have to say on the subject. That's the starting point of a Grumpy Old Men audition, not the bleeding edge of British comedy.

That hobby horse also powers a never-ending routine about homemade S&M equipment in the '30s, which extends a throwaway bit from his last tour into an interminable rant about the easy availability of everything in the modern world. I like the idea of alighting on something so perverse and obscure, I admire comics who play with the very rules of stand-up, and I know Lee's repetition, recounting and belabouring of a point are as integral to his work as the principles that underpin it, but the routine doesn't work. If he'd done something as conventional as tying it to an indictment of nostalgia, it might have, but as it is it just sort of lies there, a hollowness at its centre. I feel it's also beset with a pretentiousness that can stop Lee's shows stone dead, jettisoning much of the audience while giving a few of them the chance to show very loudly that they understand the joke; it was the same in January when he brought an unbearable joke about anarcho-syndicalists.

There's material here that's as good as anything anyone is doing right now. Surrounded by dozens of £0.01 DVDs from less-acclaimed, more popular comedians, he revives his assault on Russell Howard by seizing on a TV trailer in which the younger comic says that after running out of loo-roll he wiped his arse on a sock. Lee seizes on this faux-proletarian utterance by declaring it "observational comedy from a Victorian mental hospital", launching him into a superb juxtaposition of chummy Live at the Apollo-style stand-up and horrific human rights violations.

He follows it with an extended bit about other comics' reactions to his taunting of Howard (the sentence: "Why you say those things about Russell Howard, mate?" said perhaps 80 times, Lee's face and voice horrifically contorted) which is daring, inspired, stupid, clever, very funny and deceptively deep, while recalling interviews with Howard, John Robins and others about Lee's thin skin and yet how impervious he is to the idea that he might be genuinely upsetting young comics who idolise him by destroying their reputations in public. (I should add that I've met Stewart Lee a couple of times (once after a show and once on the street) and he was really nice and weirdly shy.)

He's now in an exalted position and I'm glad, because he's an artist who takes chances, someone with a distinctive, doggedly unconventional style, and I think that pretension is often merely what happens when your ambition overtakes your ability or the boundaries of the form, boundaries that are moved over time. But that doesn't mean you can't point out shortcomings in his work, even if he tends to obliterate anyone who does so in a whirlwind of blistering sardonism and repetition. (3)

***

FILMS



Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012)− If you're ever worried you might be oversharing, watch Sarah Polley's immaculate 2012 documentary, Stories We Tell, in which the incisively intelligent, staggeringly honest writer-director of Take This Waltz lays bare her family's history while telling the story of her late mother, Diane.

Like her earlier film, it's a movie that talks about things we know and recognise and are terrified by, and yet rarely discuss: the centrality of sex to everything, the difficulties and disappointments of relationships, and the often irresistible attractions that threaten to sever those crucial ties, perhaps irreparably. It's a film about secrets, about stories, about a search for identity, about the way we manufacture narratives to make sense of our memories and our lives.

At the start of the film, one of Polley's relatives asks why she's making it, since who else could be interested in this story? The answer, I think, is everyone. Because if you’re honest, you'll surely recognise parts of yourself in some of these characters, and perhaps in all of them. And all of them are honourable in some ways, spitefully selfish in others, wrestling with agendas and virtues and tragedies.

I don't want to say any more about either the subject or the style, as to do so would numb the impact of its surprises, but it is a remarkable film: haunting and bravura and with a genuine ovaries-out bravery that knocked me sideways. (4)

***



The Seven Five (Tiller Russell, 2014)− The apparently shameless Michael Dowd waves his arms about a lot as he explains how he made thousands of pounds committing robberies and drug deals as a New York cop in the 1980s. This is basically Cocaine Cowboys but not set in Miami and a bit more nuanced, thanks to a minor but appreciable grasp of morality and a central bromance as Shakespearean as the relationship between Paul and Frances in last week's Apprentice. (2.5)

***



Tight Spot (Phil Karlson, 1955)− A clunky, unconvincing crime film, with hapless lurches in tone, about luckless model Ginger Rogers sitting in a hotel room talking, as she tries to wriggle out of testifying against an underworld kingpin. Edward G. Robinson is the tough, plain-talking DA., with Brian Keith an irascible, sweaty cop who starts to warm to her.

For an hour, it's exceedingly stagy, its mannered script cursed with a uniquely irritating sense of humour; though there is one really sweet scene in which Rogers and Keith dance to a song on the radio, and the thaw sets in. Then finally the film judders into real life, transcending its origins to set up for a tense climax with a couple of really nice little touches in both the script and direction.

I've only ever seen Rogers give one great performance, in Gregory La Cava's dazzling comedy-drama Stage Door and she's all over the shop here (as is her accent), in a role that would have best suited a 1933 Barbara Stanwyck; for all that, she has odd moments of clarity and believability, and as a HUAC cheerleader doubtless cherished getting to state the case for informing. Keith isn't bad, if rather too hulking and obvious, so it's left to Robinson to take the acting honours, as assured as ever, in easily the least interesting of the three parts. (2)

***

TV



Huey Long (Ken Burns, 1985)− A poor documentary about one of the most fascinating figures of the American century: the rabble-rousing Louisiana radical (and spit of Frank McHugh), Huey Long, who wielded more power over his state than any politician in history and was gearing up to run for president when he was gunned down in 1935.

I've just read T. Harry Williams' phenomenal, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography and, next to that, Ken Burns' film seems embarrassingly trite and shallow, conspicuously lacking in a coherent narrative voice. Williams got to the crux of every matter: from charges of fascism and racketeering to laying bare Long's extraordinary qualities and his acts of petty-minded vindictiveness. Here, one person says one thing, another says the opposite, and you've no idea which of them is telling the truth.

I was interested to see Robert Penn Warren interviewed, as Long is mostly remembered today (if at all) as the inspiration for his book, All the King's Men − twice adapted as a film − but his only telling contribution is to read a couple of excerpts, the second accompanied by a touching montage.

It's slim pickings all round, really. Long's son Russell provides the best of the insights − including the memorable contention that by subverting democratic institutions and safeguards, his father actually promoted democracy, because for the first time people got what they had voted for − Randy Newman sings a nice song over the closing credits, and there are a few choice archive clips, but just read the book. (2)

***

BOOK



Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez (2004)− More profound and moving than any novel about a 90-year-old hiring a 14-year-old prostitute for his birthday has any right to be. Its language like silk or sand, its narrator pitiful and poetic and precise, his moments of nobility and beauty offset by a pestilent past and a pitiless self-awareness, as he moves from voracious self-involvement to reflective idealism and finally a cagey understanding of the same. Some of its grace notes (like citing numerous books I could hardly break off to read) seem perversely obscure, as does Márquez's starting point, as if he's trying to prove that he can fashion something rhapsodic, pure and mature out of the most offputting material. Or he's just a bit sexist. I'm new to his work. (3.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

Merry Christmas!

FILMS



The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino, 2015)– A bloody, bloody brilliant fusion of Western, horror and black comedy that confirms Tarantino's return to relevance after the glorious surprise that was Django Unchained, a swaggering, effortless movie following 17 years of self-conscious, self-plagiarising films.

The Hateful Eight is even better: potentially self-restricting in its claustrophobic, dialogue-heavy set-up, but with an ambition and chutzpah that causes it to leap from the screen. At times it’s reminiscent of a Ranown movie – one of those cynical, weary chamber pieces that marked a highpoint of the B-Western – with some DNA shared with Carpenter's The Thing, but when anyone is talking… well only one person could have written those lines. The stylisation in his writing is still there, but then it always was: what’s changed is that his naturalism is back and so is his range: for a while, every character in his films seemed to speak in the same, stilted way – or actually in one of two ways, sassy woman or malevolent man – but now they’re distinct, different and speaking in a way that drags you into the film, not reminds you that you’re watching one. I think that by Inglourious Basterds his writing was once more starting to sing, and his gift for suspense was much in evidence, but such virtues were rather obscured by the film’s overbearing smugness and silliness.

This one begins with bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) transporting $10,000 prisoner Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to the town of Red Rock. En route, he and driver O. B. Jackson (James Parks) pick up a former Civil War hero, Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) and a self-proclaimed sheriff (Walton Goggins), before a blizzard drives them to a haberdashery. There, a loquacious English hangman (Tim Roth, sounding like Edmund Blackadder), a hulking Mexican (Demián Bichir), a racist retired general (Bruce Dern) and a mystery man named Joe Gage (Michael Madsen) are waiting, and at least one of them has a secret that’s about to soak these walls in blood.

Since reading Truffaut/Hitchcock earlier this year, I’ve begun to look at films in a different way, particularly the way in which they create suspense – and by suspense I don’t just mean nerve-shredding tension caused by sky-high stakes (though I do partly mean that), but also basic dramatic interest. Tarantino does this unbelievably well from the get-go: from a standing start we care implicitly, overwhelmingly and relentlessly what happens next, and frequently we care so much not because the characters are likeable (see: the title), but because of Tarantino’s imagination, specificity and meticulous, tight-as-a-drum scene construction. Catharsis, when it comes, is via revelation, sardonically cartoonish violence and some of the best jokes in ages. For a director who sometimes gives the impression that he’s making films so black people will think he’s cool, he certainly gives his give detestable, racist antagonists some of the funniest lines. In a more straightforward but equally crucial sense, the film is spectacularly unpredictable, and when we can guess what's about to happen, that too's a tool, Tarantino using it to ratchet up the tension we feel.

The performances are generally good, but with superb work by Jackson (in unusually committed, dynamic form – he hasn’t been this good in 20 years), Goggins, a foully credible Dern and – probably best of all – Jennifer Jason Leigh. She’s always been a cracking actress and here she’s just superb: putrid, virulently unpleasant and increasingly covered in blood, she becomes more and more central to the story and, with it, grows in power, reaching an apogee of almost supernatural gothicism. It’s slightly ironic, then, that Tarantino seems to have borrowed her surname from RKO actress Faith Domergue, the most notoriously untalented (and most conspicuously underage) of Howard Hughes's innumerable mistresses.

I said earlier that Tarantino’s worst films seemed to be cursed by self-plagiarism. I think the problem was that this seemed more like desperation than auteurism, as here he also draws on his past, but to devastating effect. Reteaming Roth and Madsen isn’t the only sign that he’s reviving the spirit of Reservoir Dogs, the mesmerising mission statement that announced his arrival as a major new director. It’s dressed in furs, not sharp, identikit black suits, but The Hateful Eight is also a talky, gun-heavy movie about eight bad men trapped in a single room, trying to work out which one of them sold out the others. John Carpenter would appove: his hero Howard Hawks made Rio Bravo three times in various guises, before Carpenter himself had a go with Assault on Precinct 13.

The Hateful Eight might not be for all tastes – if you cringe at the n-word or gratuitous gore, give it a wide berth – but it seems an objectively good film. The scene-setting is inspired, Morricone’s sparsely-used music is marvellous, and Tarantino’s dialogue is incredibly rich: unmistakably his yet steeped in the Western tradition, with its grand allusions to the Civil War, its bitter dark humour and its contemporary resonances (which are basically what the Western is for). The film takes a massive gamble with an hour to go, and takes a little while to stop wobbling – its raison d’etre less compelling, Zoe Bell farcically wooden – but even then it regathers itself and goes again, before a final chapter of dazzling, blood-drenched Carpenter-esque Boys’ Own potency. I’ve long since given up trying to reconcile Tarantino’s embarrassing public persona – braying, posturing and misrepresenting his cinematic forefathers – with the man who can write like this.

So yes, Django wasn’t a happy accident, a brief hiatus from a spiral downwards into complete irrelevance, it was a comeback: an invigorating example of a filmmaker rediscovering his voice. The Hateful Eight goes one better, breathing new life into a moribund genre. It’s a delirious, down-and-dirty exercise in restrained mayhem that doubles as a clarion call: Tarantino is back and if he’ll never make another film as incredible as Pulp Fiction, the very literal car crash that was Death Proof is receding in the rear-view mirror, after a Western one-two of power, persuasion and startling panache. (4)

See also: I love Jennifer Jason Leigh's performance in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

***



CINEMA: Chocolat (Roschdy Zem, 2015)– A prestigious French biopic of black clown, Chocolat (Omar Sy), who became a superstar in the first years of the 20th century, which succeeds on the strength of its story and performances, but could do with playing a little less safe.

There's no denying that the story is a grabber: a penniless black refugee, posing as a 'savage' in a travelling circus, graduates to becoming a clown and become one of the most celebrated comics in the country – but longs for respect in a deeply racist society, while dealing (somewhat less interestingly) with the temptations of sudden fame.

And the mighty Omar Sy, star of that massive international hit, The Intouchables, gives it his all, delivering a deep, multi-faceted performance that infuses the film with whatever mood it's attempting to evoke, from knockabout fun to the melancholic self-loathing that comes with debasing your race for a living (even if it means giving people of your background a success story to cheer, a situation that later faced Hollywood character comics like Stepin Fetchit and Willie Best).

He's well supported by (the exceptionally handsome) James Thierrée as Footit, the arrogant, closeted but basically decent clown with whom he forges a partnership and proceeds to take Paris by storm, though most of the other characters merely represent viewpoints or challenges faced by Chocolat, and that's indicative of the film's shortcomings.

There are some nice flourishes – a notably fine wide shot of the circus stage, shot from low down; a neat montage trick that feels both slick and old-fashioned, as different parts of the frame are filled with smartly juxtaposed shots – but in a lot of ways the presentation, and the writing, are functional rather than arresting. A feeling seems to pervade the film that the story and the performances are enough to ensure that it works; and it does, but it should be more than that. Certainly there are few biopic or period piece clichés that aren't checked off (a rise-and-fall narrative, a moustachioed villain enticing our hero to betray his conscience, a man with TB coughing blood into a hanky), and its closing moments betrays a certain artlessness that frustrated me: why pan to a night sky, rather than a circus tent?!

But for all that, it is a good film. The story is fascinating, the movie never pulls its punches when dealing with difficult and even morally complex subject matter, and Chocolat and Footit's routines are impressively and exuberantly evoked, particularly given that at first you wonder if this is going to be a chore, because clowns.

More importantly than that, it's a welcome corrective in sharing Chocolat's neglected story with the world, and provides a showcase for Thierrée and more importantly Sy, who in some ways is his character's spiritual successor: a brilliant black performer in a racially-divided France, who risks his career as a comic to take on ambitious and important roles with real social significance. While the film may be safe – at least in its lack of formal ambition – its leading man is anything but. (3)

***



"THIS IS AN EMERGENCY!"
CINEMA: Chi-Raq (Spike Lee, 2015)– It seems a bit churlish to say it, but Spike Lee’s important film about the ongoing scandal of gun deaths in Chicago is an absolute shambles. It sometimes seems like he’s never seen a film before (in terms of his structure and scripting, not his natty visual sense) and while at the beginning of the movie that’s a virtue – his confrontational collage crackling with life – by the end it’s because he’s asking you to swallow an incoherent mixture of mawkishly-done melodrama and incredibly boring sex comedy. There’s a real argument for making entertainments out of critical issues, as Adam McKay did so well with The Big Short recently, because it’s a way of reaching a mass market and changing minds. But the pitfalls are obvious from Chi-raq, which simply alternates between speechifying and superficiality, and ultimately fails a subject that Lee clearly cares deeply about. Perhaps he’s just too close to this issue.

Kicking off with a dazzling credits sequence that’s basically just a YouTube lyrics video, the opening is decidedly grabby: a black urban update of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, with musical sequences, rhyming dialogue and some shouty fourth-wall-breaking from Samuel L. Jackson, basically doing his tiresome Barclaycard schtick, because he’s apparently unable to do anything else nowadays. Like Lysistrata, it’s a comedy about a sex strike, which here sees gangster’s girl Teyonah Parris trying to bring an end to mob violence by padlocking her poonani (not literally, that would be awful) and agitating for other women to follow. Nick Cannon is her eponymous lover, an extravagantly tattooed rapper with twitchy pecs who might as well be a different species considering how little I could relate to anything he said.

There are elements that work: a eulogy from throaty local priest John Cusack that starts as mere journalism but builds to a ferocious climax; a fine performance from the mighty Angela Bassett as a voice of angry, responsible reason; apposite song choices, moments of cinematic style and bits of blistering rage from a filmmaker who’s always had plenty to spare. But as a film it’s increasingly shapeless, redundant and, well, tedious, ultimately to the point of severe embarrassment. By then I was too bored and annoyed to be turned on. (2)

***



CINEMA: Remember the Night (Mitchell Leisen, 1940)– My all-time favourite film: a work of simple grace and beguiling beauty about the relationship between a shoplifter (Barbara Stanwyck) and the DA who lands her in jail over Christmas (Fred MacMurray), before feeling the first stirrings of conscience.

The marriage of Stanwyck's consummate, unique artistry and screenwriter Preston Sturges' fusion of the hard-boiled and heartfelt begins to work its magic instantly, and by the time they pitch up in Indiana to spend the holidays with MacMurray's family, I'm a mess. MacMurray too is astonishingly good, giving far and away the greatest, deepest performance of a long and erratic career.

Probably the 12 most moving moments in cinema history are crammed into this one film – among them, a meltdown at a New York nightclub, Elizabeth Patterson's love letters and Stanwyck's immortal "you bet"– while former costume designer and set dresser Leisen's very specific style (including props in the foreground to colour the whole frame) leads to some astonishing imagery: including a New Year's kiss shot through streamers and a Niagara Falls scene filmed almost entirely in silhouette. Its atmosphere is like nothing else I've ever experienced.

The movie's hilarious too, from MacMurray's ironic admission of state-sanctioned hedonism ("Oh yes, my life is just one endless parade of whoopee"), through Sturges' memorable ruminations on honesty, to a climactic courtroom scene that's both emotionally redolent and gloriously petulant, as MacMurray goes from intimidating the defendant to insulting the jury. Even the supporting characters are given pure gold: deftly sketched personas spouting stellar lines, including a ludicrously loquacious lawyer (Willard Robertson), dullwitted bondsman Fat Mike (Tom Kennedy) and overstretched orphan Willie (Sterling Holloway) – working for his supper at MacMurray's ma's house.

But the film's much more than a smart, moving, even heady rom-com: it's a plea for love, tolerance and social justice, a film about second chances, the malleability of human nature and the conditions that breed criminals, all masquerading as a holiday romance.

I've seen it perhaps a dozen times now – this was my second time on the big screen this year – and there's nowhere I'd rather be than at Beulah Bondi's house, as her son Jack (MacMurray) and the thief he's prosecuting (Stanwyck) swap songs, stories and presents, while falling desperately and irredeemably in love. (4)

See also:Here's my all-time top 25, with Remember the Night in first place.

***

BOOK



Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class by Owen Jones (he’s the author, he didn’t demonise the working class) (2011/12)– Jones’ star-making polemic is a very fine book: hopeful, angry and humane as it drags the media and politicians of all stripes over the coals for systematically destroying the British working class, sneering at the consequences and then managing to shift the blame to immigrants. Much of the material is familiar if you’re a student of modern British political history (one of the few things of which I’m a student), but there are surprises – who knew that more people worked in call centres in 2011 than ever worked in coal mining at one time? – and the accumulation of detail allied to Jones’ clear-sighted analysis and rich on-the-ground reporting adds up to a populist polemic of urgency, eloquence and unusual power. Despite the crispness of the writing, there’s a little too much repetition in both his contentions and his language (he repeatedly uses the words “rump” and “brew” like some sort of bawdy northern witch), but it’s an immensely valuable work and also a prescient one, laying bare the sheer irrationality and cruelty of a country as unequal as the one in which we live, as well as anticipating the continuing rise of the far-right, which makes it as relevant to the post-Brexit dystopia we’re inhabiting as the world Jones was addressing five years ago. (3.5)

Next up: Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies.

***

Thanks for reading.

I have a week off before Christmas, so I've spent the first part of it mostly just watching loads of movies. That's included catching up with a couple of films that the Guardian included in their 'best films' piece (SPOILER: don't bother), ahead of my review of the year, as well as getting around to two movies I've been intending to see for years: the final major artistic statements by master filmmakers Charlie Chaplin and Sam Fuller. If you're new to the blog, ratings are out of four, as that's what how the first movie book I ever owned did it, and it's going to mess up my lists if I change it now.



*MINOR SPOILERS*
CINEMA: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Gareth Edwards, 2016)– This is great: a film that hums with a love of the original trilogy, that adds layers to the Star Wars universe, but that stands on its own two feminist feet, telling a story which invokes the saga's singular iconigraphy and chimes with its enduring preoccupations – family, destiny and righteous rebellion – while going resolutely its own way. The ending, we know; but the rest is up for grabs, and the results are frequently electrifying.

Felicity Jones is superb as Jyn, the daughter of an imperial collaborator (Mads Mikkelsen), who's dragged into the rebellion after Empire pilot Riz Ahmed defects – and claims to be carrying an important message from her old man. Collecting cosmic detritus on her journey to find him – a scowling scruple vacuum (Diego Luna), a blind monk (Donnie Yen), a hilariously tactless droid (Alan Tudyk) – she discovers a purpose and a principle: rebellions are built on hope, so if the Alliance doesn't take her dad's upbeat message seriously, she's going to kick ass until they do.

The film's a little disjointed to begin with, as it hops from planet to planet, and even after it picks up momentum it has its shortcomings: some characters, like Ahmed's flyer, are disappointingly nondescript, and at its worst it has fleeting moments that plays like a skeptic's idea of Star Wars: daft creatures, tortuous gobbledegook and a surfeit of explosions. (Also Darth Vader doing his first pun.)

Such moments are in a minority; mostly Rogue One is an intricate, loving meshing of series folklore and pulsating action, which plants its feet firmly in the 21st century, but got its clothes and hair done in 1977. The inspired casting of Ben Mendelssohn as one of those transatlantic imperial functionaries with the side-parting and pursed lips is indicative of the care that's gone into crafting this, and at least one departed cast member clambers out of the Uncanny Valley to join in the fun.

I said earlier that the film's highpoints are simply electrifying, and there are many: from a dynamic dust-up in the streets of Jedah to a heartstopping "Father!"– recalling a legendary scene, but crucially credible on its own terms – and a final 10 minutes that just does everything right, climaxing with a ballet of destruction, a farewell on a beach and a closing scene that seems to fuse Empire's explosive malevolence with Old Boy's spatial innovation. The latter is one of those "Did you fucking see that?!" moments that cinema only serves up every couple of years.

