That's it. There is nothing else.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973)



I wrote a piece earlier this week about 10 things I'd learned from reading Paul Seydor's recent book on Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, but I fancied sharing some of my own thoughts on the movie, and what better way than by treating myself to a home viewing of the 1988 Turner Preview cut:

*A FEW SPOILERS*

When the world’s premier director of Westerns announced that he was making a movie about Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, it seemed the perfect marriage of artist and endeavour, but everything went wrong. Studio politics, an influenza epidemic and Peckinpah’s own self-destructive behaviour turned a dream project into a nightmare, and when a truncated version of this bleak, knackered Western about the dying of a world reached cinemas, it left critics fuming and audiences cold.

Fast forward 15 years to 1988 and Turner’s unveiling of a version hurriedly prepared for the first test screening, which ran 16 minutes longer and included several unseen or extended sequences, including the ‘Tuckerman’s Hotel’ chapter featuring Elisha Cook, Jr, an epilogue that revisits the prologue, creating a full framing device, and longer versions of the first scene in Fort Sumner, the prison escape and Peckinpah’s appearance as the coffin maker. Less auspiciously, the edit was missing the scenes between Garrett and his wife, Chisum (Barry Sullivan) and prostitute Ruthie Lee (the former cut in error), and wasn’t looped, fine cut or finished, slightly undermining the idea that it was somehow a definitive version of the film. As Peckinpah scholar Paul Seydor has made clear in his fine book on the film: there is no definitive version.

In any edit, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is a compromised, sometimes confused film that manages to both debunk and pay homage to the mythos of the Old West, as newly-elected sheriff Pat Garrett slowly circles his old friend Billy the Kid who is, in the words of Townes Van Zandt, “just waiting around to die”. Garrett, as realised by James Coburn, is implacable, instinctive and methodical, effortlessly in command in any scenario, for all the good it does him. He is a man who is never at peace, and whose only evident ethos is to do a job well. Billy (Kris Kristofferson) is a round-faced, carousing kid gone slightly to seed, whose much-heralded freedom seems simply to be the freedom to bum around whoring and shooting up places, his existence essentially meaningless and inert, as he threatens revenge or revelation, but only ever acts to reinstate a status quo.

This episodic movie alternates between the protagonists, and though some of the chapters are sluggish or lacking Peckinpah’s usual punch (the prostitutes montage is absolutely shit), there are several masterpieces: Charlie Bowdre’s death scene; the murders of Bell and Ollinger with a line torn from history (the pre-emptive: “And he’s killed me too”); the taut, hard-nosed suspense sequence and gun duel at Horrell’s trading post, featuring Alamosa Bill (Jack Elam); the pastoral but ominous, eerie raft scene (which plays perfectly without words, a late decision by Peckinpah); and the climactic passage, which floors and astounds me, no matter how many times I see it. Though the death of Slim Pickens’ Sheriff Brady by the river is my favourite scene in the picture, it plays so much better in the 2005 Special Edition, which simply added several missing scenes to the extant theatrical edit (as well as re-cutting the prologue), and so features Dylan’s ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ vocal here, as well as possessing a vibrancy in the colours that has been lost in the degrading stock of the Preview edit (only one copy of which ever existed).

Those passages of sustained brilliance, and the film’s general audacity of vision – entirely shorn of glamour and romance – are allied to a presentation of the West that I find both horrifying and seductive. Leonard Maltin complained in his review of the film that “there isn’t enough contrast in the two low-key performances”, but it’s that complexity of characterisation I find so fascinating. Peckinpah and screenwriter Wurlitzer show legality and wrongdoing as simply a matter of timing, deftly and superbly articulating the ease with which outlaws and lawmen swapped places.

Peckinpah never finished the film and never made another Western, but what he left here (quite literally, actually, quitting the film after the second preview) is a remarkable if uneven achievement. He only told Seydor that he regretted the film sinking from trace because it was “one of Jimmy Coburn’s best performances” and I’d go further – it’s simply his best. Nothing else he did approached the multi-faceted, morally labyrinthine Garrett, the character’s inner life laid bare across 122 minutes, and though Kristofferson can’t match him and Dylan can’t act (or at least can’t speak dialogue, his Chaplinesque presence is genuinely effective), the supporting cast is one for the ages, with fine work from Sullivan, Elam, Pickens, Cook, Chill Wills, Katy Jurado, Paul Fix, Harry Dean Stanton and Gene Evans. The film can be shabby and shambling and silly, frustratingly imperfect and banteringly macho in the most tiresome way, but it’s also one of the most original, important and poetic Westerns ever made: the slow, circuitous slaughter of a man resigned to his fate by another trying to change his destiny and his duty. (4)

***



CINEMA: Casque d'Or (Jacques Becker, 1952)– Man, I love French films: their easy sensuality and heavy irony, their crushing cynicism and sparkling wit, and the apparently effortless technical fluidity that so often leaves their British counterparts trailing in the dirt. This one is from Jacques Becker, whose other best-known movie was the film noir Touchez pas au grisbi, and for a long time it's wonderful: a crime-flavoured turn-of-the-century rom-com based on a notorious tabloid scandal, and full of sex and danger and moustaches.

Simone Signoret is absolutely enchanting as Marie, a prostitute in the Paris of 1902 (her blonde hair the 'golden helmet' of the title), who ditches brutish pimp Raymond for carpenter Manda (Serge Reggiani), a man who really loves her. Their halting romance leads to tragedy, thanks in part to the machinations of local crime kingpin Leca (Claude Dauphin), a sadistic, manoeuvring misogynist so utterly vile he should be in Trump's cabinet.

It's a film full of surprises, of irony and of heady moods, each one effortlessly evoked by Becker's thoughtful direction and Signoret's intoxicating performance: she falls in love with us on a dancefloor (her eyes somehow trained unstintingly on us, and on Manda, even as she turns), surprises us in a blissful bucolic neverworld, and watches from the window of a cheap hotel as fatalism plunges her into the unthinkable.

It's such a superb performance, perhaps the best of hers that I've seen: playful, amusing and appealing, her Marie so ridiculously sexy and thoroughly decent, yet also largely credible as a powerless whore in a brutal, unforgiving man's world that may be stylistically sanitised for '50s cinema, but is just as emotionally uncompromising as it should be, Becker steadfastly refusing to sugarcoat or dress up the compromises she's forced to make, most strikingly in one particularly sickening moment in Dauphin's apartment. That it follows hot on the heels of that utterly beautiful sequence in the church (my favourite scene of the film) makes it even harder to take.

It's the story that lets Signoret down, the plotting starting to plod after a lo-fi prison escape attempt, as if someone nudged Becker and handed him a checklist of film noir clichés and weepie tropes, compounding the compromises of a slightly synthetic period atmosphere (despite a compressed, repressed intensity about Reggiani, in this distracting get-up it's hard to be immersed in his plight). There are still a couple of fine, wry touches in the closing reels, but the final third lacks the distinctiveness and novelty of what precedes it, and gives its star less to do − or at least less interesting things to do.

Tragedies, least of all conventional ones that force her to suffer, were never really Signoret's forte: she was too lively and saucy and tough-but-tender. When I say I love French films, that encompasses so many of hers, but I'll always love the acidic tang of Les Diaboliques, La Ronde's effortless panache, the weighty dynamism of Melville's Army of Shadows and this one's irresistible first hour more than, say, the formulaic functionality of Thérèse Raquin or Casque d'Or's over-familiar closing reels. (3)

***



CINEMA: Fat City (John Huston, 1972)– An unglamorous, unsentimental and uncompromising boxing flick, with John Huston trying on some New Hollywood togs and finding that they suit him just fine. For an hour, he bobs and weaves – playing much of the story for laughs – before whacking us repeatedly in the solar plexus, as his film finds both its rhythm and its raison d'être.

Stacy Keach is down-and-out ex-boxer, Billy Tully, his zigzag descent into manual labour, irreleverance and alcoholism contrasted with the similarly haphazard ascent of pretty-boy pugilist, Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges). We never see Bridges win a fight, and we never see Keach lose one, but by the end of the film, one has the American Dream and the other is fagged out and fucked.

I'm not an enormous fan of that first hour: it commences with back-to-back scenes soundtracked only by songs – while both sequences are fine in themselves, that quirk is without real artistic or dramatic value – and when the film does get going, its moments of everyday tragedy are somewhat lost in an episodic structure and a style that leans too much towards the glib and cartoonish.

It's not unusual for Huston to segue from comedy to pain (as I believe Tom Jones once sang): he did it in his two great late films, Wise Blood and The Dead, but there it was underscored by melancholia, rather than interrupting it. It doesn't help that several of the bit players can't really act.

In the final 40, though, the gloves come off, and the film's punches begin to really land. The virtues that have been obscured by padding and side-stepping become blindingly obvious: Keach's bruising, multi-layered performance, the bitter poetry of Leonard Gardner's dialogue, Susan Tyrell's fantastically annoying turn as the tragic, throaty, and self-pitying Ona, and Conrad L. Hall's sumptuous cinematography, which captures both the glory of a Californian summer and the horror of perhaps cinema's worst home-cooked meal.

These final reels hinge on a thrilling, gruelling and magnificently ugly fight, and the unceremonial slide to the bottom that follows it, closing with one of my favourite unresolved endings (or is it? From this one scene, perhaps we can plot these characters' next 10 years). But what heralds them is a scene every bit as remarkable, as Keach's manager turns up to drag him out of a bar, and the grey-faced, drink-sodden fighter lets it all hang out. "Ever since my wife left me, it's just been one thing after another," he says, and it's so raw I had to catch my breath. (3)

***

Thanks for reading.

Wednesday 15 March, 2017



This explosive, intelligent stage version of MGM’s 1951 masterpiece, direct from Broadway, sags now and then in its book, but offers unmissable entertainment of a type rarely seen in the West End.

We began in the tumult of postwar Paris, less the escapist playground of the film and more a ravaged battleground where demobbed soldiers try to forget the war, women feel in perpetual danger and collaborators are being beaten and getting their heads shaved. Craig Lucas’s script offers a rejigged, re-ordered narrative that adds extra Gershwin songs (the film doesn’t have nearly enough), underscores the action with a battle fatigue that accentuates its more carefree moments, and leads to a putting-on-a-ballet climax that’s imaginatively conceived in narrative and artistic terms.



Its great masterstroke is turning the sardonic narrator from the grouchy, alienated middle-aged Adam played by Oscar Levant into David Seadon-Young’s war vet (above, left), an inspired innovation that lends a far greater heft to his sequences, if rather undermining the appeal of Jerry Mulligan (Robert Fairchild), one of three protagonists now in love with the same woman, the gamine ballerina, Lise (Leanne Cope, a worthy successor to Leslie Caron). Jerry is a painter who truly cares for Lise, but when you put this character into a more realistic, grounded world of Nazis, collaborators and the battle between duty and romance, his charming rom-com stalking comes off as a little thin, selfish and, y’know, sexist. The other romantic possibility for Lise is her fiancée, Henri Baurel (Hayden Oakley), a French aristocrat who dreams of being a musical-theatre star, and who here is a nervous, cautious man with a rather abrupt back story.



Fairchild and Cope (above) both originated their roles on Broadway, and they’re superb dancers, while transmitting the basic traits that make their characters appealing: Jerry’s ease in his skin, his irreverence and athleticism, Lise’s combination of the elfin and the erotic, a latent fire burning beneath an ethereality that – like Audrey Hepburn’s – seems dictated by the privations of war. Their characterisations can’t quite bridge the shortcomings of the script (Jerry’s quite selfish, Lise is something of a cipher), but their song-and-dance talents are unimpeachable. The moment that the climactic ballet explodes into sensual life is pure exhilaration, with shades of Bob Fosse’s revolutionary, finger-clicking goodness in Kiss Me Kate. In support, Zoe Rainey makes for a sparky, hugely appealing Milo (younger, and funnier, than Nina Foch), Oakley is pretty good balancing the inconsistencies of his character, and Seadon-Young is simply terrific as the lovelorn, limping war vet who channels his unhappiness and romantic impotence into his art.

The staging is similarly superb, making the most of the stage’s depth through some striking compositions, and mixing the irregular patterns and primary colours of ‘50s art with the more impressionistic style of the MGM film, and many of its most enchanting, striking and transportative effects achieved through brilliant projections and lighting. That sense of intelligent, contextualised innovation extends to the musical numbers, which are an absolute knockout. Beginner’s Luck is the epitome of vibrant, perfectly choreographed, 1950s-style showstopping magic, as Jerry crashes Lise’s workplace at the Galleries Lafayette perfume counter, turning the room into a riot of colour, extravagant hoofing and umbrellas.



When Henri makes his live debut, we get all the art deco razzmattaz of a ‘30s Warner musical, but framed in the realism of an awkward, halting first show that explodes into fantasy. It’s lovely too that its post-modern but idealistic escapism extends to Adam losing his limp and getting to share the spotlight (though it loses a fraction of a point for Oakley being unable to hit that climactic top note, instead going down an octave). I Got Rhythm too tinkers with the film’s formula, bringing all three love rivals together for the first time and incorporating an inspired, hushed, candlelit middle-eight with diegetic sound. Character-led, grounded numbers that still thump it out of the park are about the best thing that musicals can offer, and there are several here. And though we don’t get the breathtaking Seine-side dance to Our Love Is Here to Stay that’s one of the MGM movie’s great virtues, this stage version does incorporate several Gershwin songs from other shows, including his fondest, saddest, most romantic creation – Our Love Is Here to Stay – as well as The Man I Love and, erm, Fidgety Feet. The vocals are strong while retaining a fair amount of the subtlety and personality that can be lost in musical theatre, and the orchestra is fantastic: punchy and precise, like John Wilson at his considerable best.



The show climaxes with a ballet that’s still a hypnotic fantasy of love, but now coupled with a putting-on-a-ballet climax, as Lise makes her first public performance, but can only acquire the requisite passion by calling Jerry to mind. For a little while you wonder if they’ve botched it by junking the movie’s journey through different artistic styles – though Singin’ in the Rain is now the best-loved and most-respected of all MGM musicals, in the ‘50s it was An American in Paris, and particularly this sequence, that was regarded as the studio’s supreme achievement – but with Jerry’s entrance it becomes a powerful, extremely sexy and all together beguiling proposition: the bob-haired Cope draped across Fairchild, or swaggering, shoulders-back, towards us, as he pirouettes furiously, exuberantly around the perimeter of the stage.

It’s a stunning highlight of a show that’s less slick, seamless and smooth in the book than it needs to be – the jokes are patchy, and a laboured subplot about Henri’s parents isn’t helped by shallow sentimentality and broad playing – but knows its strengths, with some intelligent weighting towards the political context, fine acting, and musical moments that are everything they should be and more. And since I was lucky enough to land a ticket for the first night, I also got to see Leslie Caron come and take a bow. (3.5)


(Pic credit: Heidi Bohnenkamp)

***

Thanks for reading.

Cultural excursions, 11 March to date. I also have this stupid thing called Choose Your Own Twadventure, which you can take part in here.

FILMS



CINEMA: Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016)– An intensely beautiful, compassionate film in three parts about a quiet, 'soft' African-American boy being battered by the inner-city experience as he tries to deal with his tortured sexual awakening.

Barry Jenkins' movie has something of Soderbergh's captivating coming-of-age film, King of the Hill, and the same poetic eye as Killer of Sheep and Half Nelson– a camera lapped by waves or jostled by a crowd of laughing boys, fingers spreading in the sand during orgasm – but it feels revelatory and revolutionary in its subject matter, its impeccable structural control and its innate sensitivity, which strips away the distancing, self-mythologising bravado of gang culture to find something vulnerable, human and humane.

Three generations of Chirons and Kevins lead a flawless cast, and from the breathless dash for the sanctuary of a junkie's den to that steadicam shot trailing Black as he heads to the climactic encounter, Moonlight is masterfully directed: an enveloping, once-in-a-lifetime film about the constancy, malleability and complexity of human nature, the pain and ecstasy of love, and the world's vicious but not quite unrelenting assault on the weak. (4)

***



CINEMA: Raising Arizona (Joel Coen, 1987)– This early Coens comedy is sometimes too cartoonish for my own dubious taste, but how do you criticise something that’s clearly exactly what the makers wanted it to be – and so damn good most of the time?

Simon Pegg presented Raising Arizona as part of the BFI’s Screen Epiphanies strand, explaining that it paved the way for Shaun of the Dead, opening his eyes to the fact that even cuts and camera angles could be comic, then took his seat in the auditorium, hooting with laughter throughout. The film has some of the best lines the Coens will ever write (“Do these balloons blow up into funny shapes?” “No... unless round is funny”), a lovely performance from Holly Hunter as a straight-shooting cop who wants a baby so badly that she crosses to the other side of the law, and a genuine sweetness too often absent from Joel and Ethan’s films, particularly in its beautiful closing sequence. It also has Trey Wilson as unpainted furniture tycoon, Nathan Arizona (catchphrase: "... or my name ain't Nathan Arizona").

But at times it’s too noisy, mannered and self-satisfied to get truly lost in, yelling its own subversiveness and invention in your face, or sometimes just yelling for no good reason. It’s possible to be madcap without just being annoying, as Carole Lombard can tell you, and there’s so much here that’s original, interesting and affecting that I wish the Coen Bros had wanted to make a slightly different film, one that I’d really like (I appreciate that this is a selfish, unrealistic proposition).