As much as that, though, I loved Jones's performance. Rey is a great character, but Daisy Ridley's about as convincing as an action hero as I am. Her plummy vowels, Knightley-esque chin-acting and am-dram line readings constantly tipped me out of The Force Awakens, a film that recaptured the spirit of Star Wars, but in the way that above-average fan fiction might. Rogue One feels like a part of the original (and only) trilogy in a way that nothing has since Luke lit his dad on fire and Alec Guinness turned up as a ghost (sorry, 'as one with the Force') on the proviso he didn't have to say any George Lucas dialogue. The film is commanding, convincing and really fucking cool, and the same goes for Jones.

Its vivid sketching between the lines, its inspired expansion of the universe, and its layering of detail upon detail – including some red-hot X-wing action and a Giacchino score that incorporates Williams' themes superbly while deviating from them in the most perfect ways – is allied to Edwards' visual inventiveness (a sumptuous, turbo-charged Longest Day-style sweep across an invaded beach that he does not once but twice, each time snapping without a cut to action in the foreground) and the best jokes since Empire, most of them coming from K-2SO, a reprogrammed Imperial droid who'll tell you whatever's on his mind. The sense of humour recalled Guardians of the Galaxy, the most charming and least portentous thing Marvel has done in yonks.

So yes, it was great. And if you are a Breitbart reader who has expressed some concerns over the film's progressive gender politics and multicultural cast, I have some good news. There's a Star Wars film you will love: the women are largely decorative and it's chocka with lazy racial stereotypes. It's called The Phantom Menace and meesa thinkin yousa gonna loooove it. (3)

***



A Bigger Splash (Luca Guadagnino, 2015)– I should have known this would be crap, as it's in The Guardian's films of the year.

It's a self-satisfied nothing about middle clarseholes: something like Joanna Hogg's Archipelago relocated to the rock world and to a Sicilian isle, with Tilda Swinton as a singer whose romantic recuperation with Matthias Schoenarts is interrupted by noisy old flame Ralph Fiennes and his daughter (Dakota Johnson).

There's an awful lot of acting, pretension and shagging, but barely a credible character or recognisable feeling in the whole thing, which starts promisingly and then proceeds to go on for ever.

I've now seen Tilda Swinton in 14 films and she's only good in two of them. Her name in the credits seems to be a sure fire warning that I'm about to be annoyed for 124 minutes.

You do get to see Ralph Fiennes' willy, though. (1.5)

See also: Yes, this is even worse than the last Tilda Swinton film about a rock star: Jarmusch's dreadful Only Lovers Left Alive.

***



Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, 2015)– A disconnected David Thewlis turns up in a foreign city and starts treating its women really badly. It could be Mike Leigh's Naked, except that the city is Cincinnati, Thewlis is stop-motion and the women all have men's voices. In fact, the same man's voice.

Charlie Kaufman's film about love, alienation and the modern world takes overly familiar material and channels it through animation and gimmickry. The results are impressive, visually arresting and occasionally touching, but so sour and nihilistic that by the end I had begun to hate the film, sickened by its sneering superiority and utter lack of compassion for most of its characters. (2)

***


It's incredibly important here to include a photo of Dona Drake.

Kansas City Confidential (Phil Kaufman, 1952)– An absolutely knockout noir, with burly criminal mastermind Preston Foster hiring three career crooks (Jack Elam, Lee Van Cleef and Neville Brand) to pull off the perfect crime, snatching $1.2m from a Kansas bank. When they escape in a flower van, florist's driver John Payne is picked up by the cops, who start to sweat and swat him...

Startlingly directed by unheralded genre giant Phil Karlson, this one's packed with breakneck twists, and has fantastic performances across the board. Elam and Van Cleef are particularly good as giant-featured gunmen for whom the tables are forever being flipped, while Payne excels in an unusually embittered role.

Though the film has none of Out of the Past's dark poetry, it has concessions to noir's other secret strong suit: critiquing post-war America. While something like Pitfall paints crime and punishment as the price to be paid for rupturing the American Dream – whether or not it deserves to be smashed to splinters – Kansas City Confidential shows it as the consequence of a country that deserts its saviours, like Payne's Iwo Jima hero, scratching out a living driving a truck, and a perfect fall guy when the police need a patsy. It helps in narrative and dramatic terms that Payne's army past establishes him as a guy to root for and funds his next move, but that's by no means all that's going on here.

The sets are rather synthetic, the camera spoonfeeds us too much at the opening and the intrusion of a romance slows things a little at first (as well as informing the usual weak coda), but those are minor gripes with a gripping, thrilling and altogether sensational sleeper that traverses at least one big Old Hollywood taboo. (4)

***



"There's something about working the streets I like. It's the tramp in me, I suppose."
Limelight (Charles Chaplin, 1952)– A portrait of the artist as an old man, and a pure artistic statement at that, dripping with the gifts, flaws and excesses of its maker: the incomparable Charlie Chaplin. You can't read an autobiography by one of his contemporaries without finding a story of them essentially being held captive in Chaplin's library, as he insists on acting out feature-length stories until the early hours of the morning. And that's essentially what Limelight is.

He wrote it, directed it, scored it, starred in it and moved his cast around like marionettes, each simply giving the performance he demanded. His arrogance, smugness, compassion, self-obsession and brilliance are much in evidence in a film that's rough-edged, messy, self-aggrandising, sentimental, overlong and not very funny, and yet as perfect a portrait of the ailing, alienated genius in his dotage as you could want.

Chaplin is Calvero, a legendary comedian, a titan of the Music Hall stage, now reduced to drunkenness and irrelevance, until he saves the life of a neurotic, suicidal ballerina (Claire Bloom) and finds a new purpose in life. With shadows of A Star Is Born, her star begins to climb as his drifts into the gutter, and yet there's no bitterness in Calvero, just an apparently endless succession of noble bon mots and capsule philosophies, which will strike you as clever and warming or unbearably patronising, depending on your mood. (He could certainly have varied the line delivery a little, but then he'd only learned to speak in 1940.)

It's clichéd at times, there are countless, Wellesian production errors (from shoddy back-projection to supposedly uproarious sequences that play to audience silence), and it's not always clear which routines are meant to be amusing and which tragically unfunny, but it's also an extremely rewarding, deeply moving film, with a keenly felt romance at its centre, innumerable nods to its creator's legendary career, and many moments of sweetness, tenderness and sincerity that eulogise love, the stage and the noble art of comedy.

When Chaplin's character talks about the "waves of laughter" coming from the audience, it's autobiography not fiction, while there's melancholy and pathos to spare in the film's unspoken undercurrent: his budget had been less than half that of The Great Dictator, released 12 years earlier, and after the HUAC hearings Chaplin was sidelined and about to be banned from America, never to return. This is an artist looking back on his career and making one last major cinematic statement, because he might never get the chance to make another.

Limelight is not the place to start investigating Chaplin's legacy, but if you admire him, it's a must, its virtues ranging from a magnificent score to his only screen pairing with Buster Keaton (I only counted two laughs, but smell the history) via a litany of gifts from an incomparable talent. It's akin to being trapped in his library. (3)

***



The Wild Child (François Truffaut, 1970)– A boy of 10 or 11 is found living wild in the woods, apparently deaf, dumb and feral, and taken under the wing of a doctor (François Truffaut), who sets about trying to educate him. At first you wonder what exactly the point of the film is, or why Truffaut's directing it much of it like an old D. W. Griffith film, ending scenes with an 'iris in'.

But after a while you become accustomed to the stylistics (designed to root the film securely in the past) and the simple story starts to work its magic, accumulating power as it progresses. There are shades of The Elephant Man, as well as Rousseau and Voltaire's disseminations on the subject of savagery vs civilisation, published just 40 years before these real events took place in 1798, but the film is less judgemental than either writer managed (coming from opposite ends of the spectrum), being in praise of both civilisation and innocence, and seeing the doctor as a good man whose passion for discovery may act against his better nature.

Voiceover is often a vice in Truffaut's work, a shortcoming that suggests an absence of ingenuity in his writing, but here it works well, the doctor's original transcripts giving the piece a sense of authenticity and authority. He also draws an excellent performance from Jean-Pierre Cargol, the titular character, which for the most part seems utterly credible, when it could easily have fallen short or stepped over into histrionics or caricature.

Sometimes, especially early on, The Wild Child is too functional and factual, lacking the revelatory spirituality, flecked with surrealism, of Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser or the overpowering sadness of Lynch's The Elephant Man. But ultimately the fact that it's so straightforward, understated and unsentimental allows it to sneak up on you, until you're holding your breath, wondering whether the doctor's test of morality and justice will blow their bond to smithereens. (3.5)

See also: I've watched eight of Truffaut's lesser-known movies this year (three to go!). Most of them have been quite disappointing, to be honest – The Wild Child (originally L'enfantssauvage) is the best of the eight – though Le peau douce and The Woman Next Door were very well done. ***


When England was unfortunately ruled by a sad clown.

The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (Michael Curtis, 1939)– This historical romance from Warner Bros is a mixture of the silly and the sublime, with sets and situations that are often patently ridiculous, and yet a score, a central performance and a selection of scenes that are anything but. Bette Davis is the tempestuous, ghost-faced Elizabeth I, who spars with the lover who calls her his liege, the Earl of Essex (Errol Flynn), a proud, charming war hero with a thirst for power.

Across polished floors, in spotless clothes and beneath the baking sun − none of which denote Elizabethan England − they quarrel and make up, their verbiage crackling with intensity (most of it emanating from Davis) before a final 20 that's weighed down in semantics and cursed with an inevitability that's more tedious than fatalistic.

Along the way, there are serious treats in store, including a classic score from the legendary Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a commanding performance from Davis in which − that unmistakable nose and bark aside − she's largely subsumed by her character, and a handful of set pieces that rise way above the ordinary. The pick of the bunch is at the halfway stage: a profoundly moving conversation between Elizabeth and Essex, in which she gives him a ring denoting her affection, no matter how "sharp and wearing days" will change them irrevocably.

It's a remarkably literate passage worthy of Joyce, and acted with immense feeling by Davis, Korngold's music sweeping gently beneath the verse. And in its foreshadowing of less simple times, when the memory of this encounter and the lingering of loyalty may cause nothing but sorrow, it brought to mind one of my favourite pieces of writing: the final chapter of A. A. Milne's 'House at Pooh Corner'.

Much of the film is sadly more prosaic and pretend, with empty pageantry and box-ticking more associated with accounting than artistry, though it's fun to see a gawky 28-year-old Vincent Price as a despicable Sir Walter Raleigh, and Olivia De Havilland cast against type as a bit of a bitch (at least at first). The film's slightly salacious title, by the way, may have been inspired by Alexander Korda's work across the Atlantic, where he used the 'Private Life of' prefix to spice up historical titles, including one about Elizabeth's dad, released in 1933.

The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex is something of an anomaly: a splashy Technicolor outing that's often excessively talky and a period Errol Flynn vehicle directed by Curtiz and scored by Korngold with little to no swashbuckling, which gives him Bette Davis as a love interest, despite the presence of regular co-star De Havilland.

Flynn and Davis, incidentally, were mired in mutual antipathy, amusingly recalled in his rakish autobiography. When you see her lamp him in the face in the film's opening moments, she wasn't acting. But while his performance is rather lacking in energy, hers is a testament to a remarkable talent, her physical transformation not in place of a performance − a problem I have with a lot of Meryl Streep's work − but merely a starting point from which she can delve deep into the character and the viewer's being. The material here isn't always worthy of her but, when it is, the results are extraordinary. (3)

***



The Green Man (Robert Day, 1956)– Alastair Sim is an assassin trying to off a government minister in this comedy from Launder and Gilliat, best known for one of their weaker offerings – the St Trinian’s series – but responsible for several of the highpoints of classic British film, including the brilliant Happiest Days of Your Life (St Trinian’s if it was a-gag-a-minute and razor sharp), Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (which they wrote) and the classic 1946 crime-comedy Green for Danger, which inserts Sim’s wry, quipping detective into a murder mystery plot of rare complexity and brilliance.

When I first heard of The Green Man, I assumed it might be more of the same, but it’s not at all: the premise is merely the excuse for an old-fashioned farce that’s well done if you like farce, which with a few exceptions I really don’t. All the stock genre fodder is there: characters nearly seeing each other through closing doors, suspecting affairs because they find people lying together on the floor or finding that a corpse keeps disappearing or re-appearing, and – as you might suspect – it’s mostly too broad to be really funny, accentuated by one of Muir Matheson's overbearing, unbearable 'comic' scores.

Since it’s Launder and Gilliat, there are flashes of quality, though the film’s principal virtue is Sim’s performance, his impeccable timing and ability to throw himself into a scenario – no matter what it is – wringing most of the dark or dry humour from the sitcom-style scenes. When he isn't on screen, as he isn't for much of the middle act, the film noticeably drags. It's not another L&G classic, then, just a pleasant enough timewaster, with the gorgeous Jill Adams and an unusually callow, well-spoken George Cole adequate in support, and Terry-Thomas naturally stealing his two scenes. The title, incidentally, is the name of the hotel where the movie reaches its climax. (2.5)

***



White Dog (Samuel Fuller, 1982)– A heartwarming girl-and-her-pet story, about an actress (Kristy McNichol) who rescues an injured dog, nurses it back to health and finds it's been programmed to attack black people.

Ludicrously banned on racism grounds and then long unavailable, Sam Fuller's B-movie attained a near-mythic status that it would surely never have found otherwise. It's striking and original, with a few excellent set-pieces and a Morricone score, but it's also unfocused, possessed of a Hallmark TV movie aesthetic that sometimes makes it feel like a piss-take, and full of frankly crap acting. While wooden performances lend some of Fuller's early films a disorientating feel, somehow enhancing their outsider status, they undermine White Dog, and expose the atypical weaknesses in Fuller and Curtis Hanson's dialogue.

The problem is that the film works best as an allegory, but is frequently too literal to be one. In Our Friends in the North, the pitbull that savages a former Jarrow March veteran isn't just emblematic of the working class's new-found selfishness, it is the lack of solidarity. Here there are passages that work brilliantly, like the attack in the church, but elsewhere the story stops being about racism and is just about a scary dog. It doesn't help that Fuller dilutes the story with a subplot about Burl Ives training animals for movies, which is mostly used to make jokes about the industry resenting Star Wars, and drags us away from the cracking premise.

In fact, I got the feeling watching White Dog that I experienced with Peckinpah's The Osterman Weekend or Wilder's Avanti!: of a master filmmaker with some of their old powers, the odd flash of genius still crackling through them, but all at sea in a new world with new rules. And with White Dog I really do wonder if it would have the same reputation if Sam Fuller's name wasn't on it, or it hadn't been banned. Though it has an elusive resonance due to its horrific nature and Fuller's eye for an unforgettable image, it winds up as a great idea in search of a great movie, largely sunk by seriously sloppy execution.

I've added half a star because McNichol is glimpsed reading a John Barrymore biography in bed: Gene Fowler's classic 'Good Night, Sweet Prince'. (2.5)

See also: My favourite Fuller films are Pickup on South Street, The Big Red One and Forty Guns. He made a lot of great movies, though: Shock Corridor and The Crimson Kimono are B-movie classics, and Park Row– perhaps his most personal film – is a must for fans.

***

SHORTS



The Royal Rodeo (George Amy, 1939)– Garish nonsense apparently designed to test out John Paine as a singing cowboy. Child star and future cautionary tale Scotty Beckett is a 10-year-old king in a small European state who excitedly receives a troupe of cowboys, including Paine and Cliff 'Ukulele Ike' Edwards (the voice of Jiminy Cricket the next year).

As they're American, they inevitably intervene in a foreign dispute, keeping the 10-year-old puppet leader on his throne. It's faintly diverting fluff, including one hilarious stunt sequence that sees Beckett doubled by a full-grown man about twice his size. That's Doug Fairbanks, Sr's niece, Lucile (technically Hollywood royalty), as Marianne. (2)

***


You remember that time you took acid?

Old Glory (Spike Jones, 1939)– A fascinating curio: overbearing, sanctimonious propaganda, with Uncle Sam coming to Porky Pig in a dream to teach him the great myths about America. I wish Kurt Vonnegut had appeared instead; his clear-sighted, humane and sardonic treatment of US history really should be taught in schools. There are a few nice images in there, shame about the reactionary brainwashing. (1.5)

***

TV



HyperNormalisation (Adam Curtis, 2016)– A fascinating, terrifying new epic documentary from Adam Curtis, about Syria, the internet, Donald Trump, finance, the inter-connectivity of everything, and the fact that we rely on simplistic, erroneous narratives in this 'post-politics' age, because the world is far too complex for us to make sense of.

Curtis's style can be long-winded – as a book this would run to perhaps 70 pages, and much of the material creates only a mood, rather than enhancing his argument – but polemics of such intelligence, boldness and ambition are rarely seen on screen, and for me he's sort of TV's Lars von Trier: there's real depth beneath his attention-grabbing, he forces you to look at the world in a different way, and every new film is a bleak, immersive adventure that I'm compelled to go on, despite myself. (3.5)

See also: I watched Curtis's Bitter Lake last year. Both films are on iPlayer.

***

EXHIBITION



Abstract Expressionism (Royal Academy)– A heavy-hitting overview that did a fair job of making this material accessible to a beginner like me, showing Pollock's versatility, range and the muscularity of his art, expanding my understanding of Rothko beyond his status as a creator of moods, and introducing me to a selection of (apparently well-known) contemporaries. Robert Motherwell's endless evoking of the Spanish Civil War sounded promising but left me cold, but Still's ever-climbing verticals and the "violent marks" of Kline – stark black lines conjuring noirish city scapes – took my breath away, and I found the fleshy eroticism of de Kooning's 'women' period beguiling. The Pollock and Rothko pieces were utterly overpowering, in both scale and content, and a room of drawings and photos included a lovely shot of the former 'disappearing in light' as he dripped onto a vast canvas. For the most part, this was a really interesting, rewarding exhibition, though with the usual moments of nagging unease I get from modern art exhibitions, as some pictures and painters leave me with the distinct feeling that either I'm stupid or they're shit. (3.5)

***

Thanks for reading. And Happy Christmas.

2016 has been an absolute binfire of a year. At least I watched a few nice films, eh? Here's the first part of a review of the year in the usual three instalments (movies/live stuff/books and TV). I hope you enjoy it.

Best films of 2016*

10. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Director: Gareth Edwards
Cast: Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Alan Tudyk, Donnie Yen, Wen Jiang and Ben Mendelsohn
What we said:"This is great: a film that hums with a love of the original trilogy, that adds layers to the Star Wars universe, but that stands on its own two feminist feet, telling a story which invokes the saga's singular iconigraphy and chimes with its enduring preoccupations – family, destiny and righteous rebellion – while going resolutely its own way. The ending, we know; but the rest is up for grabs, and the results are frequently electrifying."

9. Weiner

Director: Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg
What we said:"From a spectacular opening that shows what a barnstorming, populist performer Weiner was in his congress days, through to a desperately and increasingly uncomfortable chance to be a fly on the wall as his marriage falters and his campaign implodes, it's a remarkable portrait − with remarkable access − of a narcissist who clearly cares about ordinary people, and yet is destroyed by his own rampaging demons and a recurrent shittiness in his private life."

8. Nocturnal Animals

Director: Tom Ford
Cast: Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor Johnson and Isla Fisher
What we said:" A film about emotional violence, cruelty and revenge, as disquieting and unpleasant as any mainstream Hollywood movie I can remember, and for that reason both an experience that I can’t recommend and that I must. An extremely unusual and refreshing reworking of genre clichés, novelistic but also invigoratingly cinematic. It’s a model of how to utilise cinematic grammar (particularly abrupt, busy but restrained editing) to tell a story, and to layer that story so densely and virtuosically that it embeds itself in you."

7. Love & Friendship

Director: Whit Stillman
Cast: Kate Beckinsale, Morfydd Clark, Tom Bennett, Jenn Murray, Lochlann O'Mearáinn, Sophie Radermacher and Chloë Sevigny
What we said:"It's so great to have one of America's best ever writer-directors back making movies again, and this one's a wonder. I was incredibly excited when I heard this movie was in the works, and I'm delighted that it didn't disappoint, its short shooting schedule (entirely in Dublin) and small budget nowhere in evidence, except perhaps to lend it the same zippy, breakneck feel as The Thin Man, a film with the same modern, offhand sensibility, and delirious sense of fun."

6. The Big Short

Director: Adam McKay
Cast: Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt
What we said:"An audacious, counter-intuitive and richly entertaining polemic about the financial crisis, its raw anger cooked up into a fun old caper movie, studded with vividly sketched characters, sourly profane dialogue and a heap of meta gags: a few of them overdone, but most melting in the mouth before leaving an aftertaste akin to charred vomit. McKay knows what he’s doing, and even if he’s sometimes doing it too loudly or just with tits, it’s ultimately worth it. The Big Short may be playful but it’s pointed enough to draw real blood, asking you to question your preconceptions and priorities – while being ferociously funny and quite ludicrously fun."

5. Spotlight

Director: Tom McCarthy
Cast: Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber and John Slattery
What we said:All the Pederasts' Men, with an exceptional ensemble bringing to life this true story of the Boston Globe's investigation into child abuse by the Catholic Church. It makes me proud to be a (lapsed) journo and a Tom McCarthy cheerleader, ashamed to be a Catholic. McCarthy, like Alexander Payne, has that rare gift for making films that entertain as you watch them, then reward you a dozen times over in retrospect. This one diverges considerably from the tried-and-tested formula of his first three – and is perhaps more obviously weighty and virtuous – but once more gives the impression of having not just passed your time pleasantly, but left an indelible mark upon you, with its quiet anger, compassion, and hard-won wisdom, never dampened by naïvete or sensationalism."

4. Julieta

Director: Pedro Almodovar
Cast: Emma Suárez, Adriana Ugarte, Daniel Grao, Inma Cuesta, Darío Grandinetti and Michelle Jenner
What we said:"A wonderful, extremely powerful film about a middle-aged woman (Emma Suarez) willing to give up everything she has for a chance to reconnect with her estranged daughter. In flashback, we learn her story. It sucks you in for 100 minutes, and when it's over it stays with you. Not just the gradually unwrapping story, nor Suarez's superb performance, but the way it forces you to interrogate the way that you live your own life. It's quite something."

3. Zootropolis

Director: Byron Howard and Rich Moore
Cast: (voices of) Ginnifer Goodwin, Jason Bateman and Idris Elba
What we said:"The jokes are superb, the action's better than in almost any other animated movie, and its balance of story, character and wider resonance – as well as the freshness and distinctiveness of each – kicks it way above most of the fare we've been fed by Disney since the pioneering spirit of its early years gave way to mawkishness, formula and safety. It's zooperb."

2. The Hateful Eight

Director: Quentin Tarantino
Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Walton Goggins, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kurt Russell, Bruce Dern and Michael Madsen
What we said:"A bloody, bloody brilliant fusion of Western, horror and black comedy that confirms Tarantino's return to relevance. The scene-setting is inspired, Morricone’s sparsely-used music is marvellous, and Tarantino’s dialogue is incredibly rich: unmistakably his yet steeped in the Western tradition, with its grand allusions to the Civil War, its bitter dark humour and its contemporary resonances. It’s a delirious, down-and-dirty exercise in restrained mayhem that doubles as a clarion call."

1. Arrival

Director: Denis Villeneuve
Cast: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Ruth Chiang and Forest Whitaker
What we said:"It opens like Up, with a breathtakingly beautiful, vividly universal montage of Adams' life with her daughter, then threatens to fall away, as you wonder if it will have anything to it at all. That's a false impression: Villeneuve is zoning in slowly but unerringly on the film's emotional centre, and when that grabs you, you can't get loose. His movie blends the literate, sun-dappled nostalgia of The Tree of Life, with Gravity's sense of nervous wonder and Moon's freaky but human edge, but it meant a lot more to me than any of those films. It's still commandeering my brain now, almost a day later, with its rich tapestry of emotions, Adams' characteristically immersive performance and a reveal that you won't forget in a hurry."

***

*Only films released in the UK this year are eligible. Thanks to #LFF2016, some of the best new movies I saw this year won't be on general release here until 2017. The best five were: La La Land, Certain Women, Tickling Giants, The Salesman and Christine. The first two of those are films for the ages.

Previous winners of my 'best film of the year' award are:
2010 – Toy Story 3
2011 – Attack the Block
2012 – Silver Linings Playbook
2013 – Frances Ha
2014 – Boyhood
2015 – Amy

***

Top 16 discoveries of 2016:



16. Safety Not Guaranteed (Colin Trevorrow, 2012)– An unexpectedly fantastic movie – based on a classified ad – about journo Jake Johnson and intern Aubrey Plaza going in search of eccentric Mark Duplass, who believes he’s built a time machine. It has a distinctive (and hilarious) sense of humour, a penchant for the unexpected and an abundance of genuine human emotion, thanks chiefly to the chemistry between Duplass and Plaza – both of whom are superb, though especially her. The way she looks at him when they’re by the campfire is worth a spot in this list by itself.

15. Beggars of Life (William Wellman, 1928)– I've wanted to see this for a decade or more, and – finally enjoyed with a live musical accompaniment from Neil Brand and the Dodge Brothers – it didn't disappoint. A grim but intoxicating silent wonder from William Wellman, with a rough-and-ready storyline, Louise Brooks' best American performance and a first 45 minutes of almost perpetual motion, as our heroine kills an attempted rapist, dresses as a bloke and then hops freights with hobo Richard Arlen, trying to shake the "dicks" on their tail (stop sniggering).



14. Bound for Glory (Hal Ashby, 1976)– A brilliant – and for the most part brilliantly unconventional – biopic of the legendary protest singer Woody Guthrie, which until its final 30 provides no stock storytelling, no obvious Hollywood moments and no real antagonists aside from the system itself, just the man with his great flaws and virtues, and a succession of episodes within a spellbinding evocation of Depression-era America, in all its grim beauty and despair.

13. Harlan County, U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple, 1976)– Documentary maker Barbara Kopple lived with coal miners’ families for a year in order to make this startling, far-reaching film, which uses a desperate localised strike – called by workers seeking union recognition – to examine the way America treats its poor. Kooper soundtracks the whole thing with a succession of beguiling, soot-choked renditions of bluegrass songs about mining, some done professionally, others sung with an overpowering intensity by minor players in the film; the CD has been my most-listened record this year, along with Pronto Monto by Kate & Anna McGarrigle, and the soundtrack to the number four film in this list.


12. Kansas City Confidential (Phil Karlson, 1952)– A late entry in the list: I only caught it this week. It's an absolutely knockout noir, with burly criminal mastermind Preston Foster hiring three career crooks (Jack Elam, Lee Van Cleef and Neville Brand) to pull off the perfect crime, snatching $1.2m from a Kansas bank. When they escape in a flower van, florist's driver John Payne is picked up by the cops, who start to sweat and swat him... Startlingly directed by unheralded genre giant Phil Karlson, this one's packed with breakneck twists, and has fantastic performances across the board. The gorgeous Dona Drake, whose role is essentially ornamental, was a mixed race black actress who passed for Mexican, somewhat circumventing the toxic racism of America in the 1940s and '50s.

11. Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012)– If you're ever worried you might be oversharing, watch Sarah Polley's immaculate 2012 documentary, Stories We Tell, in which the incisively intelligent, staggeringly honest writer-director of Take This Waltz lays bare her family's history while telling the story of her late mother, Diane. As in my review, I'll avoid saying much about its subject or its style, but it is a remarkable film: haunting and bravura and with a genuine ovaries-out bravery that knocked me sideways.


10. French Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1955)– Renoir's whimsical, beautiful film about the birth of the Moulin Rouge is handled largely with the lightest of touches, reaching eternal truths along the way, before exploding into an ecstasy of music, dance and colour. Taken minute-by-minute, it's not a faultless film, but it's a heart-melting, uniquely textured and utterly rousing experience, with just the right undertug of melancholy and sacrifice, as Renoir suggests that a great creative life means no other life at all, but that the ultimate creation makes everything else pale into nothing. On this evidence, you can see his point.

9. El Sur (Victor Erice, 1983)– A completely overpowering movie from Spirit of the Beehive director Victor Erice, about a young girl in northern Spain who loses her innocence as she begins to observe and understand her complex, haunted father. 'El Sur' (The South) is the place he left and never returned to, somewhere in his mind the Civil War guns still firing. There are so many things to love and admire. The detachment and relentless, unpleasant repetition of the opening. The unsentimental, multi-layered characterisation that evades simple categorisation. The dream-like vignettes we encounter and experience as we wander through Estrella's memories. I found this bucolic, melancholy film both exquisitely beautiful and utterly heartbreaking.



8. Abe Lincoln in Illinois (John Cromwell, 1940)– This is one of the best films I've seen in a long time: an extraordinarily mature, literature drama of the sort that has never really been in vogue. Massey is absolutely immense as the former president, particularly in the film's gobsmacking second half, full of magnificent dialogue, complex ideas and a complete lack of Hollywood sheen. It's bruising, difficult, heartbreaking: his journey from gangliness to greatness a picture of sacrifice and self-denial, a Black-Dog-and-all portrayal of a character most commonly shown in American cinema as being akin to Jesus.

7. Margaret: extended version (Kenneth Lonergan, 2011)– A breathtaking, one-of-a-kind character study about a high-school student (Anna Paquin) wrestling harrowingly with life's vicissitudes after causing a fatal accident. Kenneth Lonergan's belated follow-up to You Can Count on Me, eventually released after a six-year legal battle, is novelistic in its elliptical, conversational, almost aggressively uncommercial approach, with long takes, chapters and characters whose relevance isn't always immediately obvious, and stately, slo-mo interludes of pedestrian traffic soundtracked only by orchestral music, which not only place the narrative vividly in New York, and hint at the frailty of all human lives, but also seem to underline that this is just one story among millions.


6. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 1999)– David Lynch’s spin on Sunset Blvd. is a Hollywood nightmare, a uniquely disconcerting experience that builds to a glorious, incomprehensible climax. There are scenes here of utter brilliance, of heart-stopping terror, raven black humour and intoxicating sensuality: a psychic neighbour babbling harrowing warnings, a botched hit, the punchline to the Winkie’s set-piece, and Watts’ mesmerising audition (as much nibbling, biting and heavy breathing as actually acting). Those stand-out, almost self-contained passages are trapped in an unfolding, enveloping head-fuck of a film that’s comfortably one of the three or four scariest I have ever seen.

5. Séraphine (Martin Provost, 2008)− This is such a wonderful film: a movie about art, which is itself great art, taking the kind of real-life story that’s usually done in some hideous, schmaltzy way and ruthlessly rooting out every last bit of sentiment. Each choice it makes, from the delayed gratification of its opening (we don’t see a single painting for a good 40 minutes) to the marginal catharsis of the denouement is perfect, and the result is a French film in the traditions of Renoir, Bresson and the Dardenne brothers.


4. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel Coen, 2013)– This sad, whimsical and purposefully baggy story of missed opportunities and shambling urban alienation – set in Greenwich Village moments before the '60s folk boom, and centring on Oscar Isaac's titular troubadour – is an extraordinarily special piece of work. I'm interested by the Coen brothers, and watch everything they make, but this is the first time I've ever truly loved one of their films; and the more I think of it, the more I love it. That performance. That soundtrack. That cat.

3. The Big Red One: The Reconstruction (Samuel Fuller, 1980/2004)– Sam Fuller's masterpiece, released in butchered form in 1980 then 'reconstructed' 24 years later according to his original shooting script, is a war movie like no other: the episodic, wryly fatalistic story of four dogfaces, dubbed 'the four horsemen of the apocalypse' who fight the battles that the writer-director had in World War Two. It's the best war movie I've ever seen.


2. Black Orpheus (Marcel Camus, 1959)– An astonishing movie that I only heard of for the first time in May, when it was scheduled to play at the BFI in London; it sounded amazing, so I got a ticket. It's the Orpheus myth transplanted to the Rio Carnival, with womanising guitarist Breno Mello falling in love with pure, troubled Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn). They dance, have sex, and save one another, but his feisty ex-girlfriend and Eurydice's psychotic, death-faced stalker hint at the unlikeliness of a happy ending. It's difficult to believe when watching Black Orpheus that the story would or could make sense anywhere else, such is the film's complete conviction, and the virtuosic skill that Camus displays in meshing these diverse elements together, while capturing the penury, charm and beauty of the setting, and inspiring a host of pitch perfect performances.


1. The Bakery Girl of Monceau (Éric Rohmer, 1963) - A mesmerising, intoxicating Rohmer short that's as close to a personal manifesto as you'll ever see on screen. His enduring preoccupation was where eroticism touches romance, and his view of both was heady, wise, ironic. After the false start that was the director's abysmal debut feature, the tedious, neorealist Signe du Lion, this story of a law student (Barbet Schroeder) flirting with a counter girl at a Parisian bakery (Claudine Soubrier) as he waits for his true love (Michèle Girardon) to walk past is extraordinarily affecting, honest and insightful.

***

Everyone likes lists. Here's one.


Seeing this on the big screen was a highlight.

Crazes:Éric Rohmer (I bought a Blu-ray box-set of all his films whilst drunk) and London Film Festival (I saw 18 movies in 11 days).
Continuing preoccupations: Lillian Gish, Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis, three actresses who have given me an incredible amount of pleasure (and a little heartache) over the years.
Stuff I caught up on: François Truffaut's more obscure films. A lot of them are little-known for good reason, though L'enfant sauvage (aka The Wild Child) is an extremely fine piece of work. I also watched the rest of Buster Keaton's shorts for Educational Pictures, which had flashes of inspiration amidst much depressing floundering.
Revelations:La La Land will be the only thing anyone is talking in January (apart from Brexit and Trump).
Happiest surprises: Tarantino cementing his return to form with The Hateful Eight, Whit Stillman being allowed to take a crack at adapting Jane Austen (the fact that the resulting film was brilliant was no surprise at all). Tickling Giants being an absolute riot (after an exhausting day at work), rather than an exhausting slice of docu-realism, was such a treat. Somewhere in the Night is perpetually overlooked or patronised in discussions of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's work, but it's a fantastic little movie with a host of unexpected delights.
Biggest disappointments: Richard Kelly's Southland Tales and Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate have a reputation as being visionary artistic statements sunk by grasping moneymen. Both are a bit crap, really (though the latter is shot and scored like a dream). Trumbo was bold enough to be a film about the Hollywood blacklist that had an unrepentant communist for a hero (Guilty by Suspicion in 1991 notoriously changed Abraham Polonsky's screenplay so that its Marxist protagonist was instead a liberal), but it was an otherwise cartoonish, shallow and pathetic attempt to do justice to an enduringly fascinating and important period of American history.
Oddest film:I Married a Communist, released at the height of the witchhunt I just mentioned, is an unmissable cocktail that drops some teeth-achingly awful Red Scare nonsense into a a fairly straighforward shot of urban noir.
Worst films:Spaceship, the nadir of
a largely intoxicating and uplifting London Film Festival. I left the cinema genuinely furious.
Some favourite moments: Experiencing the campfire scene from My Own Private Idaho, the 'Girl Hunt' ballet in The Band Wagon and the Niagara Falls climax of Remember the Night on the big screen was a luxury that will live long in the memory. The conversation in the cafe in Victor Erice's El Sur was acutely painful, and gloriously offset by Black Orpheus's deliriously enjoyable samba sequences. How far can we stretch 'favourite? The insane babbling on the doorstep in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive was certainly memorable, but I don't plan to 'enjoy' it again any time soon.
2016 was... the worst year since 2002, though I loved visiting my nephews, going to the London Film Festival and seeing Adam and Joe's live reunion.
Number of films I saw at the cinema: A preposterously high 53, as I'm now a BFI member (I'd recommend it to anyone in London who loves movies).
Best film I saw at the cinema: My favourite film, Remember the Night.
I was bored by: Billy Wilder's atrocious The Emperor Waltz, one of those catastrophes from a major director that are actually surprisingly common.
I wrote this pretty good review of _______________, you should read it if you have a minute: If you want a head's up on next year's best films, my series about #LFF2016 is here. I was pleased with my write-up of Abe Lincoln in Illinois, a remarkable independent film (though it was distributed by RKO) from 1940.

***

Thanks for reading. The next two instalments will follow before the year is out.

Hello again. Thanks to those of you who read the first part of my review of the year, it means a lot to me, genuinely. And thanks especially to those who shared it on Twitter and Facebook.

Part 1 was about movies, which is when you go into a darkened room and watch a filmed record of people pretending to be other people for about two hours at a time. This second part will cover gigs, exhibitions and the theatre, the last two of which have become an increasing part of my life since I moved to That London, which for all of its many flaws – and the unacceptability of this being the case – dwarfs the rest of Britain when it comes to cultural opportunities. Unless you would care for some more ado, here it is:

THEATRE

5. Sunset Blvd. (London Coliseum)

I saw this whilst in the midst of personal trauma and, despite a few flaws, it enraptured and obsessed me. It's an Andrew Lloyd Webber adaptation of Billy Wilder's Hollywood nightmare, brought to the home of the English National Opera with a bare set, a 48-piece orchestra and Glenn Close in the lead (on the rare occasions when she wasn't indisposed). I ended up seeing it twice, and the second time was a more arresting experience, thanks to a front row seat and a stirring, moving performance from Close's big-voiced understudy, Ria Jones, whose performance I much preferred. Oddly, the things I liked most about it, though, were elements that wouldn't necessarily come to mind when you uttered the title: the lush melody of Too Much in Love to Care, the explosions of inventively choreographed dance, and the pairing of Michael Xavier as cynical screenwriter Joe Gillis – and Siobhan Dillon, playing his possible lifeline: bright-eyed studio scribe Betty Schaefer. Their irresistible chemistry made Joe's story as much of a tragedy as that of Close and Jones' character – deluded former screen queen, Norma Desmond – lending an undertug of humanity to this story of stifling desperation, laced with bitter, bullet-ridden, waterlogged wisdom.

4. Letters Live (Freemasons' Hall)

A must-see event, if you're a human and in London: letters from history, both well-known and unknown, read by some of the leading lights in the arts, including the likes of Benedict Cumberbatch, Jude Law and Meera Syal. The most profound of these was written, and read, by Caitlin Moran, and immediately and fundamentally transformed my conception of her. It has moments of self-aggrandisement, but it affected me very deeply, and I've looked to it time and again this year when things seemed a little too great to bear.

"Here is a promise, and a fact: you will never, in your life, ever have to deal with anything more than the next minute. However much it feels like you are approaching an event – an exam, a conversation, a decision, a kiss – where, if you screw it up, the entire future will just burn to hell in front of you and you will end, you are not.

That will never happen. That is not what happens.

The minutes always come one at a time, inside hours that come one at a time, inside days that come one at a time – all orderly strung, like pearls on a necklace, suspended in a graceful line. You will never, ever have to deal with more than the next 60 seconds.

Do the calm, right thing that needs to be done in that minute. The work, or the breathing, or the smile. You can do that, for just one minute. And if you can do a minute, you can do the next.

Pretend you are your own baby. You would never cut that baby, or starve it, or overfeed it until it cried in pain, or tell it it was worthless. Sometimes, girls have to be mothers to themselves. Your body wants to live – that’s all and everything it was born to do. Let it do that, in the safety you provide it. Protect it. That is your biggest job. To protect your skin, and heart."

3. The Threepenny Opera (National Theatre)

A lewd, sharp and sordid version of Brecht and Weill’s classic musical that provides deliciously amoral fun while doubling as a critique of establishment hypocrisy – and perhaps humanity itself. Seeing the play the day after Jo Cox’s murder, the brooding, putrid patriotism that infests the characters – sprawled beneath a gargantuan St George’s flag – cast a pall over the theatre: one of those moments when great art captures the national mood almost through chance. Full review.

2. Ellen Terry with Eileen Atkins (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, The Globe)

A monumental achievement on an intimate scale, with Atkins recreating a lecture on Shakespeare's women by 19th century actress Ellen Terry. Staged in the Globe's sumptuous smaller room, it was educational, enrapturing and exhilarating, with Atkins/Terry discoursing on gender politics, sketching deft portraits of characters and breaking into dazzling performances of apposite Shakespearean scenes. A quietly breathtaking night.

1. Groundhog Day (The Old Vic)

It's incredibly rare that an actor takes a role indelibly associated with someone else and makes it completely, and perhaps irrevocably, their own. But that's what's happened with Groundhog Day's Phil Connors in this musical adaptation of Harold Ramis's 1993 film. As realised by Broadway star Andy Karl, Connors is a comic whirlwind, powering a jawdropping production that's both a technical and an artistic triumph, using a rotating stage and several travelators, a song style fusing Lorenz Hart with hip hop, and an inspired broadening of its focus to wring every laugh, gasp and tear from the source material, and from its audience. A complete triumph. Full review.


Round-up: Glenda Jackson returned to the stage in a genderblind King Lear at The Old Vic: a mixture of the terrific and the tedious. Romeo and Juliet at the Garrick was interesting and enjoyable, but hampered by an understudy ill-equipped to deal with a framing of the play as a study of sexual obsession. Kinks musical Sunny Afternoon had great moments and laboured griping, The Entertainer recovered from serious inertia to provide a vivid portrait of a past (and present?) Britain, and Day Job at the Bread and Roses Theatre showed that some of the most interesting and dynamic work is done in small rooms by people who aren't on telly. The cast was superb. This year's worst were Show Boat, a play that may need to be either re-tooled or retired, and an unbearable take on The Caretaker at The Old Vic, featuring the lesser-spotted Bad Timothy Spall Performance (above).

***

GIGS

Oddly for me, almost everything I've seen this year has been at work, perhaps because the line-up at the Hall this year was quite ridiculously good.

7. Brian Wilson performs Pet Sounds (Royal Albert Hall)

A deeply moving celebration of one of the 20th century’s greatest artists, but it’s more than that: it’s a show that’s vivid, alive and invigoratingly enjoyable: an exploration and reinvention of some of the finest songs ever written, with Wilson its centre and its beating heart, even if a part of him is still lost somewhere in the 1960s. Full review.

6. Radio 2 Folk Awards (Royal Albert Hall)

A truly magical evening, not least because I spent much of it with Georgia Lucas, the daughter of my great hero, Sandy Denny, as well as meeting people I'd grown up listening to, including Norma Waterson, Linda Thompson and Ralph McTell. The show itself was a wonder, including a tribute to Sandy, Sam Lee singing 'Lovely Molly' and The Unthanks doing a clog dance. I wrote a feature about Sandy's shows at the Hall here.

5. John Grant (Royal Albert Hall)

Not the loud, sweaty, hyper-intensive show we got at Hammersmith Apollo in November, but no less memorable a night, with Grant in balladic, hypnotic and rhapsodic mood. I still haven't recovered from that heartstopping version of Mary MacGregor’s 'Torn Between Two Lovers', featuring Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon on lead vocals. Full review.

4. CHVRCHES (Royal Albert Hall)

A dancy, high-octane show from Scottish electronica heroes, CHVRCHES. 'Leave a Trace' damn near blew the roof off the building (it's not actually attached, it merely rests on the Hall). The most fun I've had without laughing, as Woody Allen once said. Review.

3. Björk (Royal Albert Hall)

A mesmerising night in the company of one of our time's truly great artists, centred largely on her tortured last record, Vulnicura, the most harrowing break-up record I’ve heard in years. Before a sell-out crowd of over 5,000, backed purely by the strings of the Aurora Orchestra and wearing a flamboyant mask that lights up midway through the first half (obviously), she gives a mesmerising performance that’s utterly raw: flaying her wounds till they’re tender, then cauterising them till they’re healed. Full review.

2. Paul Simon (Royal Albert Hall)

A stunning, moving, exultant tour of one of the finest back catalogues in popular music. Dylan is a contrarian and McCartney a crowdpleaser, but Simon's something else: a man at peace with his legacy who'll give you the hits in a new way, and knows you'll love it. The show brought us to our feet and dancing countless times, prompted four standing ovations and included both the best ('Stranger to Stranger') and worst ('Wristband') of his current record, but it was his haunting hymn to serenity and sorrow, 'The Sound of Silence', that really took my breath away. Full review.

1. Basia Bulat (Hoxton Square Kitchen)

She topped last year's list too, but nothing prepared for me this, though: the whispery, wispy, baby-faced Bulat reincarnated as a power-pop diva in a gold cape, charisma bursting from her, as she belted out crowd-pleasers from behind a keyboard, like some improbable, magnificent union between Janis Joplin and Carly Simon. She also had an adorable smear of lipstick on her cheek for the entire show. Full review. And I saw her in Hackney in September too.