As a man immune to the self-mythologising post-modern joke that is Nicolas Cage, I’ve got to admit that at times he can be just great, and here (a year after his very worst performance, in Peggy Sue Got Married) he finds a truth in caricature, like Mike Leigh or the young Johnny Depp, that’s really impressive. There are great gags all over the place, showy shots – including that one over the car, up the ladder, through a window and into Florence Arizona’s mouth that the Coens put in as a challenge to Sam Raimi, who bettered it in Evil Dead 2– and then there’s Holly Hunter singing Down in the Willow Garden. For that I can forgive, if not forget, John Goodman’s endless shouting or those moments when even the leads are asked to push it just a mite too far.

BONUS QUOTES:

“I tried to stand up and fly straight, but it wasn't easy with that sumbitch Reagan in the White House. I dunno. They say he's a decent man, so maybe his advisors are confused.”

"Need a beer, Glen?"
"Does the Pope wear a funny hat?"

(3)

***



Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (Alex Gibney, 2010)– A standard Alex Gibney doc, this time about disgraced former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, with the usual questionable pacing and shambling structure, but also a typically fascinating subject and the filmmaker’s strong journalistic insights in his favoured areas of capitalism, corruption and moral capitulation.

Spitzer was a crusading DA known as ‘the sheriff of Wall Street’ who sought to curb the spectacular, immoral excesses of AIG, Merrill Lynch et al, only to be turfed out of office for using prostitutes. Starting, peculiarly, at the end of the story, and then sort of running in loads of different directions at once, Gibney examines who Spitzer was, what he stood for and why he threw it away, while underlining the hypocrisy and dubious practices of corporate America.

The subject, to give him credit, is fairly frank about his failings, and blames no-one else for his downfall, which feels like not just a betrayal of his family, but also a dereliction of duty as the sub-prime scandal set to blow. The flipside, of course, is that Spitzer bothered to go after these companies like no-one ever had before, so in political terms we're judging him by his own high standards.

There's the usual strong, confessional interview footage, full of Gibney's precise, probing questions, as well as some solid material, though the scuzzy direction doesn't always make for the most coherent storytelling, let alone alight on the most telling juxtapositions. There's a good story here, though, told without sensationalism or triviality, and with a gallery of interesting, colourful supporting characters, including giggly, morally bankrupt pimp, Cecil Suwal, and peroxided right-wing weirdo Roger Stone, who's a fantastic character and also a massive twat. (3)

See also:I wrote about Gibney's 2013 film, The Armstrong Lie, here.

BOOK



Anthem by Ayn Rand (1937)– Rand’s short dystopian novel is a short, precise critique of totalitarianism, anticipating both 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, and climaxing with the heavy-handed ‘anthem’ of the title: a two-chapter crystallisation of the philosophy that she would late name ‘objectivism’, in which the ego is king. Here the style is substance, the story written in the first person plural at irregular intervals, as Equality 7-2521 – working by candlelight, underground – attempts to understand their flaws and sins, borne of a latent individuality in the age of the masses. There are allusions to the hypocrisy and anti-intellectualism of Soviet Russia (a Russia that robbed the Rand family of everything it had), but it’s not the box-ticking revenge porn you might fear, setting its sights higher and broader than just Bolshevism, with allusions to the torchlight regressiveness of Nazi Germany, and a firm grasp of an alternative ideology, even when pitting it against her usual straw man.

Rand hadn’t fully mastered English when she first wrote the novel, so she returned to it in 1946, after the success of The Fountainhead (1943), cleaning up passages while retaining – as she was clear to stress in her foreword – the meaning of the book. Though the allegory here is cleaner than in The Fountainhead, it’s primarily because Anthem is more simplistic and mannered, lacking the colour, depth and scope of character of that daring, problematic odyssey, and with a climax that seems more like over-the-top wish-fulfilment than an inspiring call-to-arms. For all that, it’s a distinctive and memorable work that does what it’s trying to, highlighting the ideological failings of populist extremism (while extending them to anyone exhibiting basic empathy), with flashes of stark, brutal poetry as Equality 7-2521 learns to love and question and create. (3)

Next up: Just Kids by Patti Smith. I'm nearly done.

***

EXHIBITION



Rauschenberg (Tate Modern)– Another trip to the Tate Modern, where I stand forever suspended (or rather furiously oscillating) between the opposing schools of ‘This is extraordinary’ and ‘This is pretentious bollocks that means nothing’. I always like it if there’s a good painting somewhere, for the assurance that the other forms of expression are an artistic choice and not a necessity born of basic talentlessness. Rauschenberg’s tactile, 3D works in constant motion are really strong and alive (a bubbling pit; stainless steel machinery reassembled, water running through it forever) and some of his transfers and screen prints are a striking, even overpowering synthesis of ancient themes and modern style, multimedia news and disposable pop culture ripped free and fused to depict a time of drowned hope, desperate sorrow and impotent rage.

Often you see a burgeoning new style develop across a single series of works: his 34 modern illustrations for Dante’s Inferno begin as bitty, exploratory and hard-to-follow; by 32, the painting is tying together the disparate borrowed visuals (transferred from newspapers using lighter fluid and pressure from an empty ballpoint pen) into something cohesive, immersive and provocative. At other times, context makes us at least contemplate the dynamic he is attempting: a wooden box parodying similar holders of religious artefacts but filled with dirt could be a comment on the irrelevance of faith, but seems here to be about the miracle of nature, Picasso’s “found objects” given an earthy, pastoral grandeur. Elsewhere he utterly lost me, with ‘sculptures’ that were just a couple of cardboard boxes – one complete, one disassembled – and ballet routines (captured on video) rendered stale by crass camerawork, the performers’ dated stylistics and choreography that seems turgid, limited and graceless.

As an overview, this exhibition is sumptuously put together, and (as a newcomer to this work) seems close to definitive, but Rauschenberg didn’t move me like Malevich, Matisse or much of the Abstract Expressionism I saw at the Royal Academy last year. It did, however, include the greatest artwork description in the history of the world:



(2.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

The latest in my now-almost-regular series. Recent articles include The Crying Game, Peter Lorre and Lillian Gish.


Yes, I do have excellent seats, thank you for noticing.

Allison Anders’ 1992 indie has been a favourite of mine for years. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve watched my battered, pan-and-scan VHS copy, taped off Channel 4 a few years later. I love Anders’ unique viewpoint – empathetic, unsensationalised, real – her film’s delicate balancing of emotions, and its aesthetic and emotional treats: Jay Mascis’s spare, evocative guitar score, Dean Lent’s decolourised, subtly beautiful cinematography, and Fairuza Balk’s performance, the greatest of a sporadically spectacular career in which she has been unfailingly fine, but in films only sometimes befitting her transcendent gifts.

She’s the teenage, introspective Shade, who lives with her sister Trudie (Ione Skye) and their single mom (Brooke Adams) in a New Mexico trailer. Like River Phoenix’s hero in Idaho, Shade is also searching for a family, but in an inert, haphazard way that keeps her within the boundaries of a drab, colourless small town. Ione, the town slut, has regular shouting matches with her witty, loyal, self-pitying mother, but both are masking a desperate pain, scrolling through romantic misadventures much like Shade’s heroes, those characters depicted by glamorous Spanish movie star Elvia Rivero in the local fleapit.



It’s a series of glorious vignettes – held together within an ingenious, elasticated structure – from those gloriously-realised films-within-a-film, a romantic encounter in a cave lit by violet light, and Adams’ charmingly weird ‘first date’ with an old flame, to Balk’s hilariously incompetent, profoundly moving seduction of Darius (Donovan Leitch, Jr.), and her gradual discovery of a soulmate in the shape of cherubic ‘cholo’ Javier (Jacob Vargas). Balk dominates throughout, with a performance of startling depth and beguiling sensitivity, though I don’t see it as the whole show, as I think I used to. Skye and Adams are both terrific (despite the odd wooden line-reading), James Brolin is superb as a benevolent stranger and, seeing the film as it should be – on a big screen, in a sumptuous new digital print – one is struck by the clarity of Anders’ artistic vision, her lack of judgmentalism, and her consummating shepherding of her creative collaborators, their talents drawn out and drawn together in the service of the story.

That story seems fresh now, was ahead of its time even in 1998, and must have been positively revolutionary six years earlier. Just watch Trudie’s departure for Dallas, a sequence that Kelly Reichardt would be proud of in 2017, and see how Anders deals with these female characters frankly and honestly, employing a deft, humanist poetry born of mutual dependence, pragmatism and real love, in place of the trite sentimentalism that dominates so much of cinema. And watch Balk trailing off into the brush, her ferocious loyalty and protectiveness of her spiky, abrasive older sister paying off not with a Hollywood ending, but with one that’s ultimately more satisfying, because it’s honest.

It's a great film. One of the great films. And, like Idaho, it's not flawless, but it's more important than films which arguably are.


That absolutely American DVD cover (it's never been released over here), with a misleading photo and a dreadful tagline: "When Shade's good, she's very good. But when Trudi's bad, she's better."

On Tuesday, the BFI held a special 25th anniversary screening. Here are 10 things I learnt from writer-director Allison Anders’ post-film Q&A:


1. Learning on a Wim
Anders was mentored by arthouse giant Wim Wenders, after a sustained campaign to win his favour that include writing him letters up to 30 pages long, and – with two of her friends – winning grants to study with him on the set of Paris, Texas, without asking him if it would be OK. When she did, Wenders looked into the distance, and said: “Oh well, you better come along then.” Dean Lent, who went on to shoot Gas, Food Lodging, studied cinematographer Robby Müller obsessively on the set of Paris, Texas. Her second mentor was Martin Scorsese. His Universal deal in the mid-1990s included the capacity to produce five smaller-budget features. His then-girlfriend, Ileana Douglas, asked for a meeting with Anders, they got on well, and decided to make Grace of My Heart (Anders’ 1996 movie, set in the Brill Building). Scorsese had planned a Lieber and Stoller biopic himself, but couldn’t get the knots out of his story. When Anders was briefly away from the Grace set, star Matt Dillon found himself working under Scorsese. “I can’t believe you left me with this hack,” he told her.


2. Chicago fired
Anders’ Belgian producer, Carl Colpaert, picked up Gas, Food Lodging’s source novel – Don’t Look and It Won’t Hurt by Richard Peck – at a thrift store for 10 cents, and optioned the rights. Anders wrote two drafts of the script, in the process scrapping the Chicago setting, streamlining Trudie’s character – “you can’t be both the town slut and the most popular girl in school”, adding a sex life for the mum (“a tired woman who just worked and raised the kids”) – and removing a third kid “because to be honest, [the mum] had enough to do”. By the time filming commenced, almost all of the material was her own.


3. ‘I’m never gonna cease to roam’
The film was set in New Mexico “because the producers wanted to go to New Mexico”. Anders was determined not to shoot somewhere too beautiful, like Santa Fe, as the basic drabness of the setting was integral to her vision, which coupled the mundane and the magical. The scenes set inside the trailer were filmed in a trailer home, put in a warehouse for absolute control over the setting.


4. Caving in
Nick Cave was the original choice for Robert Knepper’s character, an English rock-collector, which would have been ideal, as he spends most of his time in caves. An unnamed, high-profile English actor was then cast, but then dropped out at the last minute. Anders apologised for Knepper’s accent, but it’s actually pretty good.


5. Balking at Barrymore
Anders tested "every actor of that age who is now famous" for the part of Shade, including Drew Barrymore and Reese Witherspoon. She wanted the character to have a range and complexity that was beyond the capabilities of everyone aside from Balk. "All the actors were either bubbly or dark, but Fairuza had that lightness and depth." In my question, I'd said that Balk was "so good" in the film. "Isn't she?!" enthused Anders, adding that she is "great in everything". (I've discussed Fairuza's erratic career here.) She singled out the scene in the hospital room (perhaps the greatest thing the actress does in the picture), joking that she was "incredibly grateful to Milos Forman, as he had taught her to cry effortlessly on demand" while filming Valmont. Anders said Balk's performance resonated so much because "she was quite like that character, and she had been raised by a single mum", as had Skye, while Anders and Adams were both single parents themselves.


6. Darius' vassal
Is Darius, the object of Shade's initial affections, gay? Anders and her editor, Tracy Granger decided in the edit that it should be unresolved. And Leitch, in his performance, had done the same thing. "He's camp, and he's probably gay, but maybe he's just a New Romantic," Anders said.


7. Up to scratch
Granger 'aged' the Elvia Rivero footage by scratching it with her stepdad's Victrola. He was Richard Brooks, and it was the one he had used on the set of In Cold Blood. Her parents, incidentally, were two greats of the British screen: the ethereal Jean Simmons, and matinee idol Stewart Granger.


8. Lost in translation
Anders' one regret with the finished film is that she didn't subtitle the Spanish dialogue (though the Rivera sequences were subtitled when it screened on Channel 4, and I have the beaten-up pan-and-scan video to prove it). The reason, apparently, was money, and Anders' concern that audiences weren't used to watching subtitled films. Mascis was particularly disappointed when he saw the completed version, saying that it spoiled the climactic scene between Shade and Javier.


9. Allison's starting to happen
Having studied the French New Wave, German New Cinema and British Free Cinema at UCLA, Anders (top of frame) wanted to be part of a movement "and then I was": the American arthouse scene of the early '90s. She's directed seven features in total, as well as three TV movies, and has directed episodes of The Mentalist, Orange Is the New Black and a certain vapid show about four single women exploring Manhattan's dating scene. Though Anders isn't a big fan of TV, those four Sex and the City episodes keep the money rolling in even now, and have presumably helped her to realise other, more personal, projects.


10. Terrence's stamp
An essential 10th insight courtesy of the Telegraph's Tim Robey, who asked Anders about the apparent influence of Terrence Malick's breathtaking Days of Heaven, perhaps the most beautiful colour film ever made, which he'd spotted in Shade's voiceover and the final shot. You're right, said Anders, and it was intentional.

... and finally...


Those are not typos above. After all these years, we FINALLY have an answer on the title. It is not 'Gas Food Lodging' (as in the BFI's programme) or 'Gas, Food, Lodging' as it's frequently written but, erm, 'Gas, Food Lodging' (kudos to IMDb, who have it correct). "We couldn't afford a second comma in the credits," according to Anders, which is NOT an explanation and renders the above poster INACCURATE.
***

Thanks for reading.

Wednesday 29 March



Jens Lekman is back and this time it's personal. For me.

My little brother's been a fan for years: a decade ago, I got him Lekman's second album, Night Falls Over Kortedala, for Christmas, and last year I bought him tickets to this show. He invited me to come with him, so I thought I better do some homework. For a month I listened to almost nothing else, first through a desire to not be bored at the show, and then after a few days because I'd fallen for his music: his wordplay (like Billy Wilder, in his second language, ffs), his absurdism and offbeat sentimentality, like a Wes Anderson film brought to life, but without the posing. As much as I love music, and as many gigs as I go to, it isn't often that I'm so attuned to an artist's music at the exact time their show rolls into London. So I was excited.

And then Jens came on stage at 9:15, to announce that he had flu, but was determined to do the show, provided he was sure that "you have my back, London". As he struggled manfully through a delicate 'To Know Your Mission', accompanying himself on guitar, my heart began to sink. He was nasal and a little laboured, with a severely compromised mid-range (or 'chest voice') that even his playful self-referencing − pointing to himself as his in-song avatar enters the action − couldn't distract from. And yet within minutes we, and apparently he, had forgotten all about his flu, his all-female band joining him on-stage and launching into a run of reworkings of songs from his new record, greeted with a succession of deafening ovations. He played just 70 minutes in total, but the audience left murmuring that it was one of the best shows they'd ever seen.

Oval Space, the venue, is a strange, erm, space. I imagine it's trendy. It's airy, with quite a high ceiling, and flanked by floor-to-ceiling windows on its right hand side, orange lights from houses hanging in the distance. So while it may lack the visceral, punky immersion of a dank, hot, low-ceilinged cellar, on the plus side it's actually quite pleasant to stand in. Jens comes on stage in a white t-shirt and black jacket, a black cap pulled down over his pale, shaven scalp. His face is slim and angular, full of striking planes, and when he takes off his jacket, he doesn't fill out his t-shirt. Nowadays every singer-songwriter seems to spend most of the time in the gym, working on their biceps, whereas Jens looks reassuringly and appealing like a man who spends his time writing songs and (according to a friend of a friend who knows him, washing-up at other people's house parties).

His first song with the full band is an extended version of 'What's That Perfume That You Wear', the most popular song on his new record, if Spotify is a decent barometer. I find the first half of its chorus a bit trite − it sounds like someone reading out a shelf at Boots − but then the pathos kicks in and half destroys you. Live, it's joyous, its quiet sorrow cowering behind an amp as Lekman's constantly pogoing bassist drives that highly danceable riff. We get a jangly, rocky 'Evening Prayer'− probably my favourite song on the album, a tale of empathy and 3D printers − a passable 'Hotwire the Ferris Wheel', and a committed 'How We Met, the Long Version', now given the epic sweep that it deserves as a musical equivalent of Malick's Tree of Life. 'Dandelion Seed' is beautifully rendered too, though Jens loses either his voice or his place for its key line ("I built a bomb-shelter under every dream"), robbing it of its climactic power. The other of the seven songs from Life Will See You Now is 'Wedding at Finistère', one of those songs you feel like you've always known, with an ingenious structure a perfect chorus. Here the choruses − accompanied only by claps − lack the certainty and rhythmic relentlessness of the record, but the song's still great fun, and Jens flashes his guitar angularly to drag us gracefully and stylistically back into each verse.