Round-up: Other highlights include Belle and Sebastian's 20th anniversary 'If You're Feeling Sinister' show, Guy Barker's warming Big Band Christmas (graphic above), and the Manics doing Everything Must Go. I saw a couple of Proms too, including one in a car park.

***

EXHIBITIONS

7. States of Mind : Tracing the Edges of Consciousness (Wellcome Collection)

This study of the fringes of the mind began simply enough, with paintings representing synaesthesia and photos attempting to capture dreams, then became increasingly unsettling as it journeyed through somnambulism, resistance to anaesthesia, temporary paralysis and memory disorders, augmented by eerie soundscapes and alarming, atmospheric installations. Isn't reality terrifying?

6. Real to Reel (Imperial War Museum)


A handsome, scholarly and accessible exhibition about war and its fictional representation on screen, curiously rather better on movie artefacts than those from genuine battles, but I wasn't complaining. The highlight was right at the end: IDs, the letters of transit and a bona fide cafe chair from Warner Bros' really rather good 1942 movie, Casablanca. Full review. (That's Steve McQueen's bike from The Great Escape in the photo.)

5. Annie Leibovitz – WOMEN: New Portraits (Wapping Hydraulic Power Station)

An interesting exhibition in a startling location of bare, weathered brick and standing striplights. The photos (all of women) alternated vapid society worship and striking, distinctive work, and while seeing that volume, largely projected, created some semantic saturation, it largely engendered admiration for a sure style that avoids self-plagiarism. Leibovitz also captures character quite well, exhibiting a valuable, unexpected humility for a widely proclaimed superstar of the medium. The pub across the road did nice pies too.

4. Abstract Expressionism (Royal Academy)

A heavy-hitting overview that did a fair job of making this material accessible to a beginner like me, showing Pollock's versatility, range and the muscularity of his art, expanding my understanding of Rothko beyond his status as a creator of moods, and introducing me to a selection of (apparently well-known) contemporaries. Robert Motherwell's endless evoking of the Spanish Civil War sounded promising but left me cold, but Still's ever-climbing verticals and the "violent marks" of Kline – stark black lines conjuring noirish city scapes – took my breath away, and I found the fleshy eroticism of de Kooning's 'women' period beguiling. The Pollock and Rothko pieces were utterly overpowering, in both scale and content, and a room of drawings and photos included a lovely shot of the former 'disappearing in light' as he dripped onto a vast canvas. For the most part, this was a really interesting, rewarding exhibition, though with the usual moments of nagging unease I get from modern art exhibitions, as some pictures and painters leave me with the distinct feeling that either I'm stupid or they're shit.

3. Björk Digital (Somerset House)

There’s something endlessly fascinating, dizzyingly esoteric and yet gloriously specific about the shape-shifting, now 50-year-old Björk, for whom music is emotional expression and visual art is avant garde experimentation. This exhibition, tied into her big one-off show at the Royal Albert Hall, was led by four VR experiences, which possessed an enrapturing, all-encompassing embracing of immersion. It was artistically dazzling, its architect’s intrepid, idiosyncratic pursuit of new worlds to conquer enabled by technology that’s amazing to experience, even if it’s not quite there yet. Full review.

2. Warhol (Ashmolean Museum)

A small, brilliant celebration of Warhol's work, from striking but superficial tracings of socialites and celebrities to loops of experimental films and bold, brilliant, perfectly contextualised prints, the best of which finds him sticking great big honking portraits of his friend and polar opposite Joseph Beuys on a cheap laundry bag. From this vantage point, he seems more like a conflicted commentator on his times - bemoaning the unthinking acquisitiveness of art collectors while being commissioned to draw titled millionaires - than a hypocrite, pushing the boundaries of both imagery and popular culture, and exploring his own obsessions and failings, as he cuts a singular swathe through counter-culture and then mainstream America.

... and the winner is...

1. Ragnar Kjartansson (Barbican Centre)


All I knew about Ragnar Kjartansson before this glorious exhibition was that he once got American indie heroes The National to play their song Sorrow over and over again for six hours. Feats of endurance were a recurring theme during the Kjartansson retrospective at the Barbican, but these aren’t just stunts, they’re part of a body of work that treats popular culture with both reverence and scorn (often simultaneously), deals with deadly serious subjects like familial strife and mortality with a beguiling playfulness, and manages to tread that line between being dully prescriptive about what we take from the work and seeming to be about nothing much at all. The piece de resistance (or "stykki de viðnám" in Icelandic), though, was The Visitors, a gorgeous meditation on music, communality and individuality, as eight musicians in separate rooms of a historic building some miles from New York perform a song together, build once more around a single mantra, this time heartbreakingly beautiful: "Once again, I fall into my feminine ways.” I experienced it walking round and round, as in turn each screen came to life, and then each performer began to make music, accentuated as you reached them, from the professionalism of the drummer to the pianist’s classical flourishes, the artist himself crooningly in a bubble bath (a slightly glib gesture) and, best of all, the accordion player singing in an unaffected, Joanne Newsom-ish squeak. It’s an absolutely devastating, exultant and euphoric piece of work: a manifesto, memoir and concert film that you experience in a new way each time, and in a completely unique way based simply on where you stand and where you walk. Full review.

Round-up: I enjoyed Endless Endeavours, a one-room exhibition at the LSE Library celebrating suffragism and described by this reviewer as 'sexy'. Exhibitionism at the Saatchi Gallery was both impressive and infuriating (I took my dad for his birthday), while the Science Museum's Our Lives in Data served up both insight and imagination, right up until the point that it stopped very abruptly.

***

MISCELLANY


Paul Verhoeven and Isabelle Huppert apparently not finding the need to justify the repulsive Elle at LFF2016.

As always, I saw a fair bit of stand-up, enjoying (though not unreservedly) Stewart Lee's Southbank marathon and new Leicester Square show, catching a disappointing but nevertheless entertaining Bridget Christie performance dealing with Brexit, and experiencing David Cross's rather laboured contributions to the medium.

Film-wise, I watched Love and Friendship in the company of Kate Beckinsale and the incredible Whit Stillman (meeting him was a great thrill), saw the likes of Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams and Kenneth Lonergan at the London Film Festival, and was fortunate enough to both catch Aliens Live at work, and be invited by Neil Brand to the premiere of his score for Allan Dwan's Robin Hood (which I seem to have forgotten to add to my blog), still the best take on that thieving git from Nottingham.

An improbable event teaming Ray Davies and Mark Hamill was one of those once-in-a-lifetime shows you're compelled to go to, regardless of penury or the fact it's in Hornsey, though somehow finer than all of these things was the live reunion of Adam and Joe at BFI Southbank this month, which brought tidings of comfort, joy and delirious silliness at a time when they've scarcely been more needed.

***

Thanks for reading. The final part will be on books and TV, but virtually none of them came out this year, so it probably won't be that interesting for anyone except me.

I read 32 books and watched 43 TV shows this year. Enough boasting, here's a piece about which ones were good and which ones weren't.

BOOKS

Fiction



My favourite book of the year was Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954), an endlessly economical, alarmingly relatable marvel about lecturer Jim Dixon, who's caught between two very different women, and plagued by a litany of unspeakable men, as he attempts to hold on to his job and arrest a casual but definite decline brought on by booze, poor fortune, general confusion and a tragic inability to Play the Game. Barely a sentence goes by without Amis introducing some black, bleak or brilliant idea, revolving on some inspired turn of phrase, while the book’s blending of the cynical, romantic and inutterably, breathtakingly funny is just about perfect. It's an absolute wonder.

In April, I read Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (2004), a chilling piece of alternate history, in which heroic aviator and fascist sympathiser Charles Lindbergh ascends to the US presidency and agrees an ‘understanding’ with Adolf Hitler. Against the slow-burn of burgeoning anti-semitism, the young Roth comes of age, while the older brother he idolises is co-opted by the establishment, his cousin is crippled by war and his parents are torn between pragmatism and self-respect. Roth's humanity, intelligence and explosions of ironic violence keep you gripped and gazing in slack-jawed amazement, though of course it could never happen.



Another of my highlights was Tom Perrotta's Election (1998), an exceptional piece of storytelling told from five vantage points and prefaced with perfection by Irish novelist William Trevor's observation that "the world is the school gone mad". So I asked for two more of his books for my birthday: Little Children (2004) was a modern masterpiece that transcended its suburban trappings, and offered such virtuosic delights as a sarcastic child molester; The Leftovers (2011) was superbly plotted but saddled with a bafflingly blunt and broad sense of humour.

There is no piece of writing I love more than James Joyce's The Dead, which makes up for any of the other failings of Dubliners (published 1914), and indeed for some of the year's relative disappointings, including Dashiell Hammett's flat The Thin Man (1934), a rare case of a book being vastly improved in its cinematic translation, Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury, 1954) – an interesting but imperfect sci-fi work– and David Peace's 1974 (1999), which is unforgettable, but not always in a good way.



I was seriously underwhelmed by a couple of early Evelyn Waugh comedies: Scoop (1938), with its thin characters and fixation merely on language, and Vile Bodies (1930), an oddly blinkered and distractingly self-satisfied work with only a few passages of breathtaking wit and the superb character of absent aristocrat Colonel Blount to recommend it. It's deathly dated in its satirising of people and phenomena long forgotten, with nominative determinism that's a shallow bore, though its principal problem is its triviality: that's perhaps the point of the book, but it's also entirely self-defeating, preventing it from really amounting to anything.

This year's two Vonneguts were lesser works, though I found plenty to love about Deadeye Dick (1982), less so Galapagos (1985).

But most of the books I read were good, and many of them were simply fantastic. Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love (1945) is a playfully heightened, impeccably-written romantic comedy, laced with insight, understated emotion and dazzling wit, based upon her own life – and her experiences as a member of Britain’s most notorious family. It’s not especially ambitious in terms of scope, but it is magnificently realised. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark, 1961) was slim, spare and economical, warped, waspish and filled with malevolent, brilliant throwaway jokes, its nastiness masking a poignancy and perception that linger, along with the bitter taste of betrayal. And A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980) was as repulsive and rip-roaringly funny as you could ever want, a hypnotically original slice of Southern Gothic, full of virtuosic passages of bilious wit, as Ignatius J. Reilly and a gallery of hysterically funny supporting characters go almost aimlessly about their daily business in a vividly-realised nightmare of New Orleans, before you realise that Toole has been shuffling everyone expertly into position for a quite brilliant finale.



I also read my first Márquez novel this year, Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004), which is great if you want to read about a disgusting old man fucking a child, and luxuriated in a book of epic silliness and staggering readability, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by (Joel Dicker, 2012). I'm finishing the year with Northanger Abbey, the one of Jane Austen's six completed novels that I hadn't yet read. She wrote it first, though it was only published post-humously, and there's a different feel to her later books: an immense energy allied to an apparently limitless supply of withering sarcasm.

I read lots of kids' books to help with my pitching of my own novel for eight to 12-year-olds (nothing yet, but I'll keep you posted), though one I read for pleasure, and received incalculable amounts, was How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen by Russell Hoban (1974), an utterly beautiful ode to silliness, with hilarious, sumptuous illustrations by the incomparable Quentin Blake.



***

Non-fiction



My non-fiction book of the year was unquestionably T. Harry Williams'epic treatise on the life of Louisiana senator Huey Long (1969). Next to that (but also next to most history books), Bill Bryson's One Summer (2013) looked frankly dire, though Owen Jones'Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Classes (2011/12) remains fresh, relevant and important after five years in which so much has changed, and yet nothing has.

As usual, I read quite a few books about movies. Margaret Talbot's book about her father – actor Lyle Talbot – and his times, The Entertainer (2012) was frequently excellent, Mark Kermode's Hatchet Job (2013) proved shapeless but lively, and I really enjoyed the third volume of Simon Callow's Orson Welles behemoth, One Man Band (2015), covering 1947 to 1965 in considerable style. The best by far, though, was François Truffaut's book on Alfred Hitchcock (1967, revised 1983), which fundamentally changed the way I look at cinema. I wrote about it a little here.

***

TV



My elder brother exposed me to the French cop show, Spiral, which quickly became a favourite, as I consumed the first four seasons, though my attempts to marry Laure Berthaud (above) have thus far come to naught. At times it traverses the line marked 'do not cross, silliness ahead', but at its best it's remarkable. Season 2 is a marvellous thing.

The Thick of It and Veep were regulars round my place, with just the right balance of misanthropy and swearing at a time when I was in dire need of both. I also caught up with some quality BBC dramas from recent years, and loved all of them: The Shadow Line, State of Play and Life on Mars. I travelled a little further back too, for all three brief, brilliant series of the original House of Cards.

E4's Misfits ('superheroes with ASBOs') was escapist and intensely funny, though I bailed after Season 3, by which time all of the original cast had left. The Simon/Alisha storyline in the second series is so ambitious, and so deeply affecting. Some amazing, incredibly handsome reviewer described the programme as "an antidote to morality plays, Marvel movies and just about everything else", and who am I to disagree?



Aside from Lillian Gish, my favourite actor of all time is Wendy Hiller. She was primarily on the stage, but appeared in a handful of films, and did a fair amount of TV work late in life. I watched three of her small screen triumphs: All Passion Spent (above), a delightful rom-com called The Kingfisher that reunited her with Major Barbara co-star Rex Harrison and, best of all, The Best of Friends, a miraculous drama based on the correspondence between legendary playwright George Bernard Shaw (Patrick McGoohan), esteemed museum curator Sydney Cockerell (John Gielgud) and Dame Laurentia McLachlan (Hiller).

The American Sherlock Holmes series, Elementary, got by on the strength of its central relationship, Adam Curtis made the hyper-intelligent HyperNormalisation for iPlayer, and I developed an unexpected fondness for true crime films – or at least miscarriage-of-justice polemics – devouring the likes of Making a Murderer, The Jinx, Netflix's Amanda Knox film, and old documentaries about James Hanratty on YouTube. (Bit of a weirdo, sorry.)



I also attended Vicky's fabled Eurovision party, finding to my perpetual astonishment that this programme I'd been avoiding for years was actually great fun, especially with friends and without Terry Wogan. I have listened to the Italian entry more times than I'd care to admit this year. The Apprentice, which in the past I'd really looked forward to, was for the most part exceedingly dull, with no heroes and – even more damagingly – no decent villains. (And I listened to a lot of podcasts, but I can't review everything, where would it end?)

I've just started Master of None (2015) on Netflix, which is a sweet and beautiful thing.

***

Thanks for reading.

Just a quick round-up of the things I watched immediately before Christmas. Been mostly eating cheese and re-acquainting myself with a guitar since then.



CINEMA: It's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)– Frank Capra's immortal film about everyday heroism is a Christmas movie – but it's not just for Christmas. It's an enduring celebration of life, love, friendship and small-town America that doubles as an indictment of the rapacious capitalism that now defines the country.

It's perilously dark, delightfully left-wing and stuffed with unforgettable scenes and performances – from H. B. Warner nearly poisoning a kid, to Alfalfa from Our Gang as a graduation hop prankster, Gloria Grahame playing town flirt Violet Bick, Beulah Bondi doing her Best Mum Ever bit, Thomas Mitchell playing drunk (obviously) and Lionel Barrymore as the penultimate word in arsehole financiers.

Dominating it all is Jimmy Stewart's greatest performance: funny, utterly loveable and finally heartbreaking as selfless George Bailey, who one Christmas Eve wishes he'd never been born and gets to see what the world would be like without him, thanks to bumbling guardian angel Clarence (Henry Travers).

The wise, universal (and multi-authored) script is densely packed with charm, incident and insight, while Capra's handling is sublime, with stunning use of close-ups at key moments, and that intense, breathlessly-directed sequence in the hellish netherworld of Pottersville that culminates in Violet being dragged away by the vice squad.

All that, plus Donna Reed's beautifully-judged performance as George's wife, Mary, the genesis of Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie, that amazing joke about needing to be excused, and one of the most wonderful denouements in movie history.

Though if I read one more review from someone saying, "I thought old movies were rubbish until I saw this" and then not watching any others, I swear I will go full Mr Potter on them. (4)

***


"Psst, where can I find those fantastic breasts I keep hearing about about?"

CINEMA: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (David Yates, 2016)– A textbook family film, with just the right balance of story, characters, jokes, soppy stuff and moderate peril, as Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) pitches up in 1920s New York with a suitcase full of fantastic beasts, while vitriolic anti-witch campaigner Samantha Morton and dodgy Colin Farrell battle for the soul of Typecast Weird Teenager Ezra Miller – and a mysterious little girl.

There's so much to enjoy, from Rowling's effortless expansion of her wizarding world to Morton in a cloche hat for the first time since Sweet and Lowdown (shame she's evil), and an immensely satisfying scene in which the city is repaired following the usual CGI destruction. (We neurotics would like to see this in every film from now on, please.)

I'm not a huge fan of Redmayne, who seems to have waltzed into a major-league career on account of his background and connections, but he's rather charming as the wide-eyed Newt, Katherine Waterston is delightful as his foil – a recently unemployed auror – and both Alison Sudol and Dan Fogler do well to mine pathos from rather familiar roles.

It helps, I think, that this was written for the screen, as there's no need to strip away subplots or skip from one set-piece to the next; instead there's a methodical but immaculate balance between the different elements (like when RKO used to plot each Fred and Ginger vehicle on a chart: comedy bit, romantic bit, dance number, etc).

In my eyes, you're usually onto a winner if you set your film in '20s America – just about the most fascinating, cinematic place imaginable – and though I'm sure the decision is rooted in the commercial, it's a delight to be there, and not just because Waterston dresses as a flapper in one scene.

And though I usually find CGI too synthetic and unbelievable to be wondrous, Fantastic Beasts manages to evoke a real sense of magic – and character – from those creations. Especially the echidna-alike with a magpie's eye for shiny things. The way that Rowling allows the story to hinge on their actions and the way they're used may be a little gimmicky (we'll see in future instalments), but it completely justifies this new series – and already I can't wait to see the next entry.

There's nothing here to challenge the Harry Potter books as Rowling's finest artistic achievement, but it's arguably better than the best of the Potter films, which for the most part left me fairly cold (it goes 3, 8, 5, 6 and the rest I can leave, really, if you were wondering). Fantastic Beasts has a few extraneous sequences and hamfisted supporting characters, but it's also a handsome, funny, immersive, appealing and entertaining movie, and those don't come along every week.

It's also the only family film I've seen where a middle-aged man is almost raped by a magic rhino. On second thoughts, that sentence doesn't need the word 'family' in it. (3)

***



The Man Who Haunted Himself (Basil Dearden, 1970)– A cracking, eerie thriller about staid suburban businessman Roger Moore getting in a car smash and cheating death, only to find that he now has a corrupt, womanising doppelganger.

The film is hampered by a few naff elements – dated music, weak back projection and Freddie Jones as an eccentric Welsh psychiatrist – but the story is great, Moore is terrific fun in a dual role, and this one reaches a fantastic domestic climax, only to rather throw it away in the final seconds.

A pity, but The Man Who Haunted Himself is well worth seeing: gripping in itself, and with some heavy-handed but interesting points to make about conformity and repression. Listen out too for Moore talking about James Bond, three years before taking the role that would define his career. (3)

***

Thanks for reading.

I've only watched two films since 22 December (what the hell?), as I have been Broadening My Horizons*.

Thanks to everyone who read and shared my blogs last year. It topped 9,000 views in a month for the first time ever in December, which might not sound like a great deal, but meant a lot to me.



Pride (Matthew Warchus, 2014)

"Our lives shall not be sweated,
From birth until life closes,
Hearts starve as well as bodies,
Give us bread, but give us roses."

The best British film I've seen since Attack the Block, taking a premise that seems merely like a liberal wet dream and fashioning an astonishingly erudite, funny and intensely moving movie, which works as an examination of our shared humanity, a startling recreation of the last stand of our country's working class, and a much-needed rallying cry at a time when the left has never seemed weaker or more irrelevant.

Ben Schnetzer plays Mark Ashton, a gay rights activist who persuades his friends to protest on behalf of the miners engaged in the longest and bloodiest strike of the post-war era; like the gay community, they've been smeared and attacked by the government, the police and the right-wing press. There's division on both sides − his colleagues have been persecuted by alpha males their whole lives; the miners think the poofs will turn them into a laughing stock − but their uneasy alliance grows in sincerity and power as it progresses.

Pride is of a piece with those popular and critical British successes of a previous generation − Brassed Off, The Full Monty, Little Voice and Billy Elliot− which effectively juxtaposed artistic or social endeavour (a key tenet of British working class life since time immemorial, just watch Humphrey Jennings'Spare Time from 1939) with the plight of community, as Thatcher systematically decimated the country's industrial heartlands. But I found it more even persuasive than those films, mixing Brassed Off's intellectual rigour and daring with The Full Monty's box office crowdpleasing, and Little Voice's embracing of the outsider hero.

A lot of that is in Stephen Beresford's script, which has a very clear voice, right from the off, full of distinctive, imaginative and beautifully balanced dialogue. I particularly enjoyed this exchange:

"I've never met a lesbian before."
"I've never met anyone who irons their jeans before."

There's also one instantly classic bit of dialogue that perfectly epitomises the collision between two worlds, as veteran mining committee secretary Gwen (Menna Trusler) alerts her colleagues to the presence of their visitors with the immortal words: "Dai, your gays have arrived."

It's in the film's emotional moments, though, that I found it most persuasive, and altogether unforgettable. Many of these are from Andrew Scott's tormented Gethin, given a lifeline by the venture, and from Schnetzer, astonishingly good as the driven, prepossessing and amiable Mark, whose flipside is a pained, alienated despondency. I had no idea he was a native New Yorker until googling him afterwards. There's also one of the best single-scene bits in aeons from Russell Tovey as Mark's friend Tim.

Occasionally the film becomes too cartoonish, usually when Dominic West's flamboyant gay actor, Jonathan, is permitted centre-stage, or Lisa Palfrey peddles her one-dimensional villainy, and my main quibble on seeing the cast − that perhaps drama-school-educated, middle-class Londoners aren't the best choices to play working-class Welsh people − was validated somewhat by Imelda Staunton's slightly synthetic performance, though Bill Nighy is often very good as sympathetic committee member, Cliff. One of the script's real virtues is its rich tapestry of human life: there are at least six brilliantly-drawn characters − what's the last film you could say that about? And the rest of the casting is superb: Paddy Considine perfect as the gays' first friend amongst the miners − a measured, compassionate man − Joseph Gilgun as funny and lacking in vanity as ever, George MacKay attractively callow and genuine as a fledgling gay, and Faye Marsay as the spiky, angsty lesbian who said that thing about jeans above.