I've rarely seen a backing band look happier: the grinning drummer on backing vocals, the keyboardist pounding out Lekman's climbing melodies, and the leaping bassist's chemistry with Jens apparent, as she calls for us to celebrate his genius, and he skips over to give her a kiss on the cheek, in a fug of mutual fondness. Jens, meanwhile, swaps between electric, acoustic, and a keyboard/sampler/synth.

As a performer, he's as you'd expect from his autobiographical songs: playful and friendly, but also a showman, with star quality and ineffable, effortless cool that comes not from an arrogant self-regard, but his charisma and talent. On stage, he's intimate, conversational and even kind − standing on the raised stage telling us to look after one another in this scary world − but he's also politely unapologetic about approach to his art. When he welcomes Parisian support act, The Dove & the Wolf, to join him for an old song, two fans begin yelling requests. "There's actually a song we've rehearsed," he says gently, but sarcastically, and they launch into one of them: 'Black Cab', his anthem of anxiety, self-loathing and catharsis, from his first real EP in 2003. He allows the audience to sing that great, self-referential line, "Oh you're so silent, Jens" (later the title of his early years retrospective_, with his backing singers helping him to belt out the plaintive chorus: those words "black cab", again and again, a clarion call for a man who just wants to get the fuck out of this party. It's pretty spectacular, and so is the atmosphere.

There are other early songs too, and he reshapes them all: 'A Postcard to Nina', his tale of being the world's worst beard for a lesbian friend, with another masterpiece of self-reflexion ("Yours truly, Jens Lek-man"), a stripped-down, apologetic 'I Know What Love Isn't', which he introduces by saying "I was in a cynical period when I wrote this" and then sitting on the stage for the second chorus, before climbing down to offer the proposal to a man at the barrier ("Let's get married… I'm serious…"). It segues into perhaps the best song of the night, 'The Opposite of Hallelujah' transformed from a passable 2007 single into a raucous, floor-shaking crowdpleaser.

Another highlight is 'Maple Leaves', which is charming and timeless on that 2003 EP, but live becomes a joyous, shimmering thing, Lekman's voice riding a wave of sound that recalls My Bloody Valentine or Jesus and Mary Chain. That closes the first encore, while the second finds him alone again for a song he hasn't played live in years ("so I'm sorry if I forget the words"), 'Cold Swedish Winter' from his debut album. It's soothing and touching and snowy and weird, and it ends with him singing the chorus more and more quietly, as the pink lights slink off his cheekbones to leave him in shadow. Glorious. Imagine how good he is when he doesn't have the flu. (3.5)

***



I caught half of The Dove & the Wolf's support set: they'd left their band in Philadelphia (which is a very rock 'n' roll thing to do), so it was just two women with reverb-heavy guitars singing haunting, introspective songs, silhouetted against great orbs of light.

***

Thanks for reading.

Here's a blog I wrote about getting to go behind-the-scenes at Brian Pern: A Tribute, one of this year's televisual triumphs.

And here are reviews of the other cultural things I've ingested recently: three books, a movie and a couple of TV series.

BOOKS



Just Kids by Patti Smith (2010)– At its best, Smith’s beautifully-titled memoir of her life with idiosyncratic, doomed artist Robert Mapplethorpe is uncommonly insightful, raw and moving, as a trio of fateful encounters blossom into romance, which in time becomes an epic love that endures even as their lives begin to diverge: Smith graduating from artist to poet to pioneering rock ‘n’ roll frontwoman, Mapplethorpe admitting his homosexuality to himself as he turns from a collagist and painter into one of the era’s defining photographers. The passages detailing his death and then flashing back to their early acquaintanceship and their construction and then abandonment of a self-contained world are extraordinarily powerful, shining a light into the corners of Smith’s soul and revealing the importance that her upbringing, her faith and her commitment to creativity and visionary artistry have played in dictating her life’s course.

And yet the book becomes decreasingly revelatory and compelling as it progresses, Smith traversing into pretension with increasing frequency and intensity, as well as boringly listing which thrift shops she visited, which trinkets people gave one another, which outfits she wore every day and what she had to eat. As a fashion icon, it seems obvious in retrospect that she must have spent time and energy crafting her visual identities, but it doesn’t make for great reading, that blissful middle-ground of relatability, frank emotion and economic but literate prose vacated entirely for long stretches, as we oscillate between posturing and pointlessness.

Even then, though, Smith has a way of snapping back to a truthfulness and precision that's immediately and startlingly effective, and while reading between the lines we can deduce that perhaps Robert wasn’t the saintly, selfless figure that his great defender contends, you would have to be a psychopath not to be moved by the pair’s deep, mutual and unstinting dependence, at times breathtakingly evoked by this flawed but distinctive and heartbreaking elegy – not just for an artist, but for a man, and for the heyday of the grungy, bohemian, dangerous, filthy, accepting, unforgiving and enrapturing New York City that was his. (3)

***



Scandals of Classic Hollywood by Anne Helen Peterson (2014)– I don’t want you to develop any preconceptions about this book’s contents, based on this image: if only there were a saying that succinctly crystallised this thought.

Anne Helen Petersen’s book isn’t the tawdry, sensationalist rehashing of age-old scandals it appears from the cover, rather it seems that this is the only way you can get a book like hers published. Instead, it’s a collection of blogs from this ‘doctor of gossip’ (she has a PhD in the history of the industry, from the University of Texas) which examines Hollywood scandals or tragedies, how they were managed (or not) by the studios, and what the events, their handling and the fall-out tell us about American society. Each chapter is around 13 pages long (a couple are much longer), beginning with Mary Pickford’s affair with Douglas Fairbanks, closing with the hysteria around James Dean’s death, and in between looking at everything from the tragic lives of screen sex sirens Clara Bow and Jean Harlow to Bogie and Bacall’s romance, and Montgomery Clift’s ‘long suicide’.

The quoted sources are almost all gossip and fan magazines, a fascinating prism through which to view this history, but also somewhat limiting, if the sections on Bow and Harlow are representative of the whole. Though Petersen alludes to David Stenn’s book on Harlow, she either misinterprets or deviates from his impeccably well-sourced, well-argued narratives of both lives, with an alternate vision that seems myopic and incomplete, with no understanding of (or even reference to) Bow’s tortured upbringing. The contrary assertions it does make aren’t attributed to any sources and so seem more like supposition. Though most of the other essays crackle with energy, as we get a witty, accessible and cleverly contextualised whistle-stop tour of a star’s life, usually zoning in on a controversial, widely-covered scandal (Fatty Arbuckle) or tragedy (Carole Lombard), or – more often than not – the ongoing ‘scandal’ that was their self-destruction (in the case of Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando), or their side-lining by censorship (Mae West) or racism (Dorothy Dandridge), as a result I began to question their veracity of completeness. Doubtless some elements are difficult to fact-check through the fog of time and the smoke and mirrors of Hollywood publicity, but her constant get-out of “the accuracy of this claim matters less than…” is frustrating, and there are quite a few typos and errors (Carole Lombard dies in 1941, then signs up to do war work in 1942). That’s a shame, as the Arbuckle section is spot on, the Clift one is a decent effort, and the chapters on West, Dandridge and heroin-addicted silent star Wallace Reid are – at least on the surface – gripping and eye-opening pieces about stars I’ve seen a bit of, but knew little about beyond the headlines.

There’s also certainly no doubt that Peterson is an expert on fan magazines and studio publicity, and it’s a fascinating angle from which to approach these stories. Now and then she'll even turn something you thought you knew about – like Kazan's On the Waterfront, one of the first films I ever loved – so you see it as if for the first time, appreciating how Eva Marie Saint's transformation in the film is fundamentally achieved through Brando's reactions to her. On the other hand, Petersen is writing for an audience with little to no knowledge of these stars and their work, which means that if you’ve read Patricia Bosworth’s book on Clift, Stenn’s definitive works on Bow and Harlow, or even seen – say – Paul Merton’s documentary on Arbuckle, you’re having to sit through an awful lot of familiar (but simplified) material in order to get a little more insight. She’s also somewhat curbed the waspish, sweary tone of her earlier Hairpin articles, which is understandable (I sometimes soften my own writing depending on the audience), but a little disappointing.

It's not that I didn’t enjoy the book. It’s a lot of fun, and I learned quite a bit, but it left me a little unsatisfied. Perhaps I’m just spoiled by Karina Longworth’s superb You Must Remember This podcast, which covers these sorts of stories with such skill, insight and journalistic rigour – and at such length – that she leaves most other film historians trailing in her wake. (2.5)

With enduring thanks (and sincere apologies for my usual ungratefulness) to my friend Soph for sending me this one.

***



Music for Chameleons by Truman Capote (1980)– A book of extraordinary grace, incisiveness and honesty which further bolsters my impression that Capote remains one of the most important, original and underestimated writers of his era. Fuck his artificial image as a catty, trivial, morbid starfucker, and study the work: dark, devastating, morally decent work shot through with his actual character, the shadows of an encroaching darkness creeping across the sun-dappled idyll of his New Orleans childhood. Even fans tend to lean on a popular narrative – pushed in last decade’s cinematic biopics – that sees him in terminal decline after the trial of In Cold Blood, but while it’s true that he degenerated into substance abuse (an affliction dealt with in breathtaking fashion in the last of these 14 pieces), and that with it his work-rate slowed, this book may well be his creative zenith.

In Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, he explains (entirely preposterously) that in the late ‘80s he found a new way to sing: a mathematical formula that has enabled his voice to endure his Never Ending Tour (please post your punchlines below). Here, Capote does much the same, denigrating his entire back catalogue as he seeks to articulate exactly why, and how, he’s developed the new style premiered in this book. Unlike Dylan, who is talking through his silly cowboy hat, Capote is sincere. His style here is so clean, precise and economical, yet to formally inventive, that it takes the breath away. Every decision he makes, from delayed gratification, to leading with dialogue, to drifting into remembrance and reminiscence, seems right, and his evocation of emotion, of nature, and of character is remarkably specific and so uniquely powerful.

There are six short stories and seven conversational portraits, alongside a non-fiction (?) centrepiece about a serial killer, and each is remarkable in one way or another. Perhaps my favourite piece is Dazzle, a multi-layered story with a time-shifting perspective that’s about love, fear and guilt, as Capote relives the story of his paternal grandfather, a fortune teller and two terrible secrets: one comic, the other tragic. It is flecked with wonder, touched by horror, and redolent with an unstudied compassion for his younger self, before a climactic sucker-punch that knocked me sideways. But it’s just one masterpiece among many. The other short stories are rich in irony, but unwaveringly sincere, as they deal with self-loathing, denial and the secrets (or unspoken truths) that dominate the book, while his egalitarian ‘portraits’ take in a weed-smoking cleaner, Marilyn Monroe, pastoral novelist Willa Cather and amoral Manson acolyte Bobby Beausoleil: though you could class the first of those as ‘hilarious’ and the last as ‘chilling’, that’s to reduce them from the multi-faceted, playful, probing, touching, humane and sad works that they are. The only piece that doesn't quite work for me, at least not unequivocally, is Handcarved Coffins, the lengthy true crime chapter at the book's centre. It has passages of great insight – on sexuality, obsession, delusion – but at times its language is oddly forced, and ultimately I'm not sure exactly what the point is that Capote is constantly circling and yet never quite landing upon.

It makes sense, perhaps, that when the book does malfunction, it's in both style and content, for it's the balancing of form, viewpoint and revelation, both overt and within the reader, that is the book's great strength. Music for Chameleons is beautifully-written, but even Capote’s admirers often stop right there, and it’s much more than that. His swaggering, elegant, stylistic brilliance – even as a supposed has-been, with a pickled liver and a nose stuffed with coke – is really a way of packing as much wit, pathos and meaning into each line as possible. His style is not an end in itself, it's the way he carries truth to the reader. (4)

See also:I wrote about In Cold Blood here, and some earlier Capote works here.

***

FILM



Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)– It only took me 16 years to see Spirited Away, and what a wondrous, spectacularly odd film it is: Ghibli on an epic yet intimate scale, as a little girl named Chihiro gets waylaid while moving house, and Hayao Miyazaki’s imagination goes into overdrive.

We meet Chihiro just minutes after an emotional farewell to her old friends: she’s sitting in the backseat of her parents’ car, as they trail a moving van to their new home. The family stop to investigate what seems to be an abandoned theme park, and soon the parents have been turned into pigs, Chihiro’s life has been saved by a boy who it turns out is a dragon and also a god, and she’s been forced to find employment in a fully-functioning bathhouse populated by ghosts, assisted by a multi-armed man who lives by a furnace with his friends – sentient bits of soot – and under the cosh of giant-headed Thatcher-a-like Yubaba, whose beloved germaphobe baby is bigger than she is. That’s the first 20 minutes. It carries on in a similar vein from there, as you can see from this short paragraph lifted from Wikipedia:

While visiting her parents' pigpen, Sen finds a goodbye card addressed to Chihiro and realizes that she has already forgotten her name. Haku warns her that Yubaba controls people by taking their names and that if she forgets hers like he has forgotten his, she will not be able to leave the spirit world. While working, Sen invites a silent masked creature named No-Face inside, believing him to be a customer. A 'stink spirit' arrives as Sen's first customer. She discovers he is the spirit of a polluted river. In gratitude for cleaning him, he gives Sen a magic emetic dumpling. Meanwhile, No-Face tempts a worker with gold, then swallows him. He demands food and begins tipping extensively. As the workers swarm him hoping to be tipped, he swallows yet another two greedy workers.

The film takes a little while to begin to weave its magic, but without warning you find yourself enraptured, lost in its peerlessly weird universe, spellbound by its animation – by turns serene, frenetic, opulent, disorientating, immersive and repulsive – and touched by its understated but profound emotional core. Its characters are notable for their complexity, duality and depth – often achieved with minimal exertion – as well as for their malleability. Whether by witchcraft or kindness, they can be corrupted or reformed – these are not the one-trait ciphers often fed to animation audiences – and yet there’s a simplicity in the emotional exchanges that’s completely beguiling, and surprising for a film with such a complicated story, and such a wealth of subtext. Miyazaki’s nostalgic vision acts as a commentary on a modern Japan that has lost its way, betraying its national identity and its environmental responsibility with a greed that’s evoked with both subtlety and a crude, in-your-face literalism. This, it says, it what happens when you only have a yen for yen. On a surface level, it's also great to have this coming-of-age tale led by such a brave, forthright, decent, ass-kicking girl. There should be one in every story.

The film isn’t perfect: while transfixed and impressed by its balls-out, apparently authentic weirdness, I found it initially distancing, and there were times when the movie’s proliferation of oddball supporting characters, the scenes necessary to accommodate them and its general noisiness (compared to my favourites thus far, Totoro and Porco Rosso) began to tire. It always, though, came back to itself: to Miyazaki’s singular if somewhat unregulated imagination, to the sincerity and simplicity of the Chihiro-Haku relationship, and to the aesthetic analogue that is Spirited Away’s exquisite animation. (3.5)

The music's lovely too.

***

TV



The Nazis: A Warning from History (1997)– A topical rerun of this seminal series, 20 years on. It’s history as investigative journalism, shorn of all sensationalism and ghoulishness, which changes much of what you thought you knew about the Nazis, such as their bizarre, deeply dangerous power structure – competing, antagonistic department heads seeking to turn Hitler’s psychopathic monologues into policy – the role of voluntary, informal informants in making the Gestapo appear omniscient, and the self-justification of ‘ordinary’ Germans who enabled them to commit unprecedented horrors. From its striking credits to Samuel West’s crisp, authoritative voiceover, its unearthing (and understanding) of revelatory documents to its astonishing interviews with perpetrators and victims alike, it’s a class act, which manages to answer (or at least posit a compelling answer) to that eternal, chilling question: how could it happen? (4)

***



Spiral: Season 5 (2014)– For five episodes, this erratic but often exquisite French crime series appears to have given up the ghost. It’s tired, disjointed and – yes – even boring, as Laure Berthaud (Caroline Proust), Gilou (Thierry Godard) and the rest return to solve a slow-moving murder case, a series of ATM ram raids and the mystery of what the hell’s happened to Spiral. Then suddenly, and almost without warning, it explodes into brilliance, its stories dovetailing – and then artfully unfolding – its human subplots becoming uncommonly compelling, and Proust, Godard and Audrey Fleurot (as complex, flamehaired, bad-ass shyster Josephine Karlsson) hitting devastating peak form. It turns out that it’s all about mothers and daughters, and that neither we nor Laure are allowed to have anything nice happen to us ever. It’s back later this year, apparently. I’m going to record them all and then binge. (3)

***

Thanks for reading.

Stars and Stripes by Emma Amos (1992)

Yesterday it was my birthday. I went to the American Dream exhibition at the British Museum – which looks at modern America through screen printing, the consistency of the form illuminating the variations in theme – and to see Get Out, a horror movie that uses genre tropes to investigate the African-American experience. Several of these reviews touch on American identity, from Kurt Vonnegut's last 'novel'– which challenges the fear and intellectual bankruptcy of his country – to Evan Thomas's Robert Kennedy biography, a portrait of a decent, compromised man trying to stay true to his ideals, and sometimes merely to discover what they are, in the super-charged, dangerous and conflicted atmosphere of Cold War America. Vonnegut returns time and again to the subject of Native Americans, and they were one of Kennedy's causes too: on the last night of his life, he kept asking reporters, "Did you hear about the Indians?" Over 98% of Native American voters in California had cast their ballot for him.

Tunnel of Love, a supposedly inoffensive 1958 comedy that I watched for light relief, is fascinating in a variety of ways, eerily anticipating an American tragedy with links to the counterculture, and depicting a violently unequal, sexist US society both on-screen and off. Elsewhere, I've written about low culture trying to document high culture in '40s Hollywood, how Kurosawa took American pulp fiction and turned it into a study of Japanese society, and how one of America's finest imports, Billy Wilder, lost control of his talents after two decades at the top. By taking the action to Paris, he was aping his great hero – and fellow German emigre – Ernst Lubitsch, and yet his presentation was becoming crudely American, an unbecoming pastiche of Frank Tashlin, who a year before Tunnel of Love managed to smuggle the subversive masterpiece, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? past the censors, his characters' powerless, bawdy ogling of Jayne Mansfield a joke on the sexist, consumerist society that was '50s America. Mansfield, of course, was a Marilyn Monroe substitute, and Andy Warhol's famous screen prints of her hang in the first room of American Dream.

BOOKS:



Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut (1997)– Vonnegut’s last ‘novel’ isn’t quite a novel: it’s ‘choice cuts from the carcass’ of a book he was dissatisfied with (at least if the arch post-modernist isn’t having us on), mixed with reminiscences, reflections and bitter, hysterically funny wisdom earned in a life well but often painfully lived. The fictional portions deal with recurring character (and multi-eyed hack writer) Kilgore Trout, a mouthpiece for Vonnegut’s inspired short stories, and one of the luckless planetary citizens forced to endure a ‘rerun’ of the past decade following the ‘timequake’ of the title, in which they go through every moment of every day of every year in exactly the same way, the only novelty being that they are aware this is happening. The rest shoots off from this story at tangents, and just about every one is inspired. The book shakes with pain in its early passages, as Vonnegut details his crippling writer’s block and rails at the innate cruelty of the world, appearing almost defeated by it. After all, he says, “No-one asks to be born”. Soon, though, he’s brimming with brilliance both comic and humane, picking himself – and us – off the floor and arming us with compassion, insight and practical ideas for combating the societal plagues of poverty, loneliness and despair. It’s like a self-help book for sarcastic socialists. I thought I’d share a few favourite bits.

On socialism:



On his favourite movies and Kate Hepburn:



On wealth redistribution:





On humanism and religion:



While this is just one of the best passages I've ever read:



Me too, Kurt. Me too.

Not quite a novel, then, rather a handbook for life. Give copies to people you love. (4)

***



Robert Kennedy by Evan Thomas (2000)– This superb biography does a fine job of interrogating an extraordinary life, rejecting the lionisation and demonisation of RFK for something more complex and credible: a psychologically insightful portrait of a decent but deeply-flawed subject who felt deeply, erred frequently and grew through tragedy to become a great man. Thomas manages to explain how Kennedy could work for Joseph McCarthy, try to assassinate Castro, tap Martin Luther King's phone, and then emerge as a voice for the weak, the vulnerable and the forgotten − before being gunned down in his prime.

Across 400 pages (and acres of notes), Thomas shows us a man who was a hothead, a bully and a philosophical auto-didact, who loved children, his country and his doomed family, who hated his reputation for ruthlessness but frequently deserved it, and who wrote just one speech in his life, the greatest he ever gave, announcing the death of Martin Luther King to a black audience in inner-city Indianapolis, and speaking the words of his favourite poet, Aeschylus, to offer some shred of comfort.

The author doesn't bother with backstory, launching us into the book proper with Kennedy a teenager (and barely flashing back), and he has a tendency to be episodic − perhaps inevitable when you're dealing with a life dominated by set-pieces: the pursuit of Jimmy Hoffa, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the death of JFK − but he's also intuitive, even-handed and, though he sometimes deals with complexity of character by laying out a scattering of anecdotal, contradictory evidence − when he's dealing with complex matters of fact, he will always drill down in search of the truth.

If you go in expecting a hatchet job or a hagiography, you'll be disappointed. Thomas follows up the Indianapolis speech by having RFK mouthing off backstage about Dr King (and this time doesn't attribute it to wisecracking as a defence mechanism), while the famous story about Kennedy demanding the civil rights champion's release from jail is explained in terms of realpolitik, as well as principle, but appreciating the subject as a man forced to operate in the shady, pragmatic and morally murky world of politics makes his achievements and principled outspokenness all the more remarkable.

Kennedy was not the lily-white paragon of virtue of popular myth, his electoral hopes in 1968 − and he was by no means a cinch to win − had been raised by an unprecedented spending spree, and it's difficult to believe that he would have the same impact on the popular imagination without the tragic glamour bestowed by his brother's demise. His intense emotional connection with the downtrodden, though, was genuine, and while RFK was central in cementing the 'Camelot' myth of JFK's presidency, he was by far the more liberal, idealistic and ambitious of the two.

He was also a man of great bravery, not just in his obsession with proving his physical courage − a preoccupation forged as an effeminate young member of the Kennedy clan, sidelined by his older brothers − but in his resolute lack of fear towards the end of his short life. One of the great tragedies of a sudden death isn't just the violence and the unfulfilled promise, but the shock of it: the absence of warning, the inability of the person to prepare. This book made me realise just how fatalistic and undaunted Kennedy was: he suspected the end was coming, and he didn't care. He'd wave away his bodyguards, ignore their advice about not driving in convertibles, and even refused to draw his hotel curtains after seeing a gunman on a roof. After he was shot, he spoke just two lines. The second was a cry of pain. The first was: "Is everybody else all right." Now that is the mark of a man. (3.5)

I thought I'd share his speech upon the death of Martin Luther King with you: it's here. And this is the Great Lives episode that first made me aware of Kennedy's life and legacy, back in 2009. I remembered that Matthew Parris said the episode had done a rare thing in changing his mind about a subject, as he'd always thought RFK was a countercultural figure. I'd forgotten that it was Ken Livingstone who nominated Kennedy as his Great Life, before all he could talk about was Hitler.

***



CINEMA: Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017)– I don't watch many modern horror movies: they're just not really for me. While I actively dislike slasher films − watching attractive women in their underwear being stabbed to death strikes me as a curious way to spend your spare time − my aversion to other horror sub-genres is less rooted in moral queasiness, it's more that I'm a big wuss. Mark Kermode once said that he loves being scared. I don't. Being scared is really bad. I like being calm and in control.

Every so often, though, a horror film will pique my interest and I'll trot dutifully along to my local cineplex and try bravely to appreciate it over the sound of dickheads talking and eating crisps. That's how I experienced Get Out, as a race relations horror about the African-American experience sounded like the kind of wanky liberal thing I'd enjoy.

Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is a black college student who goes with his white girlfriend (Allison Williams) to visit her family in deep suburbia, where he's unquestioningly welcomed in a manner rife with complacent white guilt, but the spectre of African-American servitude still seems to linger, catching his eye in increasingly bizarre and jarring ways.

Writer-director Jordan Peele does a great job of balancing sardonic satire with social comment, while delivering a succession of knockout jump scares (aided by superb sound design) and passages of fantastical disorientation that keep you trapped in your seat. To an outsider, at least, he seems to articulate the immobility and impotence of self-determination that typified the African-American experience − and sometimes still do − by rendering them literal.

With very rare exceptions, black actors in the 1930s through the 1950s were only allowed to speak the words of white writers, and play characters acceptable to white audiences, as black citizens were forced to do the bidding of white masters. In juxtaposing a knowing, confident 21st century black man with these Uncle Toms and Mammys − twisted into eerie ciphers, dead behind the eyes − Peele shows how far we have come, but then how far we still have to travel. Today's racism may lurk beneath a respectable veneer, he appears to be arguing (presumably having written this before the ascent of Trump), but it's there all the same.

Whether he quite finishes that thought, or manages to properly punch it across, I'm not sure. Perhaps his point is that we'll only accept black people by controlling them in a new way − i.e. by forcing them to co-opt white norms − or it's an assault on liberal hypocrisy, but, if it's either, then the message is muddled and diluted in the telling.

Like another subversive comedy-horror that I really took to, Tucker & Dale vs Evil− the film falls down a little in the final act, becoming more horror-by-numbers, and failing to draw its thematic threads together, despite odd moments of brilliance. For the most part, though, it's a sharp and pointed and funny film, commandeering genre tropes to its own ends, while remembering to scare you shitless at the same time. And no-one was stabbed while wearing just a bra and pants. Though I wanted something even better, if they continue making horror movies this interesting, I may start watching more. (3)

***



Deception (Irving Rapper, 1946)– An absolutely awful Warner film about megalomaniac composer Claude Rains making life hell for his old flame (Bette Davis) and her new husband (Paul Henreid), who's just back from a PoW camp, and is like Victor Laszlo if he was a wife-beating twat.

The script and story are absolute shit, full of clunking, laboriously explained dialogue and bad characterisation, with Rains attempting to do his patented 'well-spoken psycho' bit using some of the least promising material in existence, and Henreid a sullen, jealous, domestic abuser whom we're supposed to root for.

Elsewhere it's all crunching plot gears, badly-mimed cello-playing and unearned sentiment − when even a committed Bette Davis and a Korngold score can't help, you know you're in trouble (though the way Erich Wolfgang holds that long note at a point of tragedy, damn). Of all the Golden Age melodramas about classical musicians, I think the only one that's halfway worthwhile is Humoresque. This one manages to be nasty, boring and stupid. (1.5)

***



The Tunnel of Love (Gene Kelly, 1958)– A very watchable '60s sitcom about the sexual peccadilloes of couple Richard Widmark and Doris Day, who are looking to adopt their first child. It's blandly shot and directed, but Gig Young is funny, Day has a couple of songs ('Run Away, Skidaddle, Skidoo' is great fun) and Scouse actress Gia Scala is stunningly attractive as the adoption board investigator who catches Widmark's eye, the cast making the most of material that's never inspired but rarely dull. There's also a bit where Young and Widmark both mugging wildly with the *exact* same face that Gene Kelly liked to pull on screen when being cheekily amorous. He directed this one.

In broader cinematic and social terms, though, there are four things that make the film troubling, some trivial and others less so:

1) Richard Widmark isn't good at playing normal characters. His great performances were all as villains or anti-heroes (even in Panic in the Streets, he's hardly straight-forwardly sympathetic). The Hollywood power structure dictated that when you became a big enough star, you played conventional leading men roles. That's why after a blistering beginning, his career tailed off so dramatically.

2) It's a fascinating snapshot of the period, but it's extremely sexist. Even when it tries to challenge its male characters' rampant, complacent misogyny, it only does so half-heartedly.

3) Martin Melcher's name is on the credits. Over the next 10 years, he would run his wife Doris Day's career into the ground, casting her in unsuitable projects and losing her fortune through bad investments.

4) There's a running joke about Gig Young's character being in therapy. In the 1970s, having been under the 'care' of Brian Wilson's psychologist, Eugene Landy, he killed himself and his young wife.

If you can put all that to one side, it's a diverting film, perfect for a lazy afternoon. Good luck. (2.5)

***



High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963)– Or 'Heaven and Hell' in its original Japanese: the first half of Kurosawa's superb film a moral thriller set in the rarified atmosphere of businessman Toshiro Mifune's hilltop home − where he must decide whether to ruin himself by paying the ransom for his chauffeur's son − and the second a trawl through the depths, taking in a speeding train, police HQ and the sweaty, dirty, morally dissolute streets of Yokohama, through which a kidnapper with terrific sunglasses (Tsutomu Yamazaki) is pursued by the full force of the law.

Adapting from an Ed McBain novel, the director fashioned a story about contemporary Japan, indicting not just the rigid, unforgiving class structure that dictates the relationship between Mifune and his chauffeur, and the cops' preconceptions of both victim and criminal, but also the increasing shallowness of Japanese society. That's elucidated by the shoe company so central to the businessman's existence (shades of the leather gloves in Philip Roth's American Pastoral), caught between the durability and reliability of its dull products, and the cheap, flashy models now in vogue.

High and Low is a masterfully-made film, a claustrophobic first hour, redolent with circular debate, that gives way to something else entirely: Kurosawa ripping the film open as it becomes a meticulous, credible and far-reaching procedural, without losing sight of its raison d'etre. The script isn't perfect, at times it spoonfeeds, at others it's long-winded or relies on coincidence, but as it evokes the collision of high and low society, as the cops search high and low for a kidnapper, it's taut, thrilling and yet substantial, with a final scene of virtuosic and pungent brilliance. (3.5)

***



Irma la Douce (Billy Wilder, 1963)– Wilder's worst film since The Emperor Waltz back in 1948, sunk by an approach that's more 'Frank Tashlin's crap brother' than Lubitsch in his prime, and sharply heralding a career decline where these shortcomings became more like old friends than the rude awakening they are here.

Jack Lemmon is a gendarme in the belly of Paris who falls in love with hooker Irma la Douce (Shirley MacLaine). He tries to reform her, but after finding himself reformed into her pimp, opts for Plan B, reinventing himself as a raffish English lord who becomes her sole client. The catch: he has to work every other hour in backbreaking manual labour in order to fund his scheme.

The first 30 is nice and the last half-hour isn't bad, but the 77 minutes in between are unbearable, with Lemmon off the leash and so at his most unbelievably irritating. There's no subtlety of specificity to his characterisation, it is just every moment in Wilder's sub-par script played as big and broad and loud as possible. He was an actor of some skill and sensitivity, but − like Mickey Rooney − he could only do comedy if he was reined in very tightly. Here Wilder is apparently aiming for cartoonish, and he certainly manages that, but to what end?

MacLaine, in green stockings, flashing her cleavage at every opportunity, strikes just the right note of casual, slightly worn sexiness, but her work is lost in this mess of a film. You could just watch The Apartment instead, and have 12 minutes free to spend how you like. (2)

***

Thanks for reading. Next time: Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer, Doris Day in April in Paris, and Bette Davis in All This and Heaven Too. Plus: other stuff to be determined.

Saturday 15 April, 2017 (matinee)



Andrew Scott's Hamlet is the best I've seen − probing, philosophical, introspective and bitterly witty − and this intimate, innovative, cleanly modern production rises to meet him, keeping your attention rapt and your emotions engaged.

Scott's emotions are always just below the surface. He doesn't cry on command, as such, that suggests a gimmicky or insincerity. He cries easily, his performance here studded with tears, dripping down that taut, gaunt, pouting face as the veins stand out in his neck. Those tears of rage, self-loathing and simple sorrow are where you go when you've run out of words. For Bob Dylan, that place was always a harmonica blast, and Dylan's the only soundtrack we get here: One More Cup of Coffee commenting on mortality, Spirit on the Water signifying a party, Don't Think Twice… subtly mocking the prevaricating Prince, and Not Dark Yet striking up as the end approaches. Am I wrong in thinking that the coda slyly winks at another track from Dylan's Time Out of Mind, as Claudius tries to get to Heaven, before they close the door.

Where the Barbican's production with Cumberbatch in the lead was flaccid, distant and long-winded, the Almeida's takes place in your lap, feels pared down to its essentials − old and newly discovered − and in its music, projections and manners feels like a Hamlet for this cynical century, its protagonist pained, tired and wired, a gentle, melancholy man wrestling endlessly with his burden, every nuance intriguing and every line seeming to be thoughts that are just occurring to him now. For the first time, I felt I was watching a Hamlet who seemed to be discovering the story as we were, lessening the play's fatalistic foreboding and making it a personal human drama, not a grand, portentous charade.

At times, Cumberbatch tried buffoonish, crowd-pleasing comedy, prancing around in a toy soldier's hat. Scott's Hamlet is nimble, knowing and drily funny, his sarcastic barbs all the funnier because he's so thoughtful, and so thoughtfully self-critical. When he's consumed by anger, it's not theatrical grandstanding, it comes from deep within, from unease that's revealed as insight, and a faltering self-knowledge that explodes into epiphany. Here, what was literal in Shakespeare shadows the psychological forces buffeting the hero: Hamlet is cast on a boat towards England, as his soul is tossed on roiling waters; his father appears thrice as a spirit, as the looming spectre of betrayal stalks our hero. And he is a Hamlet systematically if not always wittingly betrayed: by his murderous step-father, by his incestuous mother (Juliet Stevenson), by the former schoolfriends of the Prince whom they effortlessly seduce to their side, by the chummily meddling, foolish Polonius, and by Ophelia (Jessica Brown-Findlay), who seeks to help her father resolve Hamlet's loss of mirth, and instead drives both of them towards insanity.


Jessica Brown-Findlay as an affecting Ophelia, with Peter Wight her foolish father, Polonius.

The stage is just three stubby, fat steps up from the stalls: we may as well be in a living-room. In fact, we are, or at least in Elsinore's coldly comfortable quarters, coolly-coloured IKEA-like furniture close to the faux-marble floor that doubles as a CCTV headquarters, a hall and a graveyard. The use of video screens (one large and temporary, a smaller one at either side) feels unusually seamless and natural: occasional footage from a sort of Danish Sky News updating us on funerals, battles and the like, and − when the cast sit with the audience to watch the pivotal play-within-a-play − showing Claudius's reaction to Hamlet's incendiary self-penned script. After the first interval, the screen is unpaused, then exquisitely 'malfunctions' as Claudius enters, spewing out close-ups of his guiltily contorting face.



The players scenes, mercilessly and mercifully pruned to perhaps three-dozen lines (and complete with Scott's parody of declamatory acting), are illustrative of a brilliant reshaping of the text. Robert Icke's production uses modern dress and is tooled specifically for modern tastes, zeroing in on the characters' emotions, their inner conflicts and their reasons for those conflicts, and junking everything that's long-winded, extraneous or a bit stupid. It retains enough of the players to accentuate some of Shakespeare's commentary on the truthful artifice of theatre − in Scott's hands, a pithy, meta thing − to energise its hesitant hero, and to cast light on those who surround him, and that's it. Here, Hamlet's 12 lines inserted into the action to gauge his stepfather's reaction are not a threat or a test of Claudius's temperament, but solely for the prince to ascertain the suspect's guilt, or to offer His Uncertainness a way out. I'm not sure if that's always the case. If it is, then I can only say that I typically find this sequence so boring that I've never been engaged enough to realise it. And while the idea of a ghost telling his son that someone poured poison in his ear is going to be ridiculous to me until the day I die, this production is so swift in dispensing with exposition that the play's other improbabilities become part of a credible, compelling whole.