The two scenes that utterly floored me, though, were the 'Bread and Roses' set-piece− built around as perfect an evocation of working class pride and dignity (and feminism) as was ever written, and augmented with tearjerking visual grace-notes from Scott and Liz White − and a note in the credits that resolves that age-old question: can a brief statement about block voting at a political conference ever make you cry? Director Matthew Warchus's building up of momentum during those final scenes just couldn't be better, finding solace and inspiration in what was a crushing and humiliating defeat.

This is on iPlayer for a few more weeks, and I would urge you to watch it. It's uplifting, mature, intelligent, entertaining and important: a valuable corrective to modern myths about people and politics, relentlessly peddled by a hypocritical media and a political establishment who continue to con millions of people into voting against their own interests, and then to blame those who have even less for their straitened circumstances. (4)

See also: Matthew Warchus went on to direct my favourite play of 2016, so well done him. I wouldn't be doing my job if I omitted to mention that we'll be joined by Mike and Jonathan from the LGSM for a special screening of Pride at the Royal Albert Hall next month.

***



CINEMA: Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Albert Lewin, 1951)− A Hollywood art film, and as such one of the most interesting American films of its era: a metaphysical love story in which a poet (Marius Goring), a racing driver (Nigel Patrick), a matador and the Flying Dutchman himself (James Mason) risk death or worse in their pursuit of former nightclub singer Ava Gardner, and who can blame them?

I've wanted to see this somewhat notorious curio since reading Lee Server's biography of Gardner more than five years ago, which painted the actress as a voracious, hedonistic auto-didact who left behind her dirt-poor Southern upbringing to become a muse to some of the era's greatest men (including Hemingway), before depressingly if flamboyantly self-destructing. Server was at pains to highlight the unorthodoxy, originality and vision of this film (if not always the execution), and I finished the book wanting to see it more than any other.

It took an intervention by Martin Scorsese (a deus ex machina if ever there was one) to determine that not only would that be possible, but to ensure that it'd be on the big screen, thanks to his curation of a special season at the BFI featuring various oddities that have inspired him over the years. And seeing this farcically ambitious film as it was intended allowed me to luxuriate in its Spanish coastal locales, its incomparably sensuous leading lady, and writer, director and co-producer Albert Lewin's decidedly odd approach to just about everything, from shot framing to the rules of narrative (no, Albert, to the best of my knowledge, no-one has ever done a dream sequence within a flashback within a flashback before; even The Locket didn't try, and that had flashbackitis).

It's a bold, serious-minded and, yes, dreamlike film – though not without humour – that asks us to believe in faith, in fate, in legends, as Mason's sailor is doomed to sail the earth unless he can atone for his sins by, erm, making a woman die for him (bit sexist). He's good, though it's Gardner, as a cruel beauty transfigured by love, who dominates – she was often derided as an actress, especially during this period, but her untaught naturalism has aged extremely well, immune to changing modes of performance.

She is also the flat-out sexiest, most erotic actress there has ever been on screen: not the prettiest, not even necessarily the most well-proportioned or of a type still considered fashionable, but she has what Billy Wilder once called 'flesh appeal', appearing in 3D when everyone else is in two, her visceral appearance allied to a knowingness, a mixture of the ruthless and the vulnerable, and an ease in her skin that is intoxicating. Especially on the big screen.

Her conviction and attractiveness are as much a key to making this film work as Lewin's impassioned writing and his and Jack Cardiff's remarkable visual sense: notably exemplified by that shot of Gardner's face almost as a landscape, Patrick some vague cipher approaching her eternal beauty (a shot that seems to me to be echoed by Vilmos Zsigmond in The Argument); or her scarf on a headless statue that points out to the sea that will ultimately take her (that's not a spoiler, it's revealed in the first scene). I don't doubt that it was Cardiff's photography that drew, Scorsese, a massive Michael Powell buff, to the movie. Cardiff shot several of Powell's most celebrated films, including The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus.

The film is a little long-winded, at times simply too po-faced, relies overly on voiceover, and occasionally tips over into pretension or silliness, but it's also a genuinely ambitious, literate and artistic film, full of imaginative language, camera angles and ideas, and with just the right actress to play the beautiful, sensuous and thoroughly doomed Pandora. In fact, the only actress who could have done it. (3)

See also: There's a little about One Touch of Venus, Gardner's 1948 vehicle, in this thing here.

***

A BOOK:



*A FEW SPOILERS*
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (published 1917)– Jane Austen’s first completed novel, only published posthumously, is often cited as simply a parody of Gothic literature, but it’s immeasurably more: a witheringly sarcastic romantic comedy of manners, with precisely no intrusions from the supernatural or melodramatic, vastly more accessible and universal than I ever expected. Its spoofing, when it comes, is simply another comic device: Austen toying with the over-the-top expectations of her impressionable heroine, and suggesting that perhaps popular culture isn’t always the best guide to behaviour in the real world, a remarkably contemporary observation. You don’t even need to be a literature buff to get the Gothicism jokes, as Austen gently, deftly introduces the genre tropes in amusing discussions between the hero and heroine, before meticulously layering them one upon the other, then puncturing the bloated illusion with a sharp, incisive revelation.

The story has 17-year-old Catherine Morland, Austen’s most naïve heroine, going to Bath – where she finds love and friendship – and then on to Northanger Abbey, where she is assailed by intrigue of her own imagination. It’s faster and arguably funnier than any other Austen book, with a truly bruising wit – particularly when angled at braggadocious bore John Thorpe, who has Catherine in his sights – and some breathtakingly modern, absurdist observations from love interest Henry Tilney, whose satirical, laborious constructing of false positions is basically my entire sense of humour. There are also piquant, pungent passages dealing with superficiality, duplicitousness and greed, and startlingly clear-eyed, refreshing characterisation that seeks to rescue the novel from the clutches of the unbelievable. Having a character who starts to pay attention to a woman only because she clearly fancies him is a refreshing change from the hyperbole of many romantic novels.

About three-quarters of the way through the book, Austen arguably pushes Catherine too far, the heroine’s fanciful conspiracy theorising transgressing from the appealing to the appallingly insensitive, but even this potential (and indeed apparent) misstep is merely waiting for a suitable pay-off, and gets one in a denouement that has enormous, escapist fun in tying up loose ends with glee and elan – her callback to the notes in the ‘japan’ bureau is particularly and exceptionally charming.

In the Christmas Radio Times, a Bronte fan was sneering at Jane Austen for the primness of her heroines, but it’s both a misreading of those characters, and lacks insight into the differences between an author’s viewpoint and that of her creations. Catherine Morland becomes a woman over the course of these pages, but even before that she makes judgements chiefly about herself, and is shocked by cruelty and hypocrisy as opposed to a breach of accepted manners. Austen too, more than in any other book until Persuasion, showcases a contemporary sensibility that’s remarkably fair-handed, wise and good-natured, her blistering sardonism a formidable weapon turned only on the most deserving causes. She’s so fierce and funny, so strikingly modern, that painting Austen (or one of her heroines) as an endlessly shockable shrinking violet does her a ridiculous disservice, and seems to miss what it is that fans respond to so keenly in her work. (4)

Next up is Stephen King's 11/22/63, which I'm halfway through.

***

Thanks for reading.

*newcomers: this is an homage to my beloved A. A. Milne, I do know how to use capital letters

I've been busy writing, reading and working, but I found time to watch a few films too.

BOOK



*A FEW SPOILERS*
11/22/63 by Stephen King (2011)– This is the first Stephen King book I’ve read (though I’ve seen plenty of films based on his writing), I was drawn in as a fan of American history and a sucker for time-travel stories. Jake Epping is an English teacher in 2011 who’s shown a portal into 1958, located at the back of short order cook Al Templeton’s storage cupboard. He steps through and emerges in a world of tailfins, Lindy Hopping and harrowing domestic violence. His aim: to stop JFK’s assassination by monitoring and disposing of psychotic, communist mummy’s boy, Lee Harvey Oswald – if he can survive the interventions of an obdurate past that will sling all manner of abrupt, improbable obstacles into his path. First, though, he’s got some errands to run and a librarian to boff.

11/22/63 is overwritten and overlong, with clunky prose, a silly climactic dystopia and a lot of superfluous, blunt humour, but it’s also blessed with a gripping, meticulously plotted story and an unexpected moral grace. Its treatment of time travel is interesting too, as well as creating rules of the game that give melodrama a free pass and make coincidence almost profound, building to a climax of thrilling alternate history, before proceeding to go on for another 90 pages. Along the way, there are sly winks to cinematic history (Epping’s alias, George Amberson, is surely a reference to the character in Orson Welles’ vandalised masterpiece, The Magnificent Ambersons, the first cultural object I’d save, given a time portal) and historical novels dealing with the period (Dwight Holly from James Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand makes a cameo), before a bittersweet ending that has more than a hint of Somewhere in Time - a much-maligned time-travelling romance with a devoted following. The book could be more economical and precise, and less hackneyed in its phrasing, sentiments and imagery, but King creates a compelling story set in an often vividly-realised world, and with an undeniably atmospheric, race-against-time crescendo best filed under ‘D. W. Griffith Does Dallas’. (3)

Next up is The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. I'm 300 pages in and it is ridiculously readable, ideologically terrifying and a little preposterous.

***
FILMS



CINEMA: Holiday (George Cukor, 1938)– A truly beautiful, thoughtful and romantic film that deals with politics and philosophy through the prism of a wealthy family, while doubling as an utterly captivating rom-com. Cary Grant is Johnny Case, a working class boy made good, who meets privileged Julia Seton (Doris Nolan) during the first holiday of his life, forcing him to choose between a life of capitalist conformity and the idealism represented by Julia’s free-spirited sister, Linda (Katharine Hepburn).

Based on a 1928 Philip Barry play, and adapted by the great liberal screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart, it’s a remarkably deep, wise and incisive work that transcends its simple three-act structure, its running time and even its own story, seeming to live way beyond its boundaries in all directions. We encounter entire decades of these characters’ lives, to either side of the few weeks seen on the screen.

Though almost the entire cast are astonishingly good, the film is dominated by Hepburn’s magnificent characterisation, arguably the greatest thing she ever did on film. Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go) introduced the film at the BFI as part of the Screen Epiphanies strand, and eulogised her acting style during this period: innumerable emotions clashing beneath the surface. Later, he said, she either lost that virtue or abandoned it, shifting to a style of “one shot, one emotion”.

Linda is a woman shackled and patronised by her family, who finds solace only in the fourth-floor playroom created by her late mother, and escape in Johnny’s infectious zest for living. She idolises and idealises the shallow, grasping Julia, while her desperate fragility breaks more than once into quivering tears. But she’s also a ferocious fighter, fiercely individualistic, with a righteous anger and a devastating wit. “I beg your pardon,” says her father as Grant obligingly engages in a discussion about his suitability as Julia’s suitor. “I should think you would,” counters Hepburn, in just about the finest tone of sardonic disgust I’ve ever heard. Occasionally she traverses into a private school manner that I find a little much (“I do, reaaaally”), but Linda’s pretty much my ideal woman – intelligent, open-minded, loyal, funny and equipped to do a forward roll or an impression of a giraffe when duty demands it – without ever seeming like a caricature or mere wish-fulfilment.

Lew Ayres is almost as good, playing her despondent, booze-marinated brother, Ned. Prohibited from following his ambitions by his father, and with his lustre drained by alcoholism, his waning energies are channelled into sad reflection and bitter observation that’s both heartbreaking and hilarious. It would be easy to be turned off or alienated by a materially privileged character stewing in listless self-pity, but as a New York Sebastian Flyte, Ayres is so specific, so assured, so intensely, insanely likeable that his scenes aren’t just tolerable, they’re tear-jerking and timeless. “He’s in a spot, isn’t he?”, he asks Linda at one point, bleakly surveying Johnny’s chances of emerging with his principles intact. Later, as she flees the nest, the catharsis tempered by his inability to break free, she tells him: “I’ll be back for you.” “I’ll be here,” he murmurs into his glass.

Grant’s Johnny is a similarly vibrant, vital creation. Before the actor became waylaid by a tedious mahogany suavity, he was the best light comedian in Hollywood, and a dramatic actor of unheralded brilliance, and he makes Johnny’s plight remarkably real. This isn’t the fast-talking, exaggerated Grant of His Girl Friday, the stylised nebbish of Bringing Up Baby or the charmingly omniscient rom-com lead premiered in The Philadelphia Story, it’s the most human and appealing character he ever played, with more to say about his world and his times than any other role he was ever given.

Holiday is a snapshot of inter-war America, and yet it endures more than probably any other American film of its period. It’s an assault on conformity, rapacious materialism and – more subtly – fascism, as the odious Seton Cram (sometime Moriarty, Henry Daniell) memorably opines that he could make a lot more money “if only the right government was in place”. It’s also a film about the purpose of living, and especially the purpose of living in a capitalist world that values acquisition beyond accomplishment. Seton Cram’s antithesis is liberal professor Nick Potter, realised by regular Fred-and-Ginger foil, Edward Everett Horton, giving the straightest (in both senses of the word) and deepest performance of a spectacular career. He’s the only actor remaining from the 1930 version of the film, and knows the material inside out. He is warm, loyal, whipsmart but deceptively shambling, his intelligence and charm put to proper use, rather than commandeered in the service of business. His partnership with Jean Dixon – as screen wife, Susan – is immensely rewarding, their relationship like a sort of unglamorous, red-brick Nick-and-Nora, blessed with immaculate chemistry and impeccable timing. There’s one small shortcoming in this film, and that’s Julia’s character. She’s instantly dislikeable, where a superficial or eroding charm would have worked far better, and you wonder whether Mary Astor might have made more of the role in the 1930 film, her ethereal beauty and undeniable sensuality hoodwinking Johnny and the viewer more convincingly than Nolan’s shrewish reading of the character.

Ishiguro was keen to explain that ‘screwball comedy’ doesn’t mean ‘screwy comedy’, it’s a spin ball (from the baseball terminology) in which events have unexpected consequences, in which entertainment meets serious ideas, in which female characters are strong and intelligent and funny, and taken seriously. He listed Holiday as one of his three favourite, alongside It Happened One Night and His Girl Friday, and reserved a special level of ire for The Philadelphia Story– which reunited the same playwright, screenwriter, director and stars, and revived Hepburn’s flagging career, two years later – a work he sees as the reassertion of capitalist and chauvinist values after the Depression (I’d argue that it’s more complicated than that, but his extreme stance is a fun starting place for a discussion).

Holiday is very funny when it wants to be, and exceptionally romantic when it needs to be (that New Year’s kiss…), but it’s the film’s intelligence, erudition, humanity and philosophical daring that sets it apart. It’s obviously derived from a play, but it’s not overly talky and Cukor’s presentation is as cinematic as it needs to be, with some fine use of close-ups. He was Hepburn’s favourite director, having introduced her in 1932’s A Bill of Divorcement, and knew how to get the best out of her: how to capture that vulnerability, that ephemeral, quicksilver quality, and that intellectual alertness that characterised both her characters and herself. There are dozens of Hepburn performances that I admire, and a half-dozen I truly love, but for me she reached a peak in 1937 and ’38 – ironically the most difficult part of her professional career – with this and Gregory La Cava’s astounding comedy-drama Stage Door.

It is a remarkable, one-of-a-kind, lightning-in-a-bottle film, catching four Hollywood acting legends – Hepburn, Grant, Ayres and Horton – at the zenith of their artistry, given room to live and breathe by Cukor, and fed almost the last word in articulate, humane and liberal mind-fodder by two writers of uncommon quality. (4)

***



The Catered Affair (Richard Brooks, 1956)– A sort of Mother of the Bride, translated to a working-class Bronx household, with Bette Davis as a harsh but loving mother who decides to pull out all the stops for daughter Debbie Reynolds’ wedding. She wants Debbie to have something she’ll remember all her life, but the process of planning it begins to alienate her friends and family: her older brother (Barry Fitzgerald), the matron of honour (Joan Camden) and Davis’s own husband (Ernest Borgnine) – a cab driver whose life savings, meant for his own cab, are about to be splurged on one meal.

This impressively low-key drama, originally filmed for TV with Thelma Ritter, made the transition to the big screen after the success of Marty – also written by Paddy Chayefsky. He characterised The Catered Affair as “an unfocused piece, in which the first act was farce, and the second was comedy-drama and the third was abruptly drama”. There’s some truth in that, but I think the celluloid version – adapted by Gore Vidal – is more coherent and cohesive than he’s suggesting (aside from a cheering but tonedeaf ending). Its problems are more an overabundance of similar viewpoints, Debbie Reynolds’ character – who seems to have wandered in from a frothy rom-com – and the fact that it just isn’t very funny; Fitzgerald’s scheming and scowling is good value, but the rest of it is either too vague or too stressful to make you laugh.

It is, however, an unusually thoughtful, honest and poignant film, set largely in an admirably scuzzy little apartment and with fine work from Fitzgerald, Borgnine, Camden (in an arresting bit part) and Davis. Her identikit line-readings struck me at first as a shortcoming, but that’s not typically a problem she has an actress, and I came to think of it as the key to her character. That rasping, dropping voice is a positive choice Davis has made to hammer home Agnes’s weariness and emotional repression. With her usual – and indeed increasing – lack of vanity, she looks dowdy, even haggard as she crafts a character who’s neither a selfless saint nor a mommie dearest, but a real person blessed with few illusions and beset by the chronic, thankless monotony of life. When she responds to a private character evisceration by wordlessly plaiting her frazzled hair, it is a moment of rare profundity: I’ve found that tragedy is usually and perversely accompanied by such shell-shocked mundanity. (3)

See also: Ritter and Davis starred together in All About Eve, the best movie ever made about the theatre.

***

I was supposed to be seeing this at the BFI, but TFL cancelled all the trains, so I streamed it on Amazon instead. £3.49 in HD if you want to do the same:



America, America (Elia Kazan, 1963)– Kazan’s epic, based on his uncle’s journey from Anatolia to America, is uneven but unforgettable, with many fine moments and astonishing Haskell Wexler cinematography. The director’s style seems so effortlessly virtuosic, juggling moods from absurdist comedy to frenetic violence, rhapsodic joy and despair, or else conjuring them from thin air through immaculately composed monochrome imagery and remarkable but unshowy editing.

The film suffers a little from formal artificiality – everyone speaks English, the accents are a shambles and the juxtaposition of location photography and synthetic studio sets in the early stages is frustrating – but the cast looks just right (no Hollywood glamour here), and from Fordian or Seventh Seal-ish silhouettes on a hillside to that quietly overwhelming kiss of the turf, the film shows a man whose command of his medium is absolute – the climactic coughing montage on the boat a simply extraordinary bit of filmmaking.

As you might expect from the late Kazan, though, he remains transparently tortured by the shame and guilt of his appearance before HUAC, in which he ‘named names’ of fellow communists. When the hero (Stathis Giallelis) says he keeps his honour ‘safe inside him’, he is echoing not only the character’s collaborationist father, but also the writer, director and producer, who oscillated endlessly between seeing his own actions as cowardly or heroic.

It is, ultimately, a film about the opportunities that America affords immigrants, and the hardships it is worth enduring to get there, which is both an enduring message and one likely to ring bitterly hollow for the foreseeable future. There’s also a bit where someone's told that they'll have to change his name from ‘Kardashian’ if they want to make it in America. (3)

***



*ONE SPOILER IN THE FINAL PARAGRAPH*
Drive a Crooked Road (Richard Quine, 1954)– A very worthwhile and unexpectedly moving little noir, with Mickey Rooney typically excellent as a badly-scarred, self-loathing and possibly autistic mechanic, who's recruited as a getaway driver by ruthless playboy criminal Kevin McCarthy and his hard-boiled moll (Barbara Foster).

At times its low-budget is a hindrance – with an endlessly repeated musical motif and a pathetic opening set-piece dominated by lousy back-projection – while Jack Kelly's part as McCarthy's wisecracking heavy is basically just annoying, but Blake Edwards' story is genuinely affecting, there's some quietly iconic imagery and breathless action (the climactic drive is heart-in-mouth stuff, despite its overall vagueness and process shots), and Rooney is enormously touching as the lonely, unloved dupe whose great love is just a sham.

At his best, Rooney was arguably the finest screen actor in America (Young Tom Edison, The Human Comedy, National Velvet), but he typically needed both good material and a director who could rein him in. Here he seems to have both, and compared to his other best-known noir, Quicksand, in which he's supposed to be sympathetic but is written rather like a psychopath, this one comes off very nicely. It's rare to find such a gentle, sweet-natured, and quietly and consistently moral crime film; one that's about love, dreams and goodness, rather than lust, money and man's dark heart. Warner arguably did something similar with probably the oddest film in its '30s/'40s gangster cycle: Brother Orchid.

It'd be nice if Columbia and director Quine had put a bit more care into the finished product – even the impressive finale has one incompetent bit of staging that should have been re-done, as a man 10 yards away is shot by a bullet that goes directly upwards – but the film is sufficiently distinctive and original enough to succeed anyway, while leaning on all those noir tropes that I love so dearly.

***



"I never thought I'd make a killing on some guy's 'integrity'."
Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)– A spectacularly cynical late noir, with Tony Curtis's best dramatic performance, as gorgeous, amoral press agent, Sidney Falco, who slimes his way around a vividly-realised, nocturnal NY, trying to save his own skin. He'll do whatever it takes to break up the romance between an idealistic jazz guitarist and a fragile young woman (Susan Harrison), in order to win the favour of her brother: all-powerful, creepily possessive Broadway columnist, J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), one of the movies' most frightening villains.

Director Alexander Mackendrick called satire "the snarl behind the smile", and here that snarl is barely concealed, as he mercilessly drags tabloid muckraking, capitalist compromise and phony patrotism under the lens. It's the feel of the thing too, though: a sweaty, desperate, and seductive trawl through the seething, rancid underbelly of urban America. It's in the striking performances and the avant garde angles (some of which are positively Wellesian). It's in the textures and timbres of Elmer Bernstein's classic jazz score. It comes from the peerless NY flavour, with stunning use of street locations by the great James Wong Howe; the bruising, blistering dialogue from regular Hitchcock collaborator Ernest Lehman (who wrote the original novella) and legendary playwright Clifford Odets.