That's certainly true of the final scene, which is showy, spontaneous, gripping, wryly funny and deeply moving, before passing into a rhapsodic fantasy, then snapping back to black and gutting tragedy. At the Barbican, it felt like a laughable orgy of improbable deaths. Here, the human cost is vast and epic and inevitable in the context of the action.



Scott's Hamlet is the first to whom I've felt a natural and personal connection, and it runs deep. He's groping in the dark, beset with an impotence of action from which he's trying to rip himself free, questing for self-knowledge, while praying for a relief from it. He's an existential Hamlet: thoughtful, melancholy, feeling deeply, a decent, anguished, emotionally tender Prince with an adolescent's loathing of hypocrisy and duplicity, a child's guilelessness, and a self-loathing born of immobility in the face of dishonour. In pegged black trousers and a collarless shirt, barefoot or in shiny black shoes, stripped to a vest highlighting his voluminous biceps, or dressed in cream and white for the graveyard scene, the wiry, wild-eyed Scott commands the stage, and all of your attention.

Occasionally he ventures forth with his finger and thumb in an 'O', reclaiming the gesture from Donald Trump, and putting it into the service of poetic precision as he wonders at what a piece of work a man is. He blasts his arms skywards, showering the stage with spit as he finally shakes off the shackles of inaction. And he toys slyly with Polonius, outfoxing him amiably as the darkness sets in around Hamlet's heart. Elsewhere he is fleet of foot, touchingly tentative and uncertain ("To be… or… not to be) or sardonic, turning the Dane's usual contemplation of mortality after the revelation of Yorick's skull into something more offhand, spiky and yet strangely affecting, the dust pouring from the eye-sockets as he at first calls with an amazed amusement: "Alas, poor Yorick...", then muses: "Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?" Its nostalgia for childhood for once outweighs its macabre portents, which chimes beautifully with this innocent Hamlet who seems not to know what awaits him. The spontaneity of the delivery, the lightness of touch, and the play's scope but specificity of humour seem to all play into it, and so do the other performances.


Juliet Stevenson as a lustful, protective Gertrude and Angus Wright a svelte, straightforward Claudius

Peter Wight's meddlesome Polonius is unusually likeable and doltish, Luke Thompson is a spirited, dangerous but noble Laertes, and Juliet Stevenson plays Gertrude as lustful, naïve and protective, and while a couple of her actorly tricks were a little synthetic for my taste at close quarters, she does a better job than anyone I've seen of resolving the character's apparent inconsistencies, of being vain and blinkered while still "living almost by [Hamlet's] looks", and taking a bullet for her son, for all the good it does him. Jessica Brown-Findlay is a fine Ophelia too: appealingly playful, sexy and normal in the opening scenes, her sense of fun not equating to triviality, and her growing vulnerability constrained within a real character. When Ophelia does fall to pieces, a transformation intelligently rendered in stagecraft and performance, she plays mental illness credibly and compellingly, without patronising ethereality or runaway artificiality, but seriously, properly, weightily, singing a Laura Marling melody, flaring into rage, then greeting Laertes with an erotic tenderness, before dissipating into despondency. When her death comes, it's without predetermination or fanfare: all keeping with a production that thinks you haven't seen this before, because it's never happened before. Polonius's violent death too is a sudden, bloody shock that hits you hard because of its ear-splitting ferocity and because a dull-witted but good-meaning father whom we were beginning to like is dead, and not simply because Hamlet has just incinerated every bridge in sight.

Hamlet is closing at the Almeida as I write this, but it's bound for the West End later this year, and I'd urge you to see it if you can afford to. It's 195 minutes long, but it's vivid and enthralling, and consistent too, not lagging when Hamlet is off stage, as other productions do. I'd recommend it to anyone who loves Shakespeare, but I'd recommend it even more strongly to those who don't, because it filters his work unerringly through a modern sensibility, stripping away the redundant and finding resonances with the world in 2017. Like Elsinore, it's a lonely place, ruled by murderous liars, but if thou can be true to thine own self, you're halfway there. The rest you try to fill with self-knowledge, personal philosophy, friends and art.

(4) ***

Thanks for reading.

Your are more than welcome.

FILMS



Shaun the Sheep Movie (Mark Burton and Richard Starzack, 2015)– This is all rather lovely: a feature-length adventure for Shaun the Sheep that takes out hero to the medium-sized city and completes a trinity of really strong Aardman features, following Arthur Christmas and The Pirates. If it bucks the five-strong trend of every movie from the studio being better than the last, lacking the distinctive characters and clever dialogue of those two fine films (and featuring a thoroughly predictable, one-note villain), it emerges as something different: a spiritual successor to the silent comedies of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, full of rich visual humour, imaginative thrill comedy and a little well-judged sentiment.

I find it disorientating to watch human characters who can’t speak except in vague noises (like The Sims, it makes me feel like I have dysprosody), the “oh you” mannerism utilised a full three times seems weirdly broad and old-fashioned for a movie this neat and sharp, and the film takes a good 20 minutes to get going, but once it does it’s a lot of fun, replete with clever sight gags, unexpected twists and deft swipes at everything from deux ex machinas to the shallowness of celebrity culture. It also has a breezy, summery theme tune from Ash’s Tim Wheeler.

My favourite jokes are the sheep who pretends to be human by attaching a sweeping brush to his face (I laughed out loud every time I saw him), and the psychotically-staring dog in the animal-control centre.

Having said all this, I'm not sure if being put in some poo is a serious enough punishment for attempted murder. (3)

***



Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra, 2015)– Apocalypse Now for hipsters.

This ethnographic arthouse film is enthralling at times, but disengaging at others, as two white men – decades apart – are taken up the river by Amazonian shaman, Karamakate, in search of the miraculous, health-giving plant, yakruna. This causes problems. Yakruna problems. "Yakruna matata”.

The mid-section is superb, its marriage of luscious monochrome cinematography (reminiscent of Louisiana Story and Jarmusch’s Dead Man) with colonial comment, deadpan humour and rich, deeply-rooted characterisation washing over you, saturating you with its quiet anger, shimmering beauty and resolute complexity. But Embrace of the Serpent’s trailer promised something greater than this film, which takes an age to navigate its slow, talky and boring opening stretches, and traverses into redundant hedonism after peaking in the instant that a boat cruises past the crumbling sign of a Catholic mission.

It's wonderful to see a film doing something new, and exposing us to a world and culture we've rarely encountered, but that doesn't just give it a free pass. Its fitful glories, including an obvious but nonetheless stunning and mindbending final act (A Field in England on Amazonian acid), aren’t enough to cover for a film that meanders endlessly or hits you at full force, when it should be following a steady course.

That bit where the young Karamakate is teasing Theo for crying made me laugh so hard, though. (2.5)

***



Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Alex Gibney, 2005)– A delightful piece of anti-capitalist porn about the collapse of America’s seventh-biggest corporation, which made its name by using mark-to-market accounting (registering phenomenally large ‘expected profits’ to inflate its share price), and ended up with its traders getting Californian power plants to cut off electricity to homes and hospitals for days at a time to send stocks rocketing, ushering in a new governor of the state, Mr Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It’s an extraordinary story well-told through the use of previously secret documents and tapes, archive news footage and the usual talking heads, and though it suffers a little from triviality and gimmickry when leaning on found footage and music (Tom Waits, though!) and has no after-the-collapse interviews with the principal villains, the characterisation is superb, while it lays bare the moral bankruptcy of corporate America, and the dereliction of duty that is free market idolatry.

If I’d seen it at the time, I could have warned you about the recession. Sorry. (3)

***



SHORT: Hollywood Daffy (Friz Freleng, 1946)– Though there are a few fantastic Daffy Duck cartoons – like the legendary, post-modern Duck Amuck and the concurrent "Hunter's trilogy"– they're almost all made by Chuck Jones. And while the story here came from the same writer as those classics, Michael Maltese, and Hollywood Daffy was directed by influential animator Friz Freleng (himself famously the irascible inspiration for Yosemite Sam), it's sadly rubbish: an abrasive, unfunny and barely-drawn piece of nothing about Daffy attempting to become a Hollywood big-shot but being sidetracked by a rivalry with a studio security guard. Some of the references are faintly fun if you're interested in the period, but I didn't smile once, and the drawings of Bette Davis and Johnny Weissmuller are terrible. (1)

***



All This, and Heaven Too (Anatole Litvak, 1940)– An exceptionally classy melodrama, with Bette Davis giving one of her most extraordinary performances as a silhouette of a woman who enters the Duc de Praslin's tempestuous household in Paris of 1848 to act as the governess, falling in love with her master and becoming beloved of his children, before incurring the formidable wrath of his jealous, unstable wife.

It's a beautifully balanced and restrained performance, with the star often saying one thing and playing three more, her heroine having to keep her emotions in check, know her place in society and her household, and juggle the conflicting responsibilities to her employers, her charges and herself. She's a character rarely permitted to speak honestly, but yet at every instant we know what she's thinking. All the while, she's plagued by the circumstances of her early years − the script expertly drip-feeding information and motivation − while the framing device, with the older Davis justifying herself to a classroom of malicious teenage girls, tells us that it's unlikely to end cheerily.

As with many prestige pictures of the era set in foreign countries in previous centuries, a conceited, and at times complacent attitude prevails that undermines the film's aspirations to art: a distracting muddle of accents, the odd duff supporting performance (I'm quite fond of Harry Davenport, but he's pure am-dram here) and concessions to Hollywood hokum that that are superficially satisfying but detract from the wider film.

There are other elements, though, that would confound those who regard Hollywood studio product of the '30s and '40s as trite or silly or shallow, including Max Steiner's sweeping score, and artful cinematography from Ernest Haller, who began as assistant to D. W. Griffith's favoured cameraman, Billy Bitzer, and shot the likes of Gone with the Wind, Mildred Pierce and Rebel without a Cause, as well as several signature Davis vehicles.

The collision of art and artifice is rarely more profound than in the ballroom sequence, where he shoots twirling couples − complicit in the filthy hypocrisy of aristocratic life − in the mirrors behind three innocent children. That Ambersons-ish brilliance is in sharp contrast to the kids' conversation and characterisation: as much as I love Virginia Weidler et al, having modern American children enact these parts, spouting Hollywoodised exposition spoils the effect of the scene. Elsewhere, he brings a timeless freshness to his compositions (waves lapping upon the camera to slosh us into the flashback) while staying true to the glossy, idealised glamour of peak-era Hollywood.

Though I've catalogued its shortcomings, Casey Robinson's screenplay is mostly quite poetic and thoughtful, and if the film barely bothers to articulate the greater stakes beyond the compelling central story (which is only trivial if you believe that love and death are trivial when practised in a wealthy home), its slow-burning storyline is touching, immersive and intelligently handled. It's also broadly true, the source novel having been written by Rachel Field, the great-niece of Davis's Henriette Desportes.

Alongside Davis, Barbara O'Neil is an adequate if somewhat one-note villain, Charles Boyer does a fair job as the brooding Duke, and there are pleasant supporting turns from June Lockhart, Virginia Weidler and Ann E. Todd as the kids (they're joined by little Richard Nichols, who's too young to be able to act, but is really cute), within the restrictions of Hollywood convention.

But it's Bette's show: aside from All About Eve, this might be my favourite of her performances: another distinct, vivid and compelling character to add to a seemingly endless gallery. (3.5)

***



"I'm sorry, Miss Jackson."
April in Paris (David Butler, 1952)– An erratic piece of musical escapism, with bumbling State Department functionary Ray Bolger accidentally inviting chorus girl Dynamite Jackson (Doris Day) to perform at a highbrow arts festival in Paris, then falling in love with her on the boat over.

It's a weird mixture of elements that don't always gel, but still entrance, pall or apall. The surprisingly smutty script has gags about voyeurism and conjugal visits, but also lame right-wing barbs about taxation and government bureaucracy. Claude Dauphin seems to be playing Maurice Chevalier, rather than a character of his own. Bolger is a great dancer too often required to muggingly undermine his own talent, while approximating a mediocre, selfish man being unaccountably fought over by two feisty women. One of them, Day's character, is too prim and well-behaved for the story she's in, but yet she's sexy, brings a real sweetness to the central relationship, and injects the film with all the life it has, at this stage of her career simply brimming over with charisma and talent. Though the songs are variable (Sammy Cahn knows his way around a preposterously drawn-out lyric), her vocals are breathtakingly good, and the big set-piece in the boat's kitchen is fantastic fun: a showcase both for her and for Bolger, whose delirious 'drunk dancing' threatens to subvert his brilliance, only to emerge as a piece of virtuosic art: as big yet impeccably restrained as Jackie Chan's drunken mastery.

There's also a bit where she slags off the Eiffel Tower like a big loser, but it turns out this was a dramatic device intended to show how the city subsequently wins her over. Clever. But not actually. Much like this film. (2)

***

BOOK



The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth (1979)– Roth’s first book narrated by his serious-minded, horny and human alter-ego, Nathan Zuckerman, is a vigorously and continuously brilliant story of three father figures and a barely acceptable reverie, as he arrives at the snowbound country home of cranky, regimented short story genius, E. I. Lonoff, indulging in reflection, self-exploration and methodical, metatextual flights of fancy on Roth’s chosen subjects of Jewishness, family, creativity and betrayal. It’s a profound, wistful, emotionally violent novel that takes one of the most almighty gambles and somehow pulls it off. (3.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

Next time: Fassbinder's Fox and His Friends, the Oscar-winning doc, I Am Not Your Negro, and Jack Kerouac's Big Sur.

Before I begin, please forgive me for the most appalling self-indulgence. But imagine a callow newcomer, around 1,500 reviews in, rooting through this blog trying to find The Good Stuff. No need! Since I publish the filmic elements on mildly successful social networking site Letterboxd, there's a very easy way to determine which of my witterings are the most defensible: those with the most up-votes from the small number of discerning film nerds who frequent that website. So here are, objectively, my 12 best reviews. Some are po-faced and endless, others just smug one-liners. 'Enjoy'.

12. The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980)



Reviewed April 2015
"Here are 10 things I love about The Empire Strikes Back, the best of the series, without any shadow of a hint of a suggestion of a doubt..."(5/5)

Full review:Letterboxd / This blog

***

11. The Little Foxes (William Wyler, 1941)



Reviewed August 2015
"We need to go beyond the canon. The established canon. The regimented canon ... Between the monoliths and the re-evaluated misfires lie films every bit as good: forgotten, neglected, still classic. This masterpiece is a caustic, troubling, profound examination of a Southern family brought low – or high and to prominence, depending on how you view it – by a sea of moral dissolution."(5/5)

Full review:Letterboxd / This blog

***

10. Far From Heaven (Tod Haynes, 2002)



Reviewed February 2012
"Haynes's florid recreation of the style of classic-era "women's pictures" is meticulous, the cast is uniformly fine and there's a terrific, backwards-looking score from Elmer Bernstein that captures the essence of the genre ... To get the full effect - and appreciate the dark humour of the opening reels - a crash-course in the work of '50s director Douglas Sirk would definitely help, but I think you can appreciate the film regardless, as a deliciously mannered portrait of an ideal crashing quietly to the floor."(4.5/5)

Full review:Letterboxd / This blog

***

9. The Invention of Lying (Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson, 2009)



Reviewed December 2012
"What begins as a mildly entertaining high-concept comedy (with Woody Allen-ish credits) turns into an incredibly heavy-handed atheist satire that operates at the heady intellectual and theological level of an 11-year-old skim-reading Philosophy for Beginners."(1/5)

Full review:Letterboxd / This blog

***

8. Napoleon (Abel Gance, 1928)



Reviewed December 2013
"Yesterday saw a rare screening of Kevin Brownlow's near-mythic five-and-a-half-hour reconstruction of Abel Gance's silent film Napoleon, a labour of love that has dominated more than 50 years of the historian's life ... It's the longest film I've ever seen and among the strangest, most restlessly innovative and technically astounding. It's as if Gance had never seen a film before, and no-one had told him that this simply isn't how it's done."(5/5)

Full review:Letterboxd / This blog

***

7. About Schmidt (Alexander Payne, 2002)


Reviewed July 2013

"Dear Ndugu,

How are you? I'm fine. Today I watched the film About Schmidt. I enjoyed it. At times I feared it was just a less inspired take on The Straight Story, with a score that went too jaunty too often, and a tendency to undercut its many truthful moments with smug comedy. But then the ending came along, one of the greatest endings I've ever seen, a heartbreaking voiceover followed by a heart-mending pay-off, and I realised that I'd seen something truly extraordinary, a film whose flaws are a small price to pay for a majestic, life-affirming whole. And then there was Nicholson's performance. It's so long since he bothered to act - I suppose One Flew Over must have been the last time - that I was willing him to succeed. And, yes, there were ticks and twitches there, and at times he hadn't quite submerged arrogant, shark-faced Jaaack within self-hating, sad-faced Warren (me), but in the end it was a triumph, just like the movie. Along with the usual cheque, I'm enclosing a little something extra to spend as you please.

Yours very truly,

Warren Schmidt"

(4.5/5)

Full review:Letterboxd / This blog

***

6. The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013)



Reviewed February 2014
"So what's all this then? Basically Banks of New York, with Leonardo DiCaprio as hedonistic stockbroker Jordan Belfort, the kind of guy who caused the global recession.

Here he is having an awesome time. Look at his wife. Look at his car. Look at the size of his house. Here he is snorting cocaine off a hooker's boobs. Here he is doing it another eighteen times. Here he is making money. He has lots of money."(2.5/5)

Full review: Letterboxd / This blog

***

5. The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927)



Reviewed October 2013

"On this evidence, I'm not sure talking pictures are a very good idea."(1.5/5)

Full review:Letterboxd / This blog

***

4. The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)



Reviewed August 2013
"'Something had happened. A thing which years ago had been the eagerest hope of many, many good citizens of the town. And now it came at last: George Amberson Minafer had got his comeuppance. He got it three times filled and running over. But those who had so longed for it were not there to see it, they never knew it. Those who were still living had forgotten all about it and all about him.'

But when George Orson Welles, the infuriating, profligate wunderkind of American cinema got his comeuppance - three times full and running over - the whole world was watching."(5/5)

Full 2,278-word review:Letterboxd / This blog

***

3. The Outlaw (Howard Hawks, 1943)



Reviewed August 2013
"I'm not going to jugs this film too harshly. It has its knockers, and tit's certainly not the breast Western of the '40s - perbaps the casting of Jack Buetel is a bit of a boob - but it has a couple of really good points, which hold your interest as the cliches rack up."(2.5/5)

Full review:Letterboxd / It's not on this blog, I wrote the these all-new boob puns especially.

***

2. Sideways (Alexander Payne, 2004)



Reviewed October 2012
"Wine is probably the most boring subject on Earth, so how come Payne’s film about a lonely, bitter best man (Paul Giamatti) taking the soon-to-be-groom (Thomas Haden Church) on a week-long tour of vineyards is so bloody good? Perhaps because of Giamatti’s astonishing characterisation, which imbues an arrogant, self-destructive, self-hating pseud with a completely disarming humanity. Or perhaps because it’s not really about wine at all, but love and friendship and the choices that people make that end up deciding and defining their lives. It’s the antithesis of formula filmmaking: incredibly entertaining, but also about something, and featuring – quite unexpectedly – a handful of brilliant sight gags."(5/5)

Full review:Letterboxd / This blog

***

1. Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001)



Reviewed October 2012
"You can take your Juno, your Scott Pilgrim, even your Heathers, and chuck them in a skip, because Ghost World just does it all so much better. Well, all of it that's worth doing. I'm beginning to think this melancholy, bitingly hilarious crystallisation of teen ennui might be the only film I'll ever really need."(5/5)

Full review: Letterboxd / This blog

***

Of course, Letterboxd doesn't have that many people on it, so this will continue to be my main review platform, and we're now hitting 20K hits a month, which is lovely. The 10 most popular blogposts are viewable here, with 35K views between them:



Boast boast boast.

Here are three other reviews I was pleased with:

Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy, 1933)
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973)
Gas, Food Lodging (Allison Anders, 1992)

***

Thanks for reading.

Since you've been very good, I've written some reviews for you, taking a look at I Am Not Your Negro, Julien Temple's bizarre, fascinating 1986 musical, a Fassbinder film (he's the subject of a BFI season at the moment, so there are more on the way), and Jack Kerouac's phenomenal follow-up to On the Road, 1962's Big Sur.



CINEMA: I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, 2016)– A profoundly powerful polemic that forces you to view the African-American experience through the piercing gaze of writer, thinker and activist James Baldwin, who speaks with authority, insightfulness and a broiling anger about the way his people have been exploited, abandoned and killed by their own country.

The script is taken entirely from his unfinished book, Remember This House, which was to explore the history of black America through the murders of community leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Those passages, perfectly performed by Samuel L. Jackson, are mixed with footage of Baldwin in interview or debate (I love his voice), and a wealth of material showing everything from reviled character actors Stepin Fetchit and Willie Best – who epitomised the slurring, slow-witted black American in ‘30s comedies – to public information films, contemporary news reports of police shootings, and clips of Doris Day and Gary Cooper, the paragons of toxic white innocence whom Baldwin draws into his crosshairs.

At times that footage matches, showing the prescience – or more often the enduring relevance – of Baldwin’s words, but director Raoul Peck seems more interested in creating a collage of cumulative effect. In some ways, I do find it difficult that the film goes after RFK – who’s derided for his commitment to pragmatic realpolitik– and John Ford, one of the most thoughtful mainstream directors when it came to race, but that’s kind of Baldwin’s point: black people shouldn’t have to be grateful to the benevolent white man who nobly recognises their worth, they have as much right to their country as the white people who nicked it from the Native Americans.

As filmmaking, it may have rough edges or clumsy segues, but it’s wrenchingly powerful: an extraordinarily rich, humane and unsettling work, dominated by Baldwin’s unique moral and intellectual voice, which it brings to the masses. His polemicising is startlingly clear-sighted and incisive in a way that yanked the scales from my own eyes, and while it’s also wide-ranging and complex – bringing in such relevant but apparently disconnected concerns as the gulf between Americans’ private and public personas – perhaps its purest essence is contained in the speech that closes the film.

There, Baldwin rightly argues that since the grotesque caricature of black men (or of Jews in Nazi Germany or Muslims in Britain and the US today) bears such little relation to reality, it must have another purpose. “What white people have to do,” he says, “is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I'm not a nigger, I'm a man, but if you think I'm a nigger, it means you need it.” (3.5)

***



Absolute Beginners (Julien Temple, 1986)– Julien Temple's notorious musical is one of the oddest and most perversely interesting British films of its era: a sort of West Side Story for '50s Soho, shot in the fantastical neon style of One From the Heart (or the 'Girl Hunt' ballet in The Band Wagon) and featuring arguably the most peculiar cast of all time. Ever wanted to see David Bowie and Patsy Kensit share the screen? Dying to find a movie where Lionel Blair, Profumo affair luminary Mandy Rice-Davies, and Sade all feature? Searched all your life for a film graced by the talents of Irene Handl, Sylvia Syms, Ray Davies, Edward Tudor Pole, Alan 'Fluff' Freeman, James Fox, and Steven Berkoff as an Oswald Mosley-like fascist hate preacher? Well step right up and enjoy the weirdness.

Kensit is Crepe Suzette, an annoyingly-voiced model and fashion designer whose romance with clean-cut dirty-picture-photographer Colin (Eddie O'Connell) is sacrificed on the altar of career advancement, as London gets ready to erupt into race riots in the boiling summer of 1958. No-one can act and the script is infuriating pretentious rubbish stuffed with shallow sub-and-pseudo beatnik proclamations, but the music's mostly excellent, the energy of the film is thrilling, and it's startlingly directed from start to finish, kicking off with a roaming five-minute tracking shot introducing us to a vividly-realised '50s Soho.

Self-contained scenes like Bowie's 'That's Motivation' and Ray Davies's 'The Quiet Life' aren't just like music videos, they are music videos, a stipulation made by the Americans financiers (who stepped in part-way through and insisted on adding famous names to the cast list). That might have corrupted Temple's original vision, but those set-pieces are a lot better than much of the narrative that surrounds them: while the film's themes of gentrification, racism, and art vs commerce (centring on the idea of 'selling out', an idea that obsessed my adolescent, music-loving mind) are more timely now than at any time since the film was made, the screenplay is enormously irritating, and the leads are risible, especially the squeaky, blank-faced Kensit. For her big number on the catwalk, Temple uses most of the Busby-Berkeley-meets-Baz-Luhrmann tricks in the book to keep it moving, and make it dynamic and convincing, but he can't quite mask her absolutely bloody awful dancing.

The screening at Regent Street Cinema included a Q&A with jazz club owner Chris Sullivan. He appears briefly in the film and supplied most of the extras, who largely wore their own clothes, the late-'50s look being fortuitously in vogue in the London of 1986. He remains keen for Temple to create a director's cut reinstating all the footage that was shot but then junked after the film was taken out of the director's hands following his original editor's death. It's only then, I suppose, that we can see whether Temple's vision was intended to be as divergent from the source novel, and if it would have made a more convincing film overall, with stronger characterisation and a greater consistency of tone than this compromised final cut.

Sullivan also shared some stories about production: the entire cast being off their face on beer, speed or coke, the climactic pitched battles exploding into genuine violence (since none of the non-professional actors were used to faking fight scenes), and a woman having 12 stitches in her bum because − while almost everyone was shagging behind the sets − she was the only one who decided to do it on top of an antique pinball machine with a flimsy glass top.

He didn't have too much to say about the film itself, which is − to pervert the Manics lyrics − "all surface and no feeling", a sumptuous stylistic delight with nothing to it, Temple's 'Carry on Punking' approach to everything rendering its characters and attempts at sincerity visceral, shallow and grotesque. It is a wonder of sound and vision, though, capped by Bowie's theme tune and 'That's Motivation', Sade's 'Killer Blow', the jazz club numbers and Davies's 'The Quiet Life', complete with a Finders Keepers-style cutaway house and unbearable cartoonish shenanigans, while unexpected explosions of movement and music pepper the half-finished, artistically bankrupt script. (2.5)

***



Mood Indigo (Michel Gondry, 2013)– When I heard that Michel Gondry was making a phantasmagorical romance starring perhaps my favourite three French stars of recent decades, I was excited, but bad reviews and an inability to find the full-length cut that played to home audiences sapped my appetite, so it took a while.

The film – adapted from a book by singular, surrealistic author Boris Vian – tells the story of rich layabout Colin (Romain Duris), who spends his time in a spectacular, stop-motion apartment, being cooked for by his perma-grinning lawyer, Nicolas (Omar Sy). When Nicolas and his other best friend begin romantic relationships, he realises just what is missing from his life, and begins to court Chloe (Audrey Tautou), a playful, post-modernly joshing young woman he seeks out at a party. On their wedding night, a water-lily begins to grow in her lung, puncturing their perfect existence and sending Colin out into a merciless, absurd and unforgiving world, as his cloistered home descends into rot and ruin.

It begins (at least in this 95-minute version) like a music video stretched well beyond breaking point, coming off as twee and shallow – if fitfully amusing – when its quirks should be shorn of some of their self-consciousness, and rooted in a world both transcendent and idealised. But then, as it slips into prolonged, joyless, existential anguish, its style becomes substance, which is a good job as there's precious little else to cling on to here.

It is Gondryan excess in the service of Vian, with mere silvers of story, and its stars left out in the cold, or deluged by an avalanche of whimsy. Here, Duris has neither the fascinating looks nor the commanding intensity that power his most compelling vehicles, Tautou is thoroughly underused – while the mountain diversion never gives you the epic money-shot of flowers wilting all around her – and Sy comes across as a mere comic adornment, with the script and effects doing all his heavy lifting.

It does draw you in, and by the second half you’re immersed and engaged in its characters’ plight, so arrestingly articulated by the restlessly innovative visuals, leading to a final scene that makes use of one of its calling cards – a mouse realised through in-camera effects and played by a man in a mouse suit – before breaking into a simple and simply beautiful animation.

It lacks the novelty of Eternal Sunshine, which first brought Gondry’s delirious DIY aesthetic to audiences, or the sublime comedy and off-balance emotional centre of The Science of Sleep – easily my favourite of his films – but it’s just about worth seeing if you’re receptive to his preoccupations, and the way he serves them through ostentatious stylistics. (2.5)

See also: Here's one film each that spotlights Gondry (The Science of Sleep), Sy (Chocolat), Tautou (Amélie) and Duris (The Beat That My Heart Skipped), and which I'd really recommend.

***



*SOME SPOILERS*
CINEMA: Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975)– This resonant Fassbinder allegory tells the story of a virile, happy-go-lucky prole (the director) who wins the lottery, then loses his dignity, identity and all his money after falling for a calculating middle-class snob (Peter Chatel).

Its presentation of gay society can feel a little forced and it has moments of woodenness, but the film's combination of fatalistic poise and rough-and-ready spontaneity is pure Fassbinder, while his script blends excoriating satire with human drama and mordant humour.

Fox and His Friends also expands the director's familiar world to incorporate society drawing rooms, Marrakech and the kind of factory office you'd see in a Dardennes film, but doesn't skimp on the trappings you rightly expect from a Fassbinder film: moustaches, dingy bars, brown clothes, trashy '20s cabaret glamour, and squalid flats that stink of fags, booze and stifling urban desperation.

It's also interesting to Karlheinz Böhm, the star of Michael Powell's immortally creepy horror, Peeping Tom, in his more natural habitat. He's initially inscrutable – but unexpectedly suave and well-balanced in an Anthony Andrews vein – as an upper middle class antiques dealer who picks up Fassbender in a public toilet.

From the absurd, witty carnival intro to the pitiful dance of tragic greed that closes the picture, it's a hard-bitten but humane movie which suggests that the world is a terrible, cynical, rapacious place, but there are good people in it. What happens to those people, though, doesn't bear thinking about it, especially if they're from the proletariat and get ideas above their station. (3)

***



"No, I'm not gay!"
"Okay, alright, calm down. Look, this gay panic situation you're having right now, it's coming off a little homophobic."
"What, I'm homophobic because I don't want a penis in my mouth?"
"Exactly. That's exactly what homophobic means."

We're the Millers (Rawson Marshall Thurber, 2013)– An above-par comedy, with scuzzy weed dealer Jason Sudeikis moving into smuggling after losing loads of drugs, and recruiting a fake family (stripper neighbour Jennifer Aniston, homeless punk Emma Roberts, all-time dork Will Poulter) to help put the authorities off the scent. It's sensitive more often than sentimental, undercuts some occasional misogyny with clever pay-offs and Aniston's strong female character, and − while at times it's guilty of obviousness or signposting jokes or virulent misanthropy − when it's funny it is very funny. For that, you can forgive its lurches in tone, the clumsy recuts and post-synced dialogue synonymous with a film they thought was in trouble, and Ed Helms offering precisely nothing as Sudeikis's amoral boss. 'Very funny' covers a lot of sins (and how can you dislike a film in which the two main characters love Tom Waits? Shame he doesn't feature on the soundtrack). (2.5)

***

BOOKS



Big Sur by Jack Kerouac (1962)– Kerouac's follow-up to On the Road finds him retreating from the pressures and moral privations of fame to a lonely cabin in foggy, violent, howling, rocky Big Sur. Between there and the city, alone or with gentle, conspiratorial Cody, ailing George Baso − his slowness and Zen-ness corrupted by illness − with his eternal future bride Evelyn, with Ben Fagan, Monsanto, Dave Wain and the tortured, destructively depressed Billie, he finds only mounting madness, which comes at first in fleeting signs that interrupt his tranquil but restless, probingly creative diversion, then grows in the fertile ground of a wine-soaked mind, until chapters of exhausting, harrowing, unrelenting terror that evoke mental malaise as well as anything I've ever read.

It is a breathtaking work, written in Kerouac's roving, unstinting style, basking in naturalistic, colloquial language, in the juxtapositions of ideas and words, in the unvarnished, unprettified honesty of a man at the end of his tether, who despairs at his lack of 'human beingness' and yet in Big Sur shows the compassion, innate, clear-sighted judgement of character and ruthless, pitiless self-awareness that is being human. It is a book of wisdom, hope and relentless artistic accomplishment, a journal of illness and uncertain, incomplete redemption, haunted by the spectre of insanity and total self-destruction but blessed with the gentleness, empathy, childlike playfulness and richly-textured world of this unique poet: wine bottles, fireplace, old green t-shirt, singing bluejays, rolling mist, sacred burro and all. (4)

***

I also greatly enjoyed Dr Seuss's immortal Oh, the Places You'll Go, which has everything you need to know for a life on earth. See also: Vonnegut's Timequake.

***

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 Tinseltown, 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.

Behold such riches as have rarely been seen on Advice to the Lovelorn: one of my favourite 20 movies, two fantastic books, and the amazing psychedelic folk records that one of them has turned me onto. I also enjoyed a phenomenally intense Yasmine Hamdan performance at London's sweaty, sensational Scala, and saw the Moomin exhibition at the Southbank and the sensational butterflies at the Natural History Museum. Those sojourns will turn up in my review of the year, but for now let's talk films, books and music:



*MINOR SPOILERS*
The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960)– I will never get over how much I love this movie: a film about unrequited love, with Jack Lemmon taking a verbal and physical pummeling to protect the elevator girl he loves, the beautiful Miss Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine).

She's the one left holding the sleeping pills after his spineless corporate climbing – achieved by leasing the titular abode to horny company executives – and her naïve romanticism bring them into the circle of all-time business shitweasel, Mr Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray, cast brilliantly against type). Recovering in Lemmon's apartment, MacLaine begins to fall for the poor fool, but damn it if he can't quite untangle himself from acquiescence, subversience and the hollow, ill-gotten glories of corporate success, and become a mensch.

The greatest of Wilder's many masterpieces (I'd say he made nine), it's a perfect marriage of cynicism and innocence, with Lemmon perfectly balancing his character's myriad complexities, making us feel sorry for a fawning, amoral and (admittedly) piteous schmuck for 20 minutes, transmitting his character's innate sensitivity and subsequent moral awakening – inspired by his beautifully unselfish love for the bob-cutted, pixie-ish Miss Kubelik – and negotiating the frustration of a hero who'll try to set up the love of his life with his arsehole boss out of pure selflessness, then enjoy the societal and financial rewards. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Lemmon needed a tight rein on him or it was all overbearing humming and unbearable mugging. Here he does a little of that, but it's part of the densely-packed mesh of a believable, human character.