It's also an enormously entertaining film, once you become attuned to its eye-watering misanthropy (or at least that of its characters), until it begins to stop and stutter with 20 minutes to go. Characters had to be punished in this era, and the tricks that the script has to play in order to do it are worse than fraudulent, they're laboured. There are flashes of inspiration and irony in those last two reels, but the intrusion of bathos into this nightmare vision has never worked for me. This is one movie where comeuppance should be outlawed; where sweetness doesn't spell success. (3.5)

***

TV



Sherlock: Season 4– A disappointing fourth series of what used to be the best show on TV, with flashes of brilliance but an awful lot of self-satisfied nonsense and bum-squeaking tedium.
The Six Thatchers– Mary’s got a secret and apparently we care. This opener was difficult to follow and had far too many platitudes in its script (a major problem with Gatiss’ writing), though it was terrifically acted and the music was fantastic.
The Lying Detective– An hour of light-hearted escapism about Jimmy Savile (terrifyingly rendered by Toby Jones), followed by an insanely good closing 30 that made this whole series worthwhile. The reveal was astonishing.
The Final Problem– Silly, disengagingly overblown, self-parodic silliness, with our heroes forced to play The Crystal Maze with Ayn Rand. The closing montage is a reminder that Sherlock was most fun when he, y’know, solved crimes. (2)

***

Thanks for reading.

Thursday 2 February, 2017



This was an often brilliant evening in the company of one of the 21st century’s most compelling performers, ably supported and assisted by multi-instrumentalist Ed Harcourt, who has never quite done what I fervently wished he might, but does what he can quite brilliantly. He was on the expansive, semi-circular stage first, for an hour-long set based around the David Ford one-man-band model of building a looped backing track on drums, guitar, and sometimes bass and keyboards, and then finally coming to the mic, when the music and expectation hit fever pitch. On paper it threatens to be a laborious, potentially tedious way of playing live, but in practice it rarely is, especially with a musician of Harcourt's prodigious talents.

I bought his first two records, Maplewood and Here Be Monsters, all those years ago, when he was tipped alongside Ryan Adams as the Next Huge Thing. He’s never quite become that, perhaps because his lyrics aren’t good enough and his worldview isn’t very interesting – which is odd, given he's the son of a diplomat, and spent his formative years travelling the world – the between-songs banter suggesting a certain poverty of insight and incisiveness, straining constantly for a humour that he doesn’t really possess (in one early interview he speculated about two bands he’d made up: ‘Limp Wristed’ (“don’t print that, the PC brigade will lynch me”) and ‘Rage Against the Washing Machine; give me strength). He's undeniably a special musician, though, and seems to have acquired a shabby cool as he’s aged: coming on stage in a half-buttoned blackshirt and white suit jacket, his greying hair and thick beard making him look like a hybrid of Jeff Bridges and the young Tom Waits. Then opening his mouth to reveal a plummy middle-England accent.

Interest ebbs and flows during his set, which kicks off with Antarctica – as good an advert as any for his lyrical poverty – but there are fine moments, Harcourt enthusiastically ripping up the received wisdom about how these songs go, with a tightly-packed Apple of My Eye (debuted on Maplewood, perfected on Here Be Monsters), and a climactic Crimson Tears, expanded and turned into a languidly lost jazz track. Loup Garou, his werewolf song, is a simple, sexy rocker, the lovely, Waits-ish Until Tomorrow Then reveals unexpected depths, and new song Velvet and Gold finds him in atypically political mode – bluntly if powerfully taking aim at Tony Blair’s life and legacy – though it’s his tender list song about love, Murmur in My Heart, that sticks in the memory the longest, his guitar whining and throbbing as he moves from the offbeat poetry of “She’s the buzz from my guitar” to the plaintive, desperate “She’s the murmur in my heart.”

***



Like her backing band, Martha’s wearing a grey-blue jumpsuit, a large autumn leaf necklace in Native American style hanging over her chest, her hair half-up, that imperious nose and wicked mouth wrapping around scaling melodies, turning warm when she sings of her children, barking in that way she does when she’s mad. She plays a few from her new record, including a charming Francie – shades of Kate Bush’s glorious, transcendent Bertie – and a playful, old-fashioned version of Francis (written for the same son), composed by her brother Rufus, and surely the best Cole Porter song he didn’t actually write since Tom Waits’ A Foreign Affair. Not all of the new material is so persuasive. Her new record is patchy – procreation and motherhood taking rather up her time and talents – and Window, which was written for her elder child and sounds on the record like it is being made up on the spot, has neither a proper tune nor any good words, and ideally you’d want both.

She is such a mesmerising performer, though, that she can wring brilliance from almost anything, her hips rotating sensually, her foot coming off the floor and her knee up towards her chest again and again in a mannerism that seems both inexplicable and inevitable, as much a part of her act as her easy humour, constant between-songs swearing and that unapproachable voice, racing over the octaves, blasting the roof off the Roundhouse or staying husky, deep and disgruntled somewhere in her larynx. The response from a sold-out crowd in an all-seated Roundhouse? Almost nothing, the audience bafflingly muted and inert, feeding off Martha, perhaps, but feeding nothing back.

She barely seems to notice. Leonard Cohen’s Chelsea Hotel #2 is the highlight: among the most remarkable things I’ve ever seen or heard, at a gig or anywhere else (even after a false start in which she leaps straight into the second verse). At one point she’s crouched on the floor, her voice somewhere in the rafters, her heart somewhere in Hell. There are versions of it on YouTube, one from 10 years ago, another when she started doing it again live in December – clutching a lyric sheet, skitting around the tune – but nothing will ever come close to the way she sang it last night. It was revelatory.

She's backed by Bernice, a Canadian band who've also been touring with her as support act, and whose singer, Robin Dann, looks – in the words of my concert buddy – "like she is about to do science": thick glasses, tied-back hair, and overalls with sensible shoes. The rest of the band also seem to have been allowed out of the lab at short notice to create an unsatisfyingly muddy, murky sound, but there's clearly talent in there, especially from guitarist and keyboardist Thom Gill. It's he alone who accompanies Martha on Chelsea Hotel, switching to piano and offering a blissful counterpoint to the fuzzy swampiness that dominates. At one point Martha breaks out a cheap electric guitar she got from her first boyfriend, and it makes a little more sense.



Another new song, Look Into My Eyes, is based around a short keyboard riff and a snatch of lines written by Martha’s aunt, the legendary Anna McGarrigle, later worked into a song by the pair and Anna’s daughter Lily Lanken; played live, it’s somehow both luscious and haunting, like a newly-minted Kate and Anna song from the Matapedia era. She stretches back to her second record for a bracing, confessional Jimi, then invites Harcourt on for a half-hour jam that includes a duet at the piano on Gram Parsons’ heartbreaking A Song for You (Ed playing and singing, Martha straddled on the end of the stool, facing him, crooning quietly into the mic), a new co-written song that took Martha an hour to write and Harcourt two weeks to finish, and a rousing reading of one of my favourites: the proudly, coldly and euphorically alienated Factory, from her first record.

She finishes with the last song her mother ever wrote, Prosperina, a song of beguiling simplicity, like the saddest nursery rhyme ever written. When Martha sings it, she’s stripped down to skin-tight tartan trousers and an MW t-shirt that she’s customised with the words ‘Fuck the president’. It seems to say something profound about her resolve, her fearlessness, her duality, her complete and stark difference to just about anyone else around: her mother’s rich sense of musical heritage and profound spiritual innocence, her father’s foul-mouthed non-conformity, her own immutable beauty and singularity. She’s erratic and as much so in concert as on record, playing songs she’s barely rehearsed and others that sound like writer’s block, backed by a sterile, unsuitable ensemble, but just try to take your eyes off her, or think of anyone who’s a third as good as she is when she’s on song. Here that transcendence was periodic, most striking at the Chelsea Hotel, where:

You were famous, your heart was a legend
You told me again you preferred handsome men
But for me you would make an exception.

(3.5)

I pinched that shot at the top from these fellas. It's from her date at the Gateshead Sage.

Sunday 6 February, 2017



A slightly disappointing acoustic show, sat on a broken seat, listening to an erratic setlist, with RT wrapping it up and going home a good half hour before the curfew. Perhaps I'm just spoiled, as I saw him put on a truly wonderful show at the Bridgewater Hall a decade ago, and I wish I was still there.

Thompson’s singing is still pretty good and his guitar-playing is – of course – unparalleled, but for someone who has the songs that Thompson has, it seems odd that he would choose to play these ones – especially compared to the setlist of his Christmas shows in the States. Dressed in army trousers, a denim vest and the obligatory Kangol beret, he comes on grinning and relaxed, but the first half hour is deathly dull aside from a welcome, fingers-afire 'Vincent Black Lightning 1952', and though the show picks up after a delightfully offhand 'Crocodile Tears' and a rocky 'Wall of Death', he doesn't mine his rich stock of beguiling ballads at all: there's no 'End of the Rainbow', 'Al Bowly's in Heaven' or 'Waltzing for Dreamers' (the closest we get is ‘Tore Down the Hippodrome’), and so there's little real variety of tone or tempo, the gig just sort of plodding along.

It doesn't help that his solitary guest, Liverpudlian vocalist Siobhan Maher Kennedy, offers merely nondescript backing, and doesn't seem to have rehearsed. Their badinage, accentuated by Thompson's good humour and ready wit, is charming, but their collaboration is flat and uninspired, typified by their final number together. Considering that there are nine great songs on Richard and Linda Thompson's 1973 album, I Want to See the Bright Lights, it's perverse that he would choose the other one: the uplifting but uninspired title track. I know that art is subjective, but I’m not alone in this contention, especially when we’re talking about trading the acoustic, egg-shell majesty of, say, ‘The Great Valerio’ for an acoustic version of an electric song.

Then he's gone, re-appearing only for an uproariously updated version of his antique anti-Trump song, ‘Fergus Lang’ – appropriately enough, perhaps the evening’s highlight, sample lyric: “Fergus he builds and builds/Yet small is his erection/Fergus has a fine head of hair/When the wind’s in the right direction” – and for a single fan request: ‘Shoot Out the Lights’. Many see Richard Thompson live for the frenetic fretwork of the master guitarist. While the BBC session of Mr Lacey remains one of the most exhilarating examples of guitar play ever committed to tape, my interest is more because he’s a great writer – and singer – of sad and funny songs. There’s little of that tonight. It’s fine, but I want better than fine.

In support, Australian folkie Emily Barker was parachuted in at short notice after WildwoodKin cancelled. Dressed in a rigid silver skirt, her hair swept into a blonde bob, she begins a little blandly, but reaches a tremendous crescendo, sitting at a piano for ‘Precious Memories’ – a catchy, heartfelt paean to blues guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe, from the point of her view of her closest friend – and then offering a gorgeous a capella take on ‘Disappear’. (2.5)

***

Pic from here. Thanks for reading.

Hello there. Below you'll find some stuff about books and films, mostly focusing on The Fountainhead. I've also written a couple of blogs in other places. Here's one about legendary composer Elmer Bernstein, and this is a chat with filmmaker Christopher Nupen about Jacqueline du Pre. The 80-second film he made for BBC Music Magazine is truly beautiful too, it's here.



BOOK: The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)
FILM: The Fountainhead (King Vidor, 1949)

Ayn Rand’s book, The Fountainhead, is absolutely fascinating: a strident, remarkable, often ridiculous crowdpleaser that lays out her philosophy of ‘objectivism’, in which self-interest is the driving force of progress.

It centres on a visionary modernist architect, Howard Roark, who wants to be judged solely on his work, without forging the personal relationships and making the compromises that he – and Rand – see as fraudulent and antithetical to great art. His counterpoint is Peter Keating, the golden boy of the architectural world, who excels at Stanton (from which Roark is expelled for insubordination), rises to fame and glory, and then receives an almighty comeuppance, as his nemesis blasts through society’s barriers to take his rightful place at the peak of the world.

Along the way, Rand fires spectacularly and relentlessly at social responsibility, at the masses and at socialism, the latter represented by Ellsworth Toohey, an apparent hybrid of Alexander Woolcott and Bernard Shaw: a hideous, brilliant bird of a man whose motives are kept murky until a stunning speech to the bereft, swollen Keating, 664 pages in. Charity is a way to absolve oneself of guilt or provide meaning to a mediocre life, the masses are revolting, stupid and feral, and socialism is a way to rob man of his individuality and thwart his potential, she argues.

While I find her polemicising utterly lacking in the empathy intrinsic to basic humanity (and perhaps informed by the Bolsheviks seizing her family’s possessions in the ‘20s), there’s no denying that her way of viewing the world is explosive and even revelatory, and it’s hardly surprising that this visceral but cerebral book has become a bible for libertarians. It is, above all, a hymn to individual freedom and a condemnation of society’s skewed priorities – which will fight for an unwed mother but not a beautiful building – with architecture a richly symbolic field in which to state the case for human progress rocketing skywards thanks to the work of a few great men.

It dips massively during two laughable, comically sincere sequences – the first dealing with Roark’s mutually sadistic courtship of journalist Dominique Francon, the second his love-in with Hearst substitute, Gail Wynand – and sometimes slips so deeply into a recounting of Rand’s ‘objectivist’ philosophy that it becomes a textbook rather than a novel (most damagingly during Rourk’s climactic speech), while inescapably featuring an idealised ‘great man’ who’s a rapist.

But it’s also enormously readable – far more so than I was expecting – with a patented contrariness and counterintuitiveness in its language and ideas, a starkly impressionistic vocabulary full of “smears” and “smudges”, “parapets” and “porticos”, and bursts of sudden, shocking violence: in its architecture, its relationship with an imperfect world, its characters’ creativity and cruelty. The first time that Roark reshapes a hackneyed, ignorant design by slashing thick black lines through it, you can’t help your heart beating a little faster.

Rand's contention that the point of life is to create is one that many of her critics will still be able to relate to, though she argues extremely persuasively that this is something one should do for oneself and not for others: anything else is a betrayal of the self, and that is the most heinous betrayal, the gravest sin of which man is capable. She elaborates in her introduction, written in 1968, by saying that religion too is an abuse of man, since it involves us apologising for and debasing ourselves before a higher power. In The Fountainhead, Roark's visionary design for the Stoddard Temple naturally causes outrage – stirred by Toohey, and Wynand's flagship tabloid, The Banner– because it is a temple scaled to man's proportions, which glorifies humanity, and not God.

Donald Trump has said recently that the film, and book, have been a huge inspiration for him. I'd say the chances of Donald Trump having read a 725-page book about philosophy are exactly zero. If I'm wrong and he has, then he must have missed the part in which Rand says that the worst of all the "second-handers", those inferior specimens whose self-worth is based on the approval of others, is he who seeks not just vindication, but power.



In 1949, the book was adapted for the screen, and the subsequent film is fascinating, though not in the same way. When I heard about it, my fear is that it would lose the ideological imperative in translation, but actually the opposite is true: only the ideology remains intact, characters just yelling political slogans in one another’s faces for two hours. When you realise that Rand adapted the book herself, and essentially took over the direction from King Vidor, that makes more sense. Even so, you’d think that a cinephile like Rand, who saw up to 200 movies a year in the cinema, might have learned how to write one. Gary Cooper is simply miscast as Roark: in the book, a gaunt, upright, red-headed, ferociously dedicated, single-minded force of nature who lives only to create, and eschews compromise, populism and personal ties in his pursuit of greatness. Cooper trials to dial down his ‘aww shucks’ charm and his inherent nobility, but there’s nothing in its place: his Roark seems slow-witted, shambling and lacking the enormous creative dynamism that typifies the character. Kent Smith is also spectacularly wrong as the banal but beautiful Peter Keating, playing the ethereal, ringleted fraud as a sort of desperate, sweaty jock gone to seed, while Ellsworth Toohey, the piece’s seductive socialist straw man, chrome-domed Robert Douglas has a few witty one-liners, but is a simple two-faced villain rather than the insidious reptile of the page. Rounding out the tone-deaf silliness is Henry Hull, whose rapidly receding Henry Cameron (Roark’s mentor) is among the worst of his many bad appearances in 1940s film.

There are two quite good turns, though: a disorientating, pained performance from Patricia Neal as Dominique – whose storyline poignantly and uncomfortably mirrors her real-life adoration of Cooper – and Raymond Massey’s imposing turn as self-made newspaper baron Gail Wynand, eventually stirred to start a public crusade he actually believes in, by the persecution of the film’s hero.



I don’t really mind that the film is camp and overblown to the point of hysteria. Even when junking much of the book’s first half and stretching the last quarter across the second hour, there is way too much plot and almost no credible dialogue, but that’s part of its batshit appeal. Instead, what I found most damaging was that it missed surely the greatest opportunity of all, which was to realise on screen the buildings that Rand could only write about. In true Roark style, Frank Lloyd Wright (the inspiration for his character) asked for $400,000 to draft the designs – a tenth of the budget. Baulking at the idea, Warner just did the best they could, producing results that Rand described as “horrible” and which architectural critics pointed out would be unable to remain standing for longer than a few seconds. By contrast, the gothic and renaissance reproductions are supposed to be revolting, but because they’re such cartoonish parodies, the exercise seems utterly fraudulent.

I find it fascinating – and a little terrifying – that in the HUAC era you had a man like King Vidor working on The Fountainhead. By 1949, he was a member – with Rand and Cooper – of the MPA, the red-hunting organisation that facilitated the Hollywood blacklist. Just 15 years earlier, he had directed unquestionably the most radical Hollywood film of its decade, Our Daily Bread, which despite featuring the ‘man of destiny’ not uncommon in his oeuvre, was also explicitly and proudly pro-communist. Even then, the film was considered too controversial for a major studio to handle, so he produced it independently and released it through United Artists.

To see Vidor, of all people, directing a hymn to individualism, a film with such vitriolic contempt for solidarity, empathy or even basic human decency, is absolutely shocking. At times, I found myself genuinely astonished at how sinister and terrifying The Fountainhead is, especially as an example of mass market entertainment. That it was bankrolled by Warner Bros, the socially-conscious studio responsible for the likes of Wild Boys of the Road, Heroes for Sale and I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang tells you basically everything you need to know about late-‘40s Hollywood.

It isn’t, by any criteria, a good film, but it is a compelling social document, with a few minor artistic virtues: Neal’s performance, some avant-garde framing and set design, and a stunning final shot of sheer, jaw-dropping fascism. By contrast, the book it’s based upon is a genuinely important artistic and political statement, however repellent and ridiculous it may be.

Incidentally: halfway through the film, a guy in front grabbed the bloke next to me by his shirt and threatened to punch him in the face if he didn't stop kicking his chair. Typical Ayn Rand crowd.



Book: (3.5)
Film: (2)

***



"What's a Tupac?"
"He's just like this really cool rapper and he's pretty much my best friend."
Hunt for the Wilderpeople (Taika Waititi, 2016)– A winning, unpredictable and disarmingly hilarious Kiwi comedy from writer-director Taika Waititi, about unwanted 10-year-old Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison) going to stay in the country with a new foster family, only to end up on the run with grumpy, taciturn father figure 'Uncle Hec' (Sam Neill).

It's packed to bursting with brilliantly unexpected jokes (“Are you gonna manslaughter him?”, "Well, they got that wrong because you're obviously white”), balanced by moments of universality and deft sentiment, and accompanied by a lovely musical score, coming off as a sort of more genuine, less antiseptic cousin to Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom.

The only shortcoming lies in the (admittedly amusing) climax, which narrowly misses the target, and a wrap-up that contains one soppy callback too many. It's a wonderful film, though. (4)

***



13th (Ava DuVernay, 2016)– This Netflix documentary about the prison-industrial complex argues, quite brilliantly, that the 13th amendment which abolished slavery never really did, since it removed human rights from those sent to jail, and then began to systematically imprison African-Americans, first to prop up the post-Civil War economy, then to undermine the Civil Rights movement, and finally – and most dangerously – via the ‘War on Drugs’.

Between 1973 and 2014, the prison population rose from 300K to 2.3m (while violent crime actually decreased, a point not made in the film); as bills backed by private prisons saw ever-harsher law and order measures, including ‘three strikes’, an accent on plea bargaining, and a drive to make offenders serve 85% of their stated sentences. Today, 1 in 3 black men in America will go to jail at some time during their life.

Ava DuVernay's film uses archive footage, and testimony from politicians, academics and activists (Angela Davies!), to make a strong polemical case that lacks some of the virtues of similar recent documentaries – The Interrupters’ accent on human stories, The House I Live In’s unerring focus on the drug issue – but offers greater context, more wide-reaching analysis and, crucially, an unfailingly African-American perspective, as those two earlier works, magnificent though they were, came from white documentarians.

Like Spike Lee’s recent Chi-Raq its use of on-screen hip-hop lyrics (in a kind of ‘dissolving chalk’ aesthetic) is a major boon, though unlike Chi-Raq it doesn’t include an incredibly boring central story about a sex strike. And the (slightly disingenuous) sequence in which Donald Trump's petulant speech about beating up protesters soundtracks a montage of Civil Rights-era outrages is simply a wonderfully visceral bit of filmmaking.

It’s also nice to see Lillian Gish’s consummate artistry being introduced to a new audience: that’s her celebrating with the Ku Klux Klan in D. W. Griffith’s abhorrent white supremacist masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation. I can lend you more of her work if you’re interested. (3)

***

Thanks for reading.

I went to the BAFTAs this week– yes, nice, thank you. Then I pathologically reviewed all of my other cultural endeavours. Here you go:

BOOK



The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (1939)– A nasty, nightmarish blast of Hollywood alienation, full of foreboding, about Tod Hackett, a hulking set-designer on the fringes of Hollywood, who falls in love with cruel aspiring actress Faye Greener while fraternising with a panorama of grotesques: the detritus of tinseltown. Written in Hollywood’s greatest year, the near-mythical 1939, it’s an unremitting horror story in economic sentences: an acidic counterpoint to Steinbeck’s contemporaneous novels, depicting the unified masses not as a humane, nourishing whole, but as a blankly vicious mob, hooked on an unfulfilling dream, and chillingly ripe for fascism. The characters in the foreground all seem ripped from some forgotten B-movie, each one warped, pathetic or both. Most memorable of all is an ailing ex-accountant who moves to California for his health, and finds only emotional brutalism and unfulfilled longing. His name? Erm, Homer Simpson. (3.5)

West's other best-known book, Miss Lonelyhearts, was adapted twice for the screen. The first version gave its name to my blog (though I was also riffing on the fact that those smitten with Old Hollywood often find a solace in it that others find in love), though the film was a faithless cash-in looking to repeat the success of Lee Tracy's breakthrough vehicle, Blessed Event. The second version stars two of my favourites: a post-accident Monty Clift, and Myrna Loy in one of her sporadic character parts.