MacMurray too is superb as the evil, ageing twin of his character in Remember the Night (my favourite film), who abandons his suicidal mistress on Christmas Day and tries to fuck her on New Year's Eve. Best of all is MacLaine's performance, which she has never come close to approaching, despite decades of fine work. Her haircut might be pure MPDG, but she's a real woman, with real difficulties, delusions and selfish impulses, real pain and anger shining from those eyes, and a real, rewarding sweetness, tenderness and humanity.

In its gorgeous widescreen, monochrome, city-based cinematography and perfectly-timed blasts of melodic jazz, it anticipates Woody Allen's Manhattan, and its ending has the same joyous dash towards romance, the same profoundly understated, compassionate, off-kilter pay-off. (It's in a constant conversation with cinema too, being inspired by an incidental element of Brief Encounter and explicitly referencing MGM's all-star 1932 movie, Grand Hotel and the westerns of John Ford.) This whole film feels like perfection, but its last 10 minutes especially so, as every seed that Wilder has sown throughout the past 115 bursts into bloom, as MacLaine sprints through the streets, a crown on her head, the camera shaking as it struggles to keep up. A mention too for the scene with Lemmon, MacLaine and the broken mirror, in which every element is so perfectly integrated, from language to image to performance. I'd die happy if I could ever write something just a tenth as good.

It's a film about gentlessness, stoicism and the need to tell power to take a running jump. My film. And as good as it gets, cinema-wise. (4)

This was #19 on that all-time top 100 I put together last year.

***



Awakenings (Penny Marshall, 1990)– An effective, sentimental story about awkward, passionate doctor Robin Williams getting a job in a chronic hospital in the Bronx, and realising that the supposed vegetables peopling the ward – including former encephalitis patient Robert De Niro – might be alive in there after all.

For more than an hour it's like a lighter, extremely entertaining variation on One Flew Over, as Williams fights the authorities for the right to administer untested medication in an attempt to “awaken” these trapped souls, and modern-day miracles begin to happen. Then the movie becomes darker and more troubling, making it a richer, more human and more profound film, but notably less comfortable viewing.

Williams' closing speech is the kind of vague, wooly, catch-all bollocks I can't stand (who, precisely, has forgotten “work, play, friendship, family”?! Even Hitler was a fan of all four), but the rest of the film is extremely well done, with strong performances, a familiar but slick script, and some thoughtful direction, Marshall's Hollywood instincts and visual shadowing of moods augmented by some artistic touches, including fine, subtle use of handheld camera.

Its overall presentation is none-more-1990, with some of the broad strokes (and subsequent distancing) you’d expect, but also the attendant entertainment value, as the film’s edge, basic commitment to the facts and underlying sincerity begins to work away at you. (3.5)

(This viewing was in the annual pre-Eurovision slot, with my friend Vicky, following last year's acclaimed screening of We Bought a Zoo.)

***



CINEMA: Adam & Paul (Lenny Abrahamson, 2004)– Michael Smiley introduced this at the BFI, saying it was a film that gave him a funny feeling inside, and a movie he’d shared with friends, always asking them to pass the DVD on, rather than giving it back. Justin Johnson, chief programmer at the BFI, said people could regard it as the most hilarious film ever made, or the most heartbreaking. For me it’s not quite either, though it does have a special something about it.

It’s essentially Waiting for Godot relocated to junkie Dublin, as two addicts who’ve been missing for a month wander the streets looking for their next hit. They are gentle, meek, apologetic Paul (Tom Murphy) and the taller, quieter, grumpier Paul (Mark O'Halloran, who wrote it), and the day we spend with them is poignant and troubling and sometimes hysterically funny. The leads aren’t unfailingly convincing, but they have just the right mix of sensitivity and selfishness, as O’Halloran’s script traverses comfortable ground, then expects us to navigate abrupt, discomforting developments, like the pitiful, pitiless mugging of a kid with Down syndrome). Adam and Paul are loveable in their innocent, Laurel and Hardy-ish way, but that scene reveals a cruelty born of desperation just beneath the surface.

The film was directed by Lenny Abrahamson, who’s since gone on to big things with Frank and Room, and while you’d never mistake it for a film with a big budget, its low-rent look and the drab Dublin it presents suit the subject matter. When there is a need to slip into something more cinematic, he really delivers: the mini-flashback (or flash-forward?) in the baby sequence is a jolt of auteuristic brilliance.

Adam & Paul is a little shabby and at times too much a melange of styles (the comic scene at the gas station is superbly done, but out of step with the rest of the picture), but there’s a great feel to it: sad and humanist and quietly absurd, with a cleverly contrarian treatment of tropes: we want these characters to be happy, but their goal is the worst possible thing for them; we want them to have friends, but if they reconnect with Janine (Louise Lewis), the new mum is likely to get hooked on heroin again. That uneasiness, our complicity in it, and the touching (if not entirely original) unspoken bond between Adam and Paul – deep, unconditional, unspoken – may well account for that funny feeling, as I got it too. I suppose I'm one of Smiley's people. (3.5)

I'd also like to mention here that my tweet about the film (and Tim Farron) got RTs from Smiley and O'Halloran. But I won't, that would be both insufferable and pathetic.

***



CINEMA: Chinese Roulette (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1976)– All the elements are here for another fine Fassbinder film – an intriguing set-up, an amusingly subversive villain, Anna Karina looking hot in a cool black bandana – but it never quite gets there, and in the meantime it’s all v-e-r-y s—l—o—w.

A married couple (Alexander Allerson and Margit Carstensen) each take a lover to their country estate, where they’re joined by their malevolent ‘crippled’ daughter, her governess, the housekeeper (Brigitte Mira) and the housekeeper’s son (Volker Spengler), an aspiring author. It sounds fascinating, but it flails impotently for an age, with Fassbinder abandoning his usual precise, methodical approach, taking a stab at a kind of cerebral Godardianism, his portentous, nebulous script directed at a halting face suffused with pregnant pauses.

Its characters are mysterious and craftily unexpected enough for it to gather momentum at times, but its intriguing dynamics and occasional surprises (a brief but brilliant off-the-wall dance sequence underlining its strong use of music; an unforgettable close up on a beaded hair net after an explosive tragedy) are bogged down by a laissez faire approach that obfuscates when it should elucidate, expecting us to basically make up both the story and what all of it means. This is typified by the titular, climactic game, which reaches a fairly worthwhile crescendo but takes an interminable amount of time to get there, forcing us to slog through synthetic dialogue, snail-paced delivery and endless silences.

It is fascinating and eerie to watch Mira standing there as Fassbinder invokes Nazi collaboration, though. The half-Jewish actress was a key performer in Goebbels’ state propaganda series, Liese und Miese, as the ‘bad’ citizen whose behaviour was a cautionary tale for German audiences.

From what I’d read, I was expecting something twisted and refreshing, with the best kid villain since Bonita Granville’s malicious gossip in These Three. What I got was less elusive than illusive, a slip of a film that you can read a lot into, much of it perhaps not really there. (2)

***

BOOKS



Electric Eden by Rob Young (2010)– This is a rare gem of a book: a beautifully-written, passionately-argued history – and defence – of British folk music from its origins in the pastoral socialism of William Morris and classical composers Holst, Vaughan Williams and Delius, through to Kate Bush, Julian Cope and Talk Talk in the 1980s. The meat of the book, though, is a conversational, amusing and astute evocation of the British folk boom of 1965-74, with vivid, condensed portraits of the likes of Pentangle, Fairport Convention, John Martyn and the Incredible String Band, their origins, obsessions and place in the canon impeccably but accessibly explained and elucidated, alongside that of an abundance of odd, often forgotten contemporaries, from the bleak and furious art rock of Comus to, erm, a moonlighting Playaway presenter involved in naked pagan rituals (these sequences are occasionally laborious or tenuously linked, but far more often utterly fascinating).

Young does a simply extraordinary job of stripping away decades of murkiness and myth, tracing an elegant through-line from 1890 to the 1980s, and confronting and considering many of the questions and controversies that dog the genre, tackling supposed middle-class hijacking – and Victorian sanitisation – of working class song preserved in the oral tradition, dismantling the associated notions of ‘authenticity’ that dominated folk in the 1960s, and repeatedly defending Morris dancing (he’s a braver man than I). He writes brilliantly about music too. There are a few too many 'tendril's and 'brew's, but his ingenious use of the pastoral vernacular, and his creating of neologisms and metaphors by riffing on album titles, is a joy to read: colourful and ambitious but precise, without the meaningless pretension of, say, '80s NME, or the drab, dryly factual contextualisation which seems to serve as music journalism today. He also takes an enormous gamble (in non-fiction terms) by slipping into allegorical fiction during the Rocket Cottage chapter, a stylistic quirk that is, if not a total success, extremely memorable.

Though a few furious pedants have found errors in the book, I’d argue that it’s better to write a passionate, revelatory book casting extraordinary light on British culture than to not bother because some bores might get cross. And while – due to the subjective nature of music – it inevitably becomes at times a personal history (Young omits June Tabor, has little time for Sandy Denny’s extraordinary second album, and neglects to even mention Fotheringay’s ‘Banks of the Nile’, perhaps the towering achievement of the era), its forays into the wider cultural context are extraordinarily invigorating, with the inclusion of A Canterbury Tale, Bagpuss and the films of Humphrey Jennings – allied to the genre’s root in socialism and a pastoral, nostalgic vision of Albion – suggests that everything I like is in some way related to British folk music.

The greatest joy of this book is the wealth of wonderful music it has inspired me to investigate. Best of the lot is the Incredible String Band, whose outrageously original psychedelic folk is illuminating each walk to and from work. Here's your four-step guide to becoming a fan:

a) Put on 5,000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion
b) Do not turn it off
c) Do it again
d) You are now a fan
(4)

***



Angel by Elizabeth Taylor (1957)– This impeccably restrained, richly ironic novel is the story of Angel Deverell, a 15-year-old liar and aspirant author who seeks to transcend the pathetic life of servitude mapped out for her, through sheer, incandescent genius. Her genius, though, isn’t for art but for matching the taste of the public, which greets her epic, florid, ‘risqué’, wildly inaccurate tour-de-force, The Lady Irania, with little short of hysteria, catapulting the waspish, selfish and humourless egomaniac into a life of which she has merely dreamt, and yet has dreamt relentlessly.

Taylor’s writing is intoxicatingly crisp and precise, allowing her to define character, invoke laughter or evoke tragedy with a minimum of language or apparent effort, as she traces Angel’s path from the deprivations of working-class Volunteer Street to the peak of renown and ridicule, and then on, towards desire, rot and ruin in a landscape blanched by snow, as lives fester beneath delusion, but compassion flowers from the muck.

In Angel’s world, horrors are envisaged then never arrived upon, as others emerge from the shadows; no passage goes where you expect it to, or elicits the emotion you anticipated; and Taylor creates not so much a cautionary tale as a devastating character study: the writer as a monster, chained to her art, anti-social and self-obsessed, in communion with herself, and fashioning the world as it should be, not as it is, both on the page and beyond.

It’s exquisitely beautiful, piercingly funny, and segues from brutish to elegiac quite seamlessly, Angel’s story peopled by vividly-realised supporting characters: her protective editor, Theo, with his perfectly-manufactured kid gloves; Nora, whose blinkers are replaced by perpetual martyrdom; lazy, deceptively doting Marvell; and that callow, listless and dissipated prettyboy, Ésme. In tone, style and subject, it’s like nothing else I’ve read. (4)

***

Thanks for reading.

Sometimes my life is really nice.



Yasmine Hamdan at Scala
Monday 15 May, 2017

One of the world's most singular, sensual and explosive performers is back in London, turning the sweaty, claustrophobic Scala near King's Cross from a dive into a dive faintly reminiscent of a bazaar, as she performs before a backdrop of white linen, and shifts between Lebanese metal, suggestive, seductive and erotic bedouin songs, and the kind of spellbinding electronica with which she made her name in cult band SoapKills, taking in both pulse-driven dance music and wails of futuristic despond.

Yasmine's presence – and sound – simply grabbed me by the throat when I first saw her live in 2014, though she delivered a different sort of show the following year: more muted and relaxed, the last of her lengthy Ya Nass tour. Here she's rediscovered her range – a range that simply doesn't transmit on her records, which are exotic and evocative but hardly arresting – the grungier sections rising into a cacophonous racket topped by her overpowering, startlingly committed vocals. At other times she's flirtatious, plaintive, erotic. "You didn't tell me she was sexy," challenged my friend Jess, when Yasmine walked on barefoot and launched into the first number, breaking into a slow grind.

Most of the dozen or so songs (she doesn't play long shows) are from her new record, Al Jamirat, which isn't the departure from Ya Nass she had promised or envisaged, at least musically (as she sings in Arabic, doesn't publish her lyrics and has dispensed with contextualising her songs live at all, themes are harder to discern), but then I don't think it needs to be. She has already cut out a unique place for herself, and exploring it gradually: brushing away the sand and gently splitting the concrete, sounds as worthwhile as just wandering off elsewhere. She does do two numbers from that 2013 record, though: 'Hal' (her best-known song in the West, due to its appearance in Jim Jarmusch's risible vampire film, Only Lovers Left Alive) and the beautiful 'Beirut', that breathtaking paean to her home city. The other old track is one I can't find on any record, but which she's done live each time I've seen her: Hamdan toying with the audience, and her own persona, as she plays both a lustful scoundrel and the nervous young virgin he's trying to bring back to his tent.

The night wasn't a total success, Yasmine has forgotten who I am, an annoying adorable new couple kept getting in the way, and we suffered the worst audience farts since the Manics at the Roundhouse in 2014, but Hamdan can't be held accountable for any of that (except the first bit, which is dreadful – I am highly memorable, if only memorably irritating), and in this spellbinding show she showed why she's one of the best live acts on the planet, intoxicating us with her mega-watt charisma, and drowning us in that extraordinary sound. (4)

***



John Grant at Union Chapel
Tuesday 2 May, 2017

A mesmeric evening in the company of electro-balladeer John Grant, who staged this one-off show in one of Britain’s most distinctive, beautiful venues to raise money for his Russian mate Oleg’s kidney transplant.

It was a proper fans’ gig, with no sign of his signature tune, GMF, but rare airings of 'Magma Arrives' (the first since 2015) and a pair of my favourites: the elegantly foul-mouthed, cataclysmic slump into depression that is 'You Don’t Have To'– with Grant delivering a vocal that rendered him lost and bewildered, offset by sonic squalls and squelches via the synth – and 'Global Warming', a piece of subtly, seductively rhythmic self-mockery that moves like a rap record, its passages of blissful audial catharsis at odds with the alarm of approaching Armageddon papered over with lust and vanity.

Other highlights included the title track of his most recent album – 'Grey Tickles, Black Pressure'– now a reliable blast of baritone misery – a thawing then roaring 'Where Dreams Go to Die' (of the 16 songs he plays, half are from his first solo record), and the greatest 'Glacier' I’ve ever heard (and I’ve now heard it live three times, and perhaps a dozen times elsewhere), Grant swaggering with intent, coalescing and convalescing with saw-player Mara Carlyle, and then ripping the lid of that unmatchable voice. It is, simply, great. (4)

See also: I saw John Grant at Hammersmith Apollo in 2015 (my second favourite show of the year), then at my office in 2016.

***

Thanks for reading.

The Girls (Phoenix Theatre)
Thursday 18 May, 2017



This is so, so Brexit. Gary Barlow’s musical version of Calendar Girls is fine-tuned to within an inch of its life, evoking a world and espousing a worldview that’s both seductive and abhorrent. It’s a hymn to a vanishing Britain – rural and nostalgic, where everyone knows everyone, and everyone is white – but it lacks the poetry or radicalism of the pastoral: it’s cloying and self-involved and almost context-free, lacking in proper principles beyond the ones you might find in the Conservative Party manifesto, and with a sense of community where there used to be a sense of society (cast member James Gaddas was a Tory PPC in 2005, so he should know all about it). The Girls is like Brassed Off for Leave voters: a safe, convivial, reassuring evening’s entertainment for people who look like the characters and think alcoholism is funny, and an ode to the crushing mediocrity rapidly consuming British culture, in both its music and its broad, blunt, saucy-seaside-postcard sense of humour. These characters aren’t really interested in politics, but they’ll vote Tory because they always have, and because you know where you stand with the Tories, and they’ve always done alright by us, and didn’t Corbyn say something about the IRA and wasn't that was dreadful, because I was around then and I remember what it was like. It’s a show of girl jobs and boy jobs, where hospitals should be paid for by charity, and the score is written by a tax avoider.

And yet, after 20 minutes of hating it, I began to come around, at least a little. From the moment that Claire Machin disappeared into her skirt for an exceptional piece of clowning on the knockout number ‘Who Wants a Silent Night?’, I started to forget that we’re in the middle of a culture war, and remembered that I was allowed to have a nice time, and a break from a hectic week at work. Having said that, the part of the show that really works is the hard part. The heartbreaking part. Torn from real life. Annie (Joanna Riding) loses her husband, Clarkey (Steve Giles) to cancer, and the play makes you feel the weight and the sorrow and the injustice of it. The way it's realised is very middle England, the lyrics evoking a world of duvets, margarine and Tesco trips that’s more Daily Mail than Ray Davies, but it's also moving and genuine and wonderfully played, with the two actors effortlessly stealing the show. That sincerity and emotion should, in principle, juxtapose perfectly with the humorous sequences that rub up alongside it. But they don’t. There are a handful of very funny moments, largely from Machin and young cast members Ben Hunter and Josh Benson, but most of the humour is really loud: inane, broad-brush joshing – the kind of thing you see on Loose Women or in an above-par Carry On… film, or when a hen party is on your train.