***

FILMS



CINEMA: Fences (Denzel Washington, 2016)– An astonishing drama, based on August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which tells an archetypally American story in the manner of Eugene O'Neill or Arthur Miller, but does so to elucidate the African-American experience, which as 13th so eloquently expressed, is the result of decisions that have never been in their hands.

Denzel Washington is Troy Maxson, an unyielding, fiercely proud working-class black man in '50s America, who's the king of his castle, a house he bought with his sweat and blood and the $3,000 his brother got for having half his head blown off in the war.

Across 140 minutes, via dazzling set-pieces both restrained and marauding, Wilson lays bear the virtues, vices, triumphs and compromises of Troy's existence, and that of black Americans both then and now: poverty, incarceration, brutal fathers, restricted choices and mistakes inherited and repeated across the generations. Viola Davis, who like Washington played her role on Broadway in a 2010 revival, is Troy's wife Rose, a fond, no-nonsense and fiercely loyal co-conspirator whose entire worldview is about to take an almighty beating.

To say more would be to undermine the film's ability to astound and confound, so I'll add simply that it is both extraordinarily original and utterly timeless, with a polemical power that comes along rarely, and two of the finest performances in years. Davis won a BAFTA at my office last night, but Washington is every bit as good, and probably even better – presumably the reason he's not scooping every gong going is because his character is so complex, and decidedly difficult to like. There are passages here that mesh together every emotion of a sidelined people fighting for self-worth: righteous but corrosive anger, well-earned but worthless pride, a cod-Biblical relationship with mortality and temptation that runs the gamut from twinkly-eyed gameplaying to supernatural terror.

He's haunted by his father, and he haunts his son.

There's superb support too from the likes of Stephen Henderson and Mykelti Williamson, and while the film perhaps has a couple of endings too many (with shades of Edna Ferber sagas or The Place Beyond the Pines' daddy issues), its epilogue does ultimately justify itself, at least in giving Davis another chance to shine, and articulating Wilson's final verdicts on manhood, on creativity and on Troy.

Fences must have been staggering on stage back in '83 and in its 2010 revival, but this filmed version is about as good as you could imagine – a little obvious symbolism here and there, like the rose falling to the floor – utilising cinema's virtues (close-ups, full sets, cuts and multiple takes) without sacrificing the intensity or authenticity of the material. Fences stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the great American plays of the mid-20th century; now in 2017 it can tell the kind of story that was kept off our cinema screens for too damn long. (4)

Many thanks to the NSPCC for inviting me to their preview screening.

***



The Great Lie (Edmund Goulding, 1941)– A far-fetched melodrama, in which an affecting Bette Davis unfathomably feuds with concert pianist Mary Astor for the affections of smugly stolid George Brent, the most objectionable leading man in ‘40s Hollywood. The first half is good fun, reaching its apogee with a beautiful wedding sequence augmented by dramatic and audial grace notes – a little black kid in a tree singing a spiritual as the newlyweds recline on a first-floor patio – but the film goes increasingly awry, degenerating into histrionics and inexplicable plot developments, and then failing to deliver the cathartic climax that would have made that halfway worthwhile.

There’s a fair amount going for it, including one of Davis’s most appealing characterisations: her Maggie is defined only in relation to a man, which is a missed opportunity in the writing, but her performance is perfectly balanced: joyous, explosive, then noble and sad: marinaded in misery, commandeered by confusion. The film is further enhanced by Max Steiner’s lush score, fitfully thoughtful direction– with crane shots and intelligent Tony Gaudio compositions, around a third of the time – and particularly Hattie McDaniel’s lovely supporting turn, the great African-American actress mining humanity from a role as Davis’s housekeeper that on paper’s not much more than a ‘mammy’ stereotype.

Unfortunately the story, the casual misogyny and the limp dialogue prevent it all from amounting to very much, a problem compounded by two of the central actors. Astor is promisingly cast as the villain, but her one-dimensional, Oscar-winning (!) performance becomes merely annoying after a while. It’s also oddly sterile: I remain baffled that possibly the most sexual woman in Hollywood doesn’t know how to be sexy on camera. When it’s beside the point – as in The Palm Beach Story or Midnight – she sizzles, with an offhand attitude that’s immensely attractive, but when it’s demanded of her to be alluring, she ballses it up: in The Maltese Falcon she’s neurotic rather than fascinating, here’s she’s superficial and irritating in a way that fatally undermines an already compromised script. Despite her shortcomings, though, Astor’s character remains a passionate artist, and the idea that these vital women would be warring over someone as unappealing as Brent’s vapid, uninspired and casually sexist aviator is altogether incredible.

It’s still just about worth it for the film’s virtues, the greatest of which is Bette at her lofty zenith.

See also: I write about Bette Davis a lot, like here, for example.

***



CINEMA: Her Man (Tay Garnett)− A stunning little Pre-Code movie from Tay Garnett, with Helen Twelvetrees utterly irresistible as a hard-boiled waterfront prostitute who spies escape from under the heel of brutish pimp Ricardo Cortez when charming, fairheaded Phillips Holmes sails into town.

This is the meeting point of von Sternberg's vivid, melodramatic Docks of New York and Garnett's own ship-based romantic tragicomedy, One Way Passage, with a rich atmosphere created through Edward Snyder's sumptuous, jawdropping tracking shots and Twelvetrees' tough-but-tender characterisation.

It's messy as hell, with a touch of the stiltedness inevitable in early talkies, plenty of incomprehensible comedy from James Gleason and Harry Sweet, and ad-libbed crowd dialogue three years after that stopped being a good idea, but it's also remarkably innovative, in both its technical wizardry and the story such mastery is serving. It begins novelistically: opening on a man dropping his luggage into the ocean, zoning in unerringly on Marjorie Rambeau's dipsomaniac, and then roaming around the busy Havana streets in search of its heroine.

And though the comic passages have a distressingly low hit-rate, despite an amusing bit for Franklin Pangborn and a Tashlin-esque climax, the central story that renders them a nuisance also makes them an irrelevance.

It's really something: deeply affecting and enduringly fresh, as Twelvetrees' archetypal bad girl − her eyebrows at right angles, her upper lip curling into a sneer − is transfigured and transformed by love, while Holmes goes all gooey and Cortez's knife-wielding psychopath prepares for war.

That story, based unpromisingly on the murder ballad, Frankie and Johnny, is augmented by some gorgeous photography: a hatless corpse spreadeagled on a barroom floor; Twelvetrees' ecstasy turning to veiled terror as Cortez approaches her in a broken mirror; the pain in her eyes as she rearranges her face, while preparing to break Holmes's heart. (And a brunette Thelma Todd in a backless dress, because why not?)

It ends with carnage, Holmes like a prototype of Mitchum's he-man in His Kind of Woman as he bulldozers his way through a barroom full of heavies, using cans, a table and eventually just his fists, before Rambeau laughs, sighs and says those words we've been waiting for. (3)

***

TV



Apple Tree Yard (2017)− I watched this four-part BBC serial because of Emily Watson, whose performance in Breaking the Waves 21 years ago remains perhaps the finest characterisation I’ve ever seen (Robards, Gish, Rylance, Henry Fonda and Wendy Hiller are all in with a shout too), and whose subsequent career has been littered with breathtaking work. I think there’s an argument that she is the best actor around today, or at least the actor working today who has scaled the greatest heights; admittedly the past five years have offered few parts worthy of her virtuosic talents. This is more of the same: she’s given a prominent role, which is welcome, but the programme is bafflingly erratic: compelling one minute, repellent the next; so passionate that its stilted writing brushes erudition, then so laboured that it’s utterly embarrassing (a special mention for the awful girl talk sequences between Watson and best bud Susan Lynch).

Watson plays Dr Yvonne Carmichael, a married mother – and renowned gene specialist – who falls for mystery man and apparent spook Ben Chaplin (giving a forced, detached fraction of a performance), after meeting him in the Commons lobby. Their passionate encounter in the Emily Davison broom cupboard sparks a destructive chain of events, which begin with a truly horrifying scene that has polarised audiences. My feeling was that it was entirely justified in the context, but others who are better placed to comment think otherwise. The series then plods along for more than two hours: two hours dominated by heavy-handed writing, but punctuated by both tragedy and the odd moment of insight, before juddering into life for its final half-hour.

At its best, it’s thoroughly worthwhile: its depiction of the dehumanisation and persecution faced by rape victims is timely and fittingly nauseating, the shifting dynamics of Carmichael’s relationships are effective, and there are small moments of moral grace (a postcard, a gesture from the public gallery, a dinner party rant), before an ending that tries to be maturely unresolved and then opts for being gleefully trivial and yet altogether unforgettable (who cares about social polemicising when you can Shyamalan the shit out of it). But taken as a whole, it’s absolutely all over the shop: a baggy, plodding, self-satisfied series that seems to regard its every move as remarkable or revelatory, when we’ve seen the vast bulk of this before: a woman violently punished because she steps outside the accepted social norms. Apple Tree Yard doesn’t think that’s acceptable, but it’s still the story it tells, rather than another one.

Watson can’t always wring quality from a script this weak, directed in such a pedestrian fashion (she somehow managed in Julian Fellowes’ risible Separate Lies, though was sunk by Miss Potter, having been overlooked for the main part, *sigh*), but she has some fine moments, particularly in the courtroom climax. Next time, why not give her something better to work with? (2.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

*Warning: plenty of spoilers in this one, please see the film first*



Last night I was privileged enough to attend the BFI's very special cast and crew reunion celebrating 25 years since the release of The Crying Game, the seminal Irish film from Neil Jordan. It's a movie so good that Jordan, who finds it almost impossible to watch his own work, managed to sit through the whole film. Star Stephen Rea said that back in 1992 he thought it was a good little film, but it's only now that he can appreciate it as a masterpiece.

I've already said everything that I want to about this genre-hopping, gender-warping classic, one of the greatest movies ever made about love, but the Q&A was extremely enlightening, so I thought I'd share its greatest insights here. The greatest thrill was an unexpected appearance from Jaye Davidson, who walked away from a film career two years after receiving an Oscar nomination for the film, and who has largely avoided being in the public eye ever since.

This is an occasional series I do on the blog. Previous instalments are on Michael Winterbottom, Woody Allen, Sense and Sensibility, Warren William, Peter Lorre, Alfred Hitchcock and Lillian Gish (she got two obviously, here and here).


1. Behan inspired
Jordan explained that he was initially − if unwittingly − inspired by Frank O'Connor's short story, Guests of the Nation, and the Brendan Behan play that grew from it, The Hostage, which both dealt with the relationship between a British soldier and the IRA operative who's taken him hostage. In his initial drafts, the IRA operative met up with the soldier's widow (a hairdresser, as in the finished film), but that character wasn't a male transvestite. The change was inspired, he thinks, by seeing the Pulitzer-nominated M. Butterfly on stage. "We're often inspired by things and don't even realise it, that's not uncommon," he said. Another influence were those post-war American crime films. "When Miranda turns up in London, it turns into a noir," Jordan said. "There are shadows everywhere, and she's wearing that Joan Crawford jacket with the shoulders," added Rea. He had been Jordan's number one choice for the role of Fergus since the off. Woolley recalled constant calls from the actor's agent asking if the project was finally going to happen, because he'd been offered another play or film. "I'd say 'yes'," and before I could say, "but it's not going to be for a while", she'd have hung up.

2. A Dil pickle
Jaye Davidson was part of punky arthouse filmmaker Derek Jarman's coterie, and was spotted by Jordan at the wrap party for Edward II. When Jordan invited dozens of transsexuals to a casting call, Davidson "knew every one of them". The casting of a black transvestite as the love interest confounded potential financiers. Several studios, including one of Britain's biggest, agreed to back the film if they would swap Davidson out for an actress, who would wear a prosthetic in the movie's grand unveiling. Jordan refused. Stephen Rea shared a story about how a 'red-blooded Irish male' in one early screening said he fancied Dil and that Davidson was clearly a man, pointing to the mention of 'prosthetics' in the end credits to back his case. Due to the problems with finding backers, the film was made on a tiny budget, with producer Stephen Woolley giving costume designer Sandy Powell cash in hand to buy the movie's quietly iconic outfits.


3. Can't see the Forest for the trees
Jordan was criticised by the press for giving an American, Forest Whitaker, a role that a British actor could have played. Miranda Richardson chipped in to say that she was criticised for playing a role that an Irish actress could have played. And Stephen Rea recalled that Irish audiences and critics complained that the men were too feminised and the women too masculine.

4. All's fair in love and war
The opening fairground sequence was shot in three days in November, "and somehow we got the sunshine we needed," Woolley recalled.

5. Dudley and more
Composer and Anne Dudley worked on her song routine together in Islington, though nobody can remember who sang the vocal that he mimes to. Lots of the background music during the film is unreleased offcuts supplied by Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys, who also produced Boy George's cover of the title song, which plays over the end credits.

6. Giving films a bad name
The working title was 'The Soldier's Wife' (which is clear from the closing credits, which contain the words at least a half-dozen times!). Stephen Woolley (producer): "Neil thought that we should change it because people would expect a war film." Neil Jordan: "No, I wanted The Crying Game because that's its name."


7. Bombing in Britain
The film got mixed reviews in Britain and only found an audience after it exploded in America. Jordan says it was seen in the States as a story about gender and love. In a Britain still living in the shadow of the Birmingham bombing, the threat from the IRA was real, so audiences found it difficult to accept Stephen Rea's Fergus as someone human. Davidson said that a similar film today could succeed in Trump's America, because there are still "intelligent and interesting" people in every society. He added, though, that when visiting and later moving to America, he was struck by the lack of integration between different races, even when just walking into a bar. Jordan wasn't surprised by the film's success, because he believed everyone in the world would watch it, "or what's the point of making it", though Jaye only signed up for the project because he thought no-one would see it.

8. Gene therapy
Richardson remembered that Gene Hackman was incredibly taken with Jaye at the Oscars ceremony. "He was very sweet," said Davidson with a smile.

9. Jaye rights
I've always been interested in Davidson's decision to walk away from the career he could have had, so I asked him about that, and how he looked back on his time in the movies now. "There were few roles for black men and even fewer for gay black men," he said. "I don't think there was a career for me, and I didn't want to scrub around for a few weak roles, so I got out. To me it was a long time ago, and I don't regret it, because I'm happy with my life now."


10. Rea of sunlight
Did Fergus love Dil? "I still do," said Stephen Rea.

***

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About five years ago, I used to write a regular series for the now defunct Eat Sleep Live Film, and since I want to run more features here alongside the usual reviews, I thought I'd revive it. It's called 'And introducing...', it shamelessly apes the Guardian's Pass Notes, and it's a beginner's guide to some of my favourite people in the movies.

#1. John Ford



Who?
The great American director. Asked which filmmaker had most influenced him, Orson Welles once replied: “The old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, John Ford.” Ford’s career – which sprawled across more than 50 years – produced more cast-iron masterpieces than any other, and covered almost every genre conceivable, though he remains best-known for his Westerns. As a person, he was a ludicrous caricature of the tough-guy-with-a-heart-of-gold, prone to acts of remarkable humanity – like filling a funeral with his own friends after the death of a lonely acquaintance, in order to comfort the widow – but in everyday terms was prickly, awkward and really liked to tell lies.

Lies? What like?
He claimed to have been born Sean Aloysius O’Fearna, in Ireland. Actually he was a second-generation immigrant, whose birth name was John Martin Feeney. Such myth-making was intrinsic to Ford’s persona and to his nostalgic films, which – if not the way things really were – were perhaps the way they should have been. Except for the bits where all the white guys shot all the Native Americans.



How can I spot a Ford film?
His movies are characterised by devastatingly effective sentiment, folksy humour, distinctive visual motifs – including extreme long shots, and photography that focuses on the eyes (but not in a stupid way, like Sergio Leone) – and an obsession with both the family unit and the outsider hero. There’s are motifs and rituals he returns to countless times from communal meals to poignant farewells, but the greatest is that of his protagonist talking to a lost loved one, while gazing at a painting or kneeling by a grave. The most exalted example is in Young Mr Lincoln, as a camera focused on the water segues from summer romance to brutal winter, and Henry Fonda’s Honest Abe is left alone on a frozen riverbank (above). It’s worth adding that if you’re watching a movie where everyone suddenly starts singing Shall We Gather at the River, then Ford almost certainly made it, and his films are also chock-full of boozing, brawling and bawling (like I said, his parents were Irish).

Talk us through Ford’s career, Troy McClure-style.
A pleasure. You may remember him from such Westerns as Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine and his masterpiece, The Searchers, a staggering odyssey of revenge and redemption that marked the high-point of his many collaborations with John Wayne.

Mates with John Wayne, eh? Was he also a right wing tub-thumper and massive racist?
No. Towards the end Ford veered rather to the right, becoming friends with Richard Nixon, but in the ‘30s he described himself as a “socialist democrat... always left”, and he made the most radical movie ever to come out of Old Hollywood, The Grapes of Wrath, ably assisted by the brilliant, union-bashing producer Daryll F. Zanuck. One of Ford’s last – and worst – films, Cheyenne Autumn, was ironically a noble but boring attempt to right the wrongs of his “manifest destiny” Westerns, by sympathetically depicting the Native American experience, while The Searchers and Sergeant Rutledge– though each complex and contradictory – argue that the people of the West can only be free when they let go of their racism. Even The Prisoner of Shark Island, which houses perhaps the most troubling views of any Ford film (anti-slavery campaigners are the bigots, apparently), focuses on the growing respect between hero Warner Baxter and his former slave (Ernest Whitman). After the pair return home, following years away, Ford saves the last shot of the picture for the reunion of the African-American family: a gesture you’re unlikely to find in many American films of the 1930s.



“Not a racist.” I’m nearly convinced. Anything else?
Biographer Joseph McBride argues that Ford purposefully cast friend, red-hunter and all-round objectionable bigot Ward Bond in aggressively progressive roles, as a punishment for his more unpleasant behaviour.

That should do it. Sorry, I seemed to touch a nerve there.
Well, Ford being a right-winger is a common misconception, and one still perpetuated by superb film director and absolutely terrible historian, Quentin Tarantino. I’ll admit that Ford did play, erm, one of the ‘heroic’ Klansmen in the most racist film ever made, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, a movie that almost single-handedly revived the KKK (he's on the right of frame, below). But which of us can honestly say we haven’t done that?



I have rarely, if ever, appeared in a racist D. W. Griffith film, but let’s move on. Aside from Wayne and Bond, who else did Ford hang out with?
The John Ford Stock Company comprised more than a dozen performers, who turned up time and again in his films, from Ben Johnson and Harry Carey, Jr to Jack Pennick, Mae Marsh and Ford’s brother Francis. In terms of leading men, Ford first worked with Harry Carey, Sr, then Will Rogers, and later enjoyed a remarkable, oft-overlooked collaboration with Henry Fonda, before his shifting priorities saw him forge a remarkable working relationship with Wayne. Ford himself claimed that it took seeing Wayne in Howard Hawks’ Red River to realise that the “big son-of-a-bitch” could actually act.

Some would disagree.
And they would be wrong. Watch She Wore a Yellow Ribbon if you’d like your eyes comprehensively opened. Ford was fascinated by the idea of toying around with Wayne’s screen image, casting him variously as a Swedish sailor, a tormented divorcee, and a tormented, lovelorn ex-soldier corrupted by racism. Compare that with regular Wayne screenwriter James Edward Grant’s memorable formula for creating the actor’s vehicles: “All you gotta have in a John Wayne picture is a hoity-toity dame with big tits that Duke can throw over his knee and spank, and a collection of jerks he can smash in the face every five minutes. In between, you fill with gags, flags, and chases. That’s all you need. His fans eat it up!” Grant was only allowed to write one John Ford film, Donovan’s Reef, and that was comprehensively re-written by the director, who preferred to work with either Frank Nugent – the brilliant, left-leaning former journalist – or the notorious but talented James Warner Bellah, a man described by his own son as “a fascist, a racist and a world-class bigot”.



I place unnecessary weight on gold statuettes. I don’t suppose John Ford ever won any of those?
Yes. Four Best Director Oscars for starters. And none of them for Westerns.

Any of them for sentimental dramas about Welsh coal miners, released the same year as Citizen Kane?
Well, it’s funny you should mention it… People make a big fuss about How Green Was Valley landing Best Director and Best Picture the year that Citizen Kane was up for both, but it’s a matchlessly poetic movie, albeit one that doesn’t seem to know much about Wales. Still, without Ford, Kane wouldn’t exist. Welles recruited the same cinematographer as Ford’s The Long Voyage Home and The Grapes of Wrath (Gregg Toland), while his preparation for making The Greatest Film Ever Made™ had been to watch Ford’s earthshaking anti-isolationist masterpiece, Stagecoach. Fifty times. Stagecoach notably popularised deep focus photography, and ceilinged sets, which gave filmmakers carte blanche to devise avant garde camera angles that would augment a scene’s atmosphere, like so:



I see. So he devised putting a ceiling on some walls. He doesn’t sound as good as my favourite director of Westerns, Sergio Leone.
Compared to John Ford, Sergio Leone was a derivative, adolescent hack, and I’m not entirely sure that he wasn’t one even when not compared to John Ford, who effectively invented the epic Western with The Iron Horse, retooled the entire genre with Stagecoach and then endlessly interrogated its priorities, preoccupations and prejudices across 25 years. His Cavalry trilogy (1947-50) remains one of the outstanding, unsung achievements in American film, and from gentle, lyrical screen poems (Wagon Master) to race relations Westerns (Sergeant Rutledge and Cheyenne Autumn) and the richly nostalgic but clear-sighted genre deconstruction that was 1962’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, he turned the oater into an artform. Whereas Leone turned it into a badly-dubbed parade of clichés lit by occasional moments of visceral excitement and lent an air of artistry by Ennio Morricone’s sumptuous scores.

I think you were telling me about Oscars, weren’t you? Before you got distracted. What were his other gongs for?
Arty IRA flick The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath, and that supreme slice of blarney, The Quiet Man. He also landed a further two documentary Oscars – and a Purple Heart – for his World War Two escapades.

What did he do?
Ford headed up a photography unit making propaganda films, and was wounded whilst pointing his camera at the Battle of Midway.