Chloe May Jackson, Ben Hunter and Josh Benson, the latter two providing many of the funny bits.

As you may know, Annie – encouraged by her free-spirited friend Chris (Claire Moore) – decides to make a nude calendar with her friends in the Women’s Institute, to raise money for a new sofa at the hospital where her husband died (I presume it hadn’t been replaced for several years due to 18 years of chronic underfunding of the health service by successive Tory governments). Along the way, they fight, squabble, banter and heal, while facing a cartoon baddie (Marion McLaughlin), assorted familial troubles and the personal demons of their WI friends. And we get a succession of Gary Barlow tunes – with pleasant if uninspired melodies, and wildly variable Tim Firth lyrics – before plot threads are tied and the cast take their clothes off behind pianos, flowers and currant buns, and the audience whoops and hollers, and a standing ovation breaks out. And in the end I kind of enjoyed it, because I like the theatre, and there were just about enough hummable songs and incidental funny bits, and Riding was very good, and her scenes with Clarkey stick in my mind because they brought a lump to my throat, and the second half was much more entertaining than the last act of King Lear at The Old Vic last year, which troubles me immensely. And though it’s set in a Paul Dacre wet dream of a small-town idyll, and the characters are cartoon Yorkshire people, and they’re the kind of cartoon Yorkshire people who actually exist, because they find the stereotype so alluring, and I’m going to have the burn the book to this show once the culture war hots up, it was a hell of a lot more enjoyable than I expected after those first, joyless 20 minutes, when I’d begun to question many of the life choices that had brought me to this point.

Having said all that, think how many hospital wings we could build if Gary Barlow just paid his taxes. (2.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

Wednesday 24 May, 2017



I thought the communality and specificity of a gig, coupled with a visit from teary-voiced alt-troubadour Angel Olsen was what we needed to heal the pain, but it all felt amiss. She got the tone wrong from the start. There was no reference to the victims in Manchester, no acknowledgement of how people were feeling, no ‘thank you for still coming out’ – though a lot of ticket-holders hadn’t turned up due to unease or fear or a feeling that a gig wasn’t where they wanted to be. In fact, Angel’s only veiled nod to the tragic events of Monday was that the world’s scariness “makes me realise what I have”, which is a commendable attitude but seemed myopic and self-centred, just as her banter with her guitarist came off as irritatingly trivial and irrelevant.



I appreciate that it can be hard to gauge the atmosphere in a foreign country, that my self-righteousness can be unbearable, and that one might not know quite how to navigate the aftermath of a tragedy, but for me the omission started to sour the experience, coupled with some more prosaic failings. For an hour this much-anticipated gig was largely a slog: the sound was muddy and Angel looked bored, not to mention confused by the dazed audience, who didn’t appear to want to be here (as I said, I was having second thoughts myself). There was no gentle balladeering to soothe the soul, or an opening blast of sound to wash the pain away: instead she started with a plodding, 10-minute version of ‘Heart-Shaped Face’, which is the worst idea an Angel’s had since getting kicked out of Heaven.



Angel has a fair stab at her most popular track, ‘Shut Up, Kiss Me’, murmuring “Well that’s out of the way” as soon as it’s over (partly in jest), lashes out the stabbing, relentless climax of ‘Not Gonna Kill You’ with real anguish and intent, and ends with a scintillating, sexy version of ‘Total Control’ by The Motels, sitting on the drum platform with legs apart as she delivers the vocal in this fabulously offhand, conversational but compelling way, then breaks out into a joyous keyboard duet with her backing vocalist. But the rest of it’s mostly monotonous, and Angel largely inert: standing out front with a guitar, occasionally sinking to her knees behind the keyboard stand when lead guitarist Paulie takes over (he’s an exceptional musician, and the star of the light blue-suited, string-tied backing band, who are ultimately more like an ensemble). The audience emit embarrassed lone whoops fading to nothing and, perhaps as a result, the set is flat, a disappointment… and such small portions too, wrapping up in just 55 minutes.



But then she’s back, for a five-song encore that just about drags it out of the bag. Angel’s alone on stage for a long, heartbreaking ’Lonely Universe’, before the band join her – backing vocalist first, the others quickly materialising – midway through ‘Unfucktheworld’, her signature song sounding stark and acidic and arresting. ‘Fly’ is mediocre, but next she breaks out ‘Tiniest Seed’ – my absolute favourite, from her 2012 debut – refashioned from a plaintive folk lament into a hard-edged, Nashville-tinged thing with echoes of Emmylou Harris (or Lucinda Williams with less throatily objectionable vocals). I enjoy that more than many, but everyone loves the closer: a sultry, exuberant ‘The Waiting’, Olsen walking around, mic-in-hand, bellowing: “I want to be the one who knows the best way.” It doesn’t seem like she does, quite, but on another day in another city I suppose this might all have worked. At least she got halfway there in the end. (2.5)

***

Absolutely terrible photographs by me. Thanks for reading.

Three all-new reviews, and a few I've had lying around since last year.

FILM:


O.J. "in full Naked Gun mode", as the film so superbly and disgustedly puts it

O.J.: Made in America (Ezra Edelman, 2016)– While the montaged credits and eerie theme tune suggest that this got green-lit because ESPN wanted the closest thing they could find to Making a Murderer, this complex, even-handed and multi-faceted five-part documentary portrait of O. J. Simpson is really an exceptional addition to the recent spate of documentaries about African-American history (The 13th, I Am Not Your Negro), viewing his remarkable story – quite reasonably – through the prism of race.

It’s all here: exhilarating footage of Simpson at his athletic zenith, the Hertz ads (“Go, O. J., go!”), the Naked Gun years, the Bronco, the trial, the glove and the acquittal – which the film convincingly argues only makes sense in the context of post-Rodney King L. A. The narrative of his football career could be neater, and the convoluted Las Vegas debacle doesn’t exactly emerge in crystal clarity here, but the crux of the series – his abuse of his wife, the subsequent double-murder and the trial – is simply hypnotic*: brought to life through recordings, court footage, rare documents, news reports and a brilliant selection of interviewees from jurors to laywers to journalists and preachers (Jeffrey Toobin and Rev Mark Whitlock are my MVPs), who don’t just contextualise the trial, but seem to embody the very viewpoints they’re espousing.

It remains a heartbreaking indictment of America that the only black man to benefit from its justice system was a multi-millionaire who had refused to engage with the civil rights movement, purposefully become an honorary white and only reconnected with his proud heritage to avoid being convicted of murdering his wife. His acting, cunning and cultivation of distinct, useful personas is chilling and extraordinary. Did I mention that he is an absolute piece of shit? And his nickname’s rubbish. I only learned recently that he’s called ‘The Juice’ not because of his stamina and speed on the football field, but because in America they call orange juice ‘OJ’. Also lol at the court clerk fluffing her one line, that gets me every time.

*especially for a legal or quasi-legal nut like me: I love courtroom dramas, have been obsessed with HUAC for years and did my undergrad dissertation on Stalin’s show trials

***

BOOKS:



High Fidelity by Nick Hornby (1995)– “Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?” Rob Fleming is a 34-year-old North London record store owner whose life is dominated by rejection, top 5 lists and music: pop, rock, Motown, STAX, oddities, dance numbers, floor-fillers and melancholy, idealistic, shimmeringly beautiful songs that have given him some unrealistic ideas about love, lust and break-ups. Unceremoniously dumped by girlfriend Laura, a former human rights lawyer who has grown out her spiky hair and moved into corporate work, he muses about men, women and relationships, while hanging out with exes, prospects and the two losers who work in his shop.

Hornby’s neatly-titled 1995 novel – made into a Hollywood film starring John Cusack four years later – is remarkably incisive, insightful and honest, in a way that makes me wish I’d read it 10 years ago and not turned my personal life into a binfire… and then makes me realise that basing our life choices on popular culture is exactly what this book is guarding against. It’s very 1990s – with a Harry Enfield cover quote and a left-leaning hero who’s unapologetic in his maleness, rather than drowning in self-loathing like the contemporary equivalent – and Hornby’s irritating, pedantic riffing on familiar phrases is a stylistic shortcoming (that “negative interest scenario” passage), but High Fidelity is also fast and funny and subversive, breaking the fourth wall while allowing us to judge the selfish, self-justifying Rob, and stripped of extraneous elements like lengthy scene-setting or laborious description.

I expected it to be funny and accessible (and London-centric and nerdy about music), but its concentration of hard-earned wisdom took me completely aback. (3.5)

***



The Bear Nobody Wanted by Allan Ahlberg (1992)– This children’s classic concerns a nameless bear who arrives off the production line feeling smug and superior – after all, a bear’s character is defined by his facial features – only to be tossed in a bin, rescued, rejected, burnt, used as a duster, savaged by a dog, repaired, briefly welcomed, relegated, forgotten, lonely, nameless, catatonic and bombed by the Nazis, on the way to a cathartic and happy ending. Telling the story in the third person but from the bear’s perspective, Ahlberg’s prose is beautiful, witty and whimsical, offering a lesson in humility and empathy, and peppered with memorable, perfectly-sketched characters and bits of human (or bearish) warmth – even as the story becomes perilously melancholy and dark.

It also economically evokes the vanished Britain of the author’s childhood: that world of smoking chimneys, cobbled streets and poky working-class houses which he wrote about so memorably in his great memoir, The Boyhood of Burglar Bill (and its sister title, My Brother’s Ghost), while ushering in a little of the timeless warmth of contemporary popular song, from 'My Blue Heaven' to 'Look for the Silver Lining'. It’s an offbeat, timeless and chokingly poignant book, and the line drawings by Janet Ahlberg (Handsome bears staring out of giant windows? Check. Chubby women with chubby sock noses? Check) are the perfect accompaniment. (4)

***

OLD REVIEWS COVERED IN COBWEBS

And now some odds and ends I saw or read last year, but never wrote about, because I was citing the books in the pitching of my novel, because the films were presents and I felt bad for criticising them, and because I forgot I'd written the one about the McGarrigles DVD.

FILMS


When you're playing an impoverished Irish waif but you're a star in 1930s Hollywood.

The Plough and the Stars (John Ford, 1936) - An abrasive, tone-deaf and dreadfully conceived film about the Easter Rising, which condenses Sean O'Casey's four-act play into just over an hour of shouting. There are a few passages of quiet lyricism, one memorably utilising the beautiful old Irish song Kathleen Mavourneen and another trading on Barbara Stanwyck's miraculous sensitivity, but for the most part it's loud, unconvincing and ugly: where badly framed bombs meet bombastic Blarney. (1.5)



Frontier Blues (Babak Jalali, 2009) - Proof that you can make any old shit and if it's in a foreign language it'll find an arthouse audience (1.5)

***

DVD



A Not So Silent Night (Gerard Schmidt, 2009) - Well that was extremely disappointing. I had high hopes for this December 2008 Christmas concert from the McGarrigle clan – Kate, her sister Anna, her children Rufus and Martha Wainwright, and assorted relatives – but it’s just completely shambolic: not in the charming, ramshackle manner it might have been, but in a crowded-stage, everyone-singing-from-sheet-music, Anna’s-lost-her-voice, tons-of-tuneless-guest-stars kind of way. Occasionally it does spark into life, with Lily Lanken kicking arse on 'Cherry Tree Carol', Rufus doing a heartbreaking 'What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve', and Martha singing 'I’ll Be Home for Christmas' with a crack in her voice, before a storming, punk-inflected Christmas Wrapping (the effect is of Greta Gerwig playing Patti Smith and just as wonderful as that sounds), but four songs out of 24 isn’t a great success rate, and the direction is lifeless and witless, fading out between songs to ensure that we don’t hear any cheering or really feel like we’re there. (2)

See also: I wrote about the obscure McGarrigles documentary from 1982 here.

***

BOOKS

I was reading lots of kids' books to help me pitch my own novel for eight to 12-year-olds (no, nothing yet, though Miranda Hart has a book deal).



Timecatcher by Marie Louise Fitzpatrick (2010) - An enjoyable, flavourful children's book, set in a Dublin-button-factory-turned-detective-agency, about a lonely girl who becomes involved with ghosts and a time travel portal. The writing is mediocre, relying on cliché and with a dubious understanding of how modern children talk, but the plot is exceptional, with a succession of brilliant twists and a most satisfying conclusion. (3)



Dead Man's Cove by Lauren St John (2010) - A magical detective story with a rich sea-swept atmosphere, in which 11-year-old heroine Laura Marlin finds her first permanent home − in St Ives, with a mysterious, brooding uncle − while pursuing a mystery just as dark and fascinating as the novels that have given her such welcome escape. It was sold with Blyton comparisons but aside from the title, a couple of minor plot elements and a helpful canine companion, it's not very similar and indeed dynamically subverts such expectations, while creating a gripping plot, an endearingly imperfect protagonist and the welcome promise of much more to come. There's one development near the close that I found simply too twee and clichéd, but for the most part it's an absolute winner. (3.5)



Kidnap in the Caribbean by Lauren St John (2011) - A dire sequel to the delightful Dead Man's Cove, which seems to have been written in one hell of a hurry. Laura Marlin is tricked into attending a pleasure cruise to Antigua, and from there on in it's all predictable plot-twists, painful expository dialogue and interminable polemicising about why we should protect sealife. Don't get me wrong, we should, but not like this. (1.5)



Skellig by David Almond (1998) - This short, simply-plotted story about a boy who finds a mysterious, winged man in his garage has a deceptive emotional impact. Some of that's down to Almond putting a seriously ill baby in the centre of his story - not perhaps the most subtle way of pulling at our heartstrings - but even if I'm not quite sure that Skellig is the unassailable, timeless classic it's often painted as, there's something special about it, in its intuitive understanding of childhood emotion, the author's graceful, spare and precise prose (when it isn't just going on about dead bluebottles again), and an agreeable lack of sentiment in its treatment of the titular character. (3)



Magyk by Angie Sage (2005) - A long, richly-textured book - attractively written and gorgeously designed - about a 10-year-old princess and the family of wizards who raised her and are now trying to keep her alive in the face of deathly danger, with the help of a ghost, an arrogant ExtraOrdinary Wizard in snakeskin boots, and a brainwashed former army cadet called Boy 412. Its big reveal is obvious, its villain is cliched and it sometimes feels as if Sage is making up the rules as she goes along, but its world is a fun place to visit, it's stuffed with incident and there's a pleasant unsentimentality about the book's emotional subtext, which manages to move you without being maudlin or mawkish. Sage also makes the most of the endless possibilities of writing, with an extremely ambitious action climax that comes off fairly well. (3)

***

Thanks for reading.

Next time: Line of Duty: Series 1 (I'm diving in at last), and a book by an LAPD detective who is convinced his dad committed the perhaps most notorious unsolved murder in American history.

Tuesday 30 May, 2017

‘Intimate, conversational, just about perfect’ – Seu Jorge headlines the Royal Albert Hall with sensational Bowie tribute show



Brazilian guitarist Seu Jorge brought his Life Aquatic show to Europe for the first time last night, paying tribute to David Bowie, his father, and the victims of the Manchester attack during a moving and memorable evening.

2003. Seu Jorge was in his flat in Rio when the phone rang. “I was playing PlayStation, so I ignored it. It carried on ringing. My ex-wife said: ‘Aren’t you going to answer it, you lazy…’ – in the end she picked it up herself. She passed it to me: ‘Someone in America is making a movie and they want to know if you would play Pelé.’ I said: ‘I can’t play soccer.’ I’m Brazilian, but I was never any good, except on PlayStation.”

That ‘someone’ was Wes Anderson, and the ‘Pelé’ he wanted Seu to play was not the three-times World Cup-winner, but a maritime safety expert and guitarist in the indie filmmaker’s upcoming movie, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The catch: the character’s main role is as an on-screen troubadour, crooning David Bowie covers. “At the time I only knew two Bowie songs – I was a black kid from a favela, we didn’t hear rock and roll – but I fell in love with him.” The film became a cult favourite and Seu released an album of his solo, acoustic, Portuguese-language Bowie covers the following year – but he had never played them live in Europe until this month.



The compère introduces the show as “a concert from two artists: one in person and one in spirit” and then Seu strides on, dressed in the Team Zissou outfit of red beanie heat and ice-blue short-sleeved shirt and trousers, looking like he’s just got off the boat. The atmosphere is intimate and conversational: it’s just him and his guitar on a little square platform ringed with fairy lights that masquerade as candles, two small piles of seafaring paraphernalia either side, the songs alternating with stories about his life, his Life Aquatic and his relationship with Bowie’s music.

The highlights are legion, and there’s vast variety in Seu’s approach, which takes counter-intuition to a new level, his deep, soulful voice the only constant. ‘Changes’ is sadder than Bowie’s original, though with the same cathartic sense of release. The slutty glam-rock of ‘Suffragette City’ is subsumed by tenderness in a gentle, finger-picked version. ‘Five Years’ is transformed from a claustrophobic, piano-led indictment of groupthink into an insistent, anthemic lament, while ‘Space Oddity’ - which gets the biggest cheer of the night – would be a sing-along if we could only speak Portuguese.


Space Oddity

Other songs are introduced with reminiscences. The bossa nova take on ‘Rebel Rebel’ was improvised on the spot on the first day of filming (“There were two or three songs I hadn’t learned properly. Wes Anderson said to me: ‘We’d love to do one of your songs today, how about ‘Rebel Rebel’? And I was like ‘