What are his best movies?
How long have you got? Ford’s pre-war filmography alone takes in silent epics 3 Bad Men and The Iron Horse, exalting, legal-minded Americana like Judge Priest and Young Mr Lincoln, Stagecoach (above), three groundbreaking collaborations with the legendary Gregg Toland (The Informer, The Grapes of Wrarth and The Long Voyage Home), and neglected gems like The Prisoner of Shark Island and Steamboat Round the Bend, the latter a rich slice of southern fried escapism. He made one of the great WWII movies, They Were Expendable, then focused mainly on the Western for the final 20 years of his career, with the spectacular results I mentioned before. He also popped off to Ireland in the middle of all that to shoot The Quiet Man, which it would be fair to say continues to polarise audiences.

Why? Not Irish enough?
Actually, the opposite appears to be true.



That big list of films sounds tiring – where do I start?
Not as tiring as this list. But start with Stagecoach: a subversive skewering of American hypocrisy, dressed up as a slam-bang Western, and featuring some of the coolest stuntwork you’ll ever see. Then try Liberty Valance, The Grapes of Wrath and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. The best of the best is The Searchers, which for some reason I wrote 4,000 words about here. It's not the best place to begin, but it is among the most beguilingly beautiful films ever made, its sumptuous Winton C. Hoch cinematography and latent humanism offset by moments of chilling brutality.

Was that his personal favourite?
Probably, but he was such a committed contrarian that he told Peter Bogdanovich that the most cherished of his films was the forgotten medical drama Arrowsmith, and once claimed that the only movie which turned out how he wanted it to was the botched Graham Greene adaptation, The Fugitive (based on The Power and the Glory), a film notable only for its breathtaking chiaroscuro photography. Ford’s fondness for The Sun Shines Bright, a remake of Judge Priest for the cheapo studio Republic, was genuine, and gave him the chance to realise passages excised from the earlier film by the censors, including a beautiful sequence set around a prostitute’s funeral (below).



Any weird ones in his back catalogue?
A few. In 1928, he tried to emulate then mentor F.W. Murnau by stuffing his sentimental WWI film, Four Sons, full of technical innovations, and keeping his camera in almost perpetual flight. It isn’t very good. Then in 1937, he made two films: a South Seas disaster movie called The Hurricane, and an adaptation of Wee Willie Winkie, starring Shirley Temple. Neither are what you’d expect from him, but both bear his unmistakable stamp, and both are fantastic. The Edna Ferber-like family saga, The World Moves On is another curio – stuffed with contrivance, bad dialogue and several of the most potent, heightened romantic scenes in cinematic history – while Tobacco Road, from 1941, is half transcendent Americana and half baffling, misanthropic filth, but it’s kind of fascinating. McBride calls it The Grapes of Wrath’s “evil twin”. Ford also shot an Army information film entitled Sex Hygiene. I haven’t seen that one.

Which ones should I avoid like gonnorhea?
The Black Watch, an early talkie released in 1929, which is notable for some of the most uncomfortable, unwatchable sound sequences in cinema history (many featuring future romantic comedy icon Myrna Loy), though it picks up every now and again. Mary of Scotland is essentially just a series of lingering close-ups of star Katharine Hepburn, who was Ford’s girlfriend at the time. The Long Gray Line and Cheyennne Autumn just aren’t very interesting.

Tell me one other brilliant factoid with which I can impress all of my mates down the pub.Certainly. The only on-screen pairing of future legends Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart was in Ford's 1930 film, Up the River, Tracy's first film and Bogart's second.

That’s all very well, but what does the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Eric Pickles, think about John Ford?
By a remarkable coincidence, he loves him. Pickles chose Ford on Radio 4’s Great Lives back in 2012. To his credit, he showed an impressive knowledge of the director’s oeuvre. To his discredit, he’s still Eric Pickles.



What to say:“John Ford invented the modern Western.”

What not to say:“Wasn’t he a racist?”

***

Thanks for reading. Subjects of future beginner's guides are up for grabs, so tweet me any you'd like to see, or comment below. I'm not doing Mel Brooks.

More erratic adventures in culture, including – but not limited to – Terence Davies's worst film, Peter Lorre on the big screen, and one of the most beautiful books I've read in years. I've just signed up for Goodreads too, I'm over here if you're interested, but the reviews will all end up on here eventually.

FILMS



Sunset Song (Terence Davies, 2015)– I was lucky enough to interview Terence Davies in 2006, and even then – sidelined by the film industry and at a notably low ebb – he was talking about turning Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song into a movie. It took him nine years to realise that ambition, but I’m not sure why he bothered, or indeed what the point of this film is. I will always dearly love his early movies, and talking to Davies was one of the true highlights of my career as a journo (before I got tired of the stress and moved into creative writing and a job in the arts), but this film is not a highlight of anything, not even my weekend.

Agyness Deyn is Chris Guthrie, a rural Scottish lass who feels at one with the land, but not at one with her tyrannical father (Peter Mullan) – shades of Davies’s own childhood, so heartbreakingly rendered in his first film proper, Distant Voices, Still Lives. As everyday tragedy visits her family, she falls for sweet-natured neighbour, Ewan (Kevin Guthrie), but this is 1914 and damn it if the drums of war aren’t pounding in the background.

The film begins promisingly, but becomes increasingly boring as it progresses, with virtually no dramatic impetus. It’s no coincidence that the good scenes here – a sumptuous opening shot, soundtracked by the wind swooshing over a field of grain, the beautiful musical sequence that ends with a congregation walking into a church – are, like the great scenes in Davies’s earlier work, wordless.

Think of the ‘Tammy’ set-piece in The Long Day Closes (the greatest three minutes in ‘90s British film), the death scene in The Neon Bible, the sequence set to Peggy Lee’s ‘The Folks Who Live on the Hill’ in Of Time and the City, or the funerals in both Distant Voices (cut to Jessye Norman’s ‘There’s a Man Goin’ Round’) and his Trilogy (to Doris Day’s ‘It All Depends on You), and they are all just stately, beautifully composed shots set to music. Davies is a genuinely great and utterly distinctive director, but as he’s moved to more conventional narratives, his work has lost not only its brilliance, but also its coherence. He has little talent for filming drama and none for shooting sex scenes: the first half of Sunset Song builds to a night of passion which, as I’d been warned, begins with a close-up of a man’s hairy arse.

There are moments when the film gets to you. The compositions by Davies and Winter’s Bone cinematographer Michael McDonough are at times breathtaking (the horses in the thunderstorm!), and you’d have to be extremely hard-hearted to find none of the plot developments affecting, but even when Guthrie is changed shockingly by the war, there’s a suddenness and silliness that prevents you from fully investing in the story. Likewise, though Deyn is mostly in fine form, she’s wearing more – and more artful – make-up than is surely realistic, and has at least one moment of farcical overacting that wrenches you out of the story. And though Mullan is pretty commanding as the cruel patriarch, and the scenes in which his rage is only enhanced by becoming a tubby, floppy invalid are genuinely scary, he’s… y’know… a bit much.

I haven’t seen A Quiet Passion yet or, indeed, Davies’ Terence Rattigan adaptation, The Deep Blue Sea. But of his others, this is the weakest, and I say that as no fan of The House of Mirth. It’s a beautiful-looking piece of nothing, depressing without being insightful, eventful without being dramatic, and slow without being a slow-burner. (2)

***



Quatermass and the Pit (Roy Ward Baker, 1967)– Each of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass TV serials was made into a movie: The Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass 2 had been monochrome outings starring fading Hollywood star, Brian Donlevy, each following two years after the small-screen outing. This one took four times as long to bring to movie audiences, and though that was down to money troubles, by 1967 Hammer could afford colour film, while the financial necessity of incorporating an American star had apparently evaporated, leaving the producers to make a purely artistic choice in Andrew Keir. (Fans remain divided on Donlevy – he has so much of my goodwill from movies like The Glass Key that my judgement may be clouded, but I enjoyed his stolid doom-mongering.)

The film begins at (the fictional) Hobbs’ Lane tube station, where TFL engineers unwittingly uncover a human skull, then another, and then a huge, unexplained… thing. The discovery brings together rocket scientist Prof Bernard Quatermass, the tiresomely officious and closed-minded Col Breen (Julian Glover) and a palaeontologist (James Donald) and his assistant (Barbara Shelley), the group remaining divided as to whether the untorchable, untouchable object is a V-1 bomb, a black propaganda exercise or the key to all human existence.

It's somewhat garishly shot and Kneale himself described the special effects as “diabolical”, but with 50 years’ hindsight, I found the technical primitiveness rather charming, while the film is unquestionably full of fascinating ideas about extra-terrestrial life, the occult and the evolution of man. Despite its general tendency to be somewhat static and talky, it also has several knockout set-pieces, the odd jump scare nicely complementing the eerie atmosphere generated by Tristram Cary’s score, and the mix of folklore, mysticism and science in Kneale’s politely whacked-out, cerebral script.

It’s not quite a great film, I don’t think, but it’s unusually innovative and intelligent, with one of my all-time favourite titles: you can read it a dozen ways by the end, and they’re all valuable insights into the film. (3)

***



CINEMA: The Chase (Arthur Ripley, 1946)– Chuck Scott (Robert Cummings) is a war hero turned bedraggled bum who gets a gig driving around absolute psycho Eddie Roman (Steve Cochran). When Roman's wife (Michèle Morgan) tries to take a powder with the help of her chauffeur, we relocate to Havana, as Cummings flees for his life, with pop-eyed henchman Gino (Peter Lorre) on his tail.

This proto-Lynchian headfuck, based on a Cornell Woolrich story, starts promisingly, begins to flounder, explodes into life through a dazzling twist and then fails to adequately deliver on its vast promise and possibilities. It also has a little too much silliness to keep you truly immersed (special mention for the additional accelerator in the back of Cochran's car).

The Chase is an interesting and largely entertaining noir, though, with artful direction, some very effective flourishes in the script, and a decent cast – Lorre is absolutely sensational, yet again. His timing, his counter-intuition (funny when he could be frightening, moving as he chills the blood, menacing simply at will) and his ability to steal a scene using only a cigarette are the stuff of legend. (3)

***

BOOKS



Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries by Jon Ronson (published 2013)– A collection of many of Ronson's finest features for the likes of the Guardian and GQ, from a deeply upsetting, unsettling investigation into sub-prime loans – published two years before the financial crash, and inspired by the suicide of a family man deep in debt – to the aftermath of a planned school shooting in a Christmas-themed town. Other pieces are more light-hearted, like his adventures with real-life superheroes and Deal or No Deal contestants, but none are trivial, each revealing something about humanity or the world we inhabit, whether looking at bravery, open-mindedness or the rationalisations we make for being callous.

Ronson's writing is as it always is: perhaps a little formulaic in structure, but crisp and economical, righteously angry and hysterically funny, with rich veins of humanity and self-deprecation running parallel through each story. It's his wit, honesty, basic decency and genuine curiosity that makes these stories work, preventing them from reading like exploitation or sensationalism, even though he exists to document the extremes of human behaviour. At least four of these articles have been included in previous compilations, but there are a total of 26 in the second edition of Lost at Sea, and it's worth every penny.

In recent years, Ronson has had major success with full-length books (The Men Who Stare at Goats, The Psychopath Test and So You've Been Publicly Shamed), but he does still write stand-alone stories, and his gift for getting to the heart of a story, and a person, over just a few pages remains utterly remarkable. (4)

***



Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson (2001)– A beguilingly beautiful children’s novel about orphan Maia, who travels to Brazil in the early 1900s to stay with distant relatives. There, she’s tormented by her new-found family, but finds solace in her friendships with governess Miss Minton, a child actor named Clovis King, and a mysterious boy named Finn, while discovering escape in her exploration of the seductive, enrapturing world of the Brazilian jungle.

Ibbotson’s plotting is meticulous but effortless, her prose clean and economical, and her worldview exaltingly humane, without ever being cloying or naïve. She wrote the book when she was 76, but got the idea years before, entranced by the idea of the Manaus opera house, a home for the arts in the most chaotic and supposedly uncivilised of natural environments (the building was also the inspiration for Werner Herzog’s astonishing 1982 film, Fitzcarraldo.

I got hold of Journey to the River Sea to help me pitch my own kids’ book, and began reading with a sense of duty, but it knocked me absolutely sideways, and by the end I was choked to let it go. It’s timeless but modern, character-led but immaculately constructed, and paints a vivid and unforgettable portrait of early 20th century Brazil, while drawing much of its humour and conflict from the virtues and vices of Englishness. It’s unquestionably a great book, but perhaps more importantly it’s a good book: rich in human decency, and as deeply and desperately moving as anything I’ve read in years. A masterpiece. (4)

***

Now reading: The Authentic Death of Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, by Paul Seydor.

***

Thanks for reading.

The latest in my semi-regular series.



I stumbled across Paul Seydor’s book, The Authentic Death and Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (2015), while passing time between BFI screenings. Since it was 35 quid, I bided my time and purchased it from the morally reprehensible tax-avoiding online behemoth Amazon, which was selling it for just £16. The blurb promised an examination of Peckinpah’s final Western that would trace a line from verifiable fact through a deluge of fiction (beginning with Pat Garrett’s own ghostwritten book, published five years after he killed Billy the Kid) to the legendary, technically unfinished 1973 film.

It does that in a different way to how I expected – after a chapter on near-contemporary retellings, there’s little on treatments of the story besides the three which directly shaped Peckinpah’s movie – but Seydor methodically and often thrillingly examines the way that the project developed. Along the way, he sheds light on how metamorphosing Billys and Garretts play into different interpretations of philosophy, mythology and American history, offers a rare insight into the collaborative process that is moviemaking (through interviews and his own insights as a respected Hollywood film editor), and delivers a respectful but frank and unsentimental portrait of a master director who was also a tragic, tragically self-destructive alcoholic.



I embarked upon the book expecting a chronicle of how Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett have been portrayed in literature and cinema, culminating with a recreation of life on the set of the 1973 movie. Instead, I got a lesson in Peckinpah, movie editing and the endless evolution of a film that has never seemed greater – nor more flawed – than it does in Seydor’s telling. It’s more academicised than most of the film books I read, but it’s never pretentious, and if his chronicling of script revisions is only for diehard Sam fans and film nerds, those fans should find it invaluable, because of the way Seydor demonstrates that even small changes can disrupt a film’s balance or enrich its dualities. Regular readers may know that I was bored out of my wits by Todd McCarthy’s Howard Hawks biography, which managed to turn one of the most fascinating Hollywood careers into a dispassionate, insight-free collection of names and dates. Seydor’s prose style can get a trifle wearying (he loves a list of job titles), but at others it’s scintillating, and there’s no questioning his passion, intelligence and insight. The sections in which he responds to criticism on the internet are also delightful – he deals with criticism about as calmly and rationally as me (please don't get me, Paul, I liked your book).

Here are 10 things I learned:


1. Bloody well-educated Sam
I didn’t know much about Peckinpah’s background, and was surprised to learn that the hard-living, foul-mouthed, macho director studied drama at the University of Southern California, and began his career as a stage director, producing a well-received, hour-long version of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie during his senior year, followed by the playwright’s Portrait of a Madonna for his master’s thesis. He was also a fan of foreign films – particularly Rashomon (above, Kurosawa), The Magician (Bergman), La Strada (Fellini), Red Desert (Antonioni) and Pather Panchali (Ray) – and, despite preconceptions to the contrary, a liberal Democrat.


2. Pat Garrett and Peckinpah the Kid
Peckinpah first approached the subject of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid when he was asked to adapt Charles Neider’s novel, The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones– a barely-veiled treatment of the subject – in 1957. When Stanley Kubrick took over the project, he chucked out Sam’s screenplay, before leaving the project himself after clashes with his star, Marlon Brando. When the film eventually appeared in 1961 as One-Eyed Jacks, it had little of Neider and virtually nothing of Peckinpah. One of the few lines from Sam’s script to make the finished project was Brando’s “Answer me, you big tub of guts,” which is admittedly memorable but not representative of his remarkable and elegiac adaptation.


3. Blood and Gore
Arthur Penn helped usher in the New Hollywood era with the bloody Bonnie and Clyde, a new milestone in movie violence until Peckinpah far surpassed it with The Wild Bunch. Penn made his own Billy the Kid film in 1958, The Left-Handed Gun, which perpetuated one popular myth (William Bonney was right-handed, but the existing, mirrored portrait of him is rarely corrected) while offering more then-popular Freudianism than anyone can handle. Scriptwriter Gore Vidal brilliantly described it as "a film that only someone French could like".


4. Playing the Wurlitzer
Rudolph Wurtlizer’s script for Peckinpah was originally just called ‘Billy the Kid’, and detailed a man in decline, his shooting and his behaviour becoming similarly erratic as he slipped into alcoholic dissipation. As he had done with his Hendry Jones script, Peckinpah removed all scenes of Billy’s drunkenness – and in fact, all references to Billy drinking at all, bar two. Seydor argues convincingly that the director found the material too painful to deal with, being in 1957 a functioning alcoholic wracked by fears over his own self-destructiveness, and by 1972 fully aware of how his drinking was affecting his work and indeed his life.


5. 'Ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence'
Among the actors suggested for Billy were Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino and Don Johnson, though the two closest to getting the part were Jon Voight and Malcolm McDowell, whom Peckinpah had so much admired in if…. and A Clockwork Orange. Apparently he wasn't aware of how intense Peckinpah's interest was, as he prepared for and filmed O Lucky Man!. "I would have died to have worked with Peckinpah," he told Seydor. "He was a genius, one of the greatest directors who ever lived. It's a regret I will always have that it didn't happen." Marlon Brando, Jack Palance and particularly Rod Steiger were considered for Garrett, though Coburn was always the director's first choice.


6. Print the legend
There are many ludicrous myths about the film, from a lost four-hour cut that never existed, to the idea that MGM took the film out of Peckinpah's hands and re-cut it (actually it was recut by his own editors – more below – after he walked off the project), and the idea that it was a prototype Heaven’s Gate, going massively massively off schedule and over-budget. Production did run to 72 days, rather than the completely unrealistic 58 days imposed on Peckinpah and his crew, but 8-12 days involved Sam reshooting footage ruined by a faulty lens so the film could be properly finished, three were caused by a stoppage due to an influenza epidemic that killed a crew member, and several days were lost due to bad weather (under the idiotic, obnoxious James T. Aubrey, above, MGM had just removed the 5% budget overage intended to cater for inclement conditions). The extra $1.6m spent the production is about what it would cost for an extra 14 days of shooting. Editor Roger Spotiswoode sent a brilliant, pissed-off memo to production head Dan Melnick – reprinted in the book – which details a litany of impracticalities in the post-production schedule, ending with the hilariously wide-ranging and unequivocal: “Finally the schedule is totally unrealistic and impossible in all areas”.


7. The check’s in the post
The main reason for the film’s artistic failings – and indeed its commercial ones – was the ridiculous deadline imposed by MGM for post-production. For The Wild Bunch he had had a year, and in 1973 (as now), 40 weeks was considered comfortable, 30 weeks do-able and 20 tight but possible. Pat Garrett was given 16, and by the time scheduling conflicts had been resolved and re-shoots completed, it was 13. The last dailies arrived back from Mexico a week after the first cut was supposed to have been completed. MGM needed profits from the movie to help pay for their new hotel in Las Vegas so, unwaveringly committed to the Memorial Day release date supposedly (but not actually) perfect for Westerns, Aubrey threw money and staff at the project, but what it needed was time. Roger Ebert famously mentioned in his damning review that the film credited six editors: actually only three worked creatively on the film, two were hired due to union rules and a sixth helped to implement changes late in the process.


8. The first cut is the deepest?
There is no definitive cut of the film. Aside from a TV edit dictated purely by a two-hour run-time and a ban on nudity and ultra-violence, three different versions exist. The theatrical version wasn’t“butchered”, as many contest, but was carefully completed by Peckinpah’s three editors, each of whom was committed to protecting his vision, while managing the studio’s demand to lose a half hour of the running time. In the end, they compromised at 20 minutes, bringing in a cut of 106m. Wikipedia suggests that Peckinpah regarded the 122m version screened at the first preview (aka the ‘1988 Turner Preview’, after its US TV air date) as definitive, but this is nonsense. He shared it on video with friends simply because it was the only longer version of the film he had access to after walking off the project. That version is missing the scene with Garrett’s wife (excised by mistake, then returned for the second preview), has a flabbiness born of the hectic editing schedule (Peckinpah had requested fine cuts which weren’t done), features an instrumental version of Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door – sans Dylan’s vocals – over the greatest scene in the picture, and closes with an epilogue improvised in post-production, which (sort of) frames the movie as a flashback. In 2005, Seydor was asked by Warner Home Video to prepare a Special Edition, for free and with literally one hour at the controls (which just shows what contempt studios have for their audiences). He compiled a list of scenes which should be reinserted into the theatrical version to make it more complete, and recut the prologue so it was more clean, logical and thrilling, while turning the credit text yellow, as Peckinpah had wanted. None of the versions are finished, but it’s the 2005 one – which runs 115m – that I tend to watch, as it seems the closest to the director’s grand and complex vision (though who can really say).


9. 'Well there was this movie I seen one time/About a man riding 'cross the desert'
Bob Dylan, who contributes a sometimes majestic score and some of the worst line readings in movies, asked his friend Wurlitzer to get him on the project, as he was so interested in Billy the Kid. The decision was greenlit by producer Gordon Carroll, but wound up Peckinpah, who had his own pet rock star on set (Kris Kristofferson) and greeted Dylan by telling him that he was "big fan of Roger Miller". In fact, when Wurlitzer and Monte Hellman initially devised the film as a follow-up to their classic B-movie Two-Lane Blacktop, the idea was to tell a story of burnt-out rock stars using Garrett and The Kid as surrogates. Peckinpah's memos show that he thought Dylan's score needed "sweetening" (open to interpretation in a dozen ways), and on the advice of regular collaborator Jerry Fielding took the singer's vocals off the great death scene, because they were too on the nose. He later questioned the decision, but by then the vocals were back on the soundtrack, and he was off the film.


10. 'C’mon, you lazy bastard'
The book's most remarkable revelation is that when Charles Aubrey left MGM in November 1973, seven months after the film had disappeared from theatres amidst critical opprobrium, public disinterest and financial catastrophe, studio intermediary (and Peckinpah sympathiser) Dan Melnick offered Sam the chance to come back to the studio and create a definitive version. He let the chance slide, his collaborators suspecting that he knew there were unfixable problems with the film, and this way he had an easy out: he would have created another masterpiece, but the fucking studio wouldn't let him.

***



Thanks for reading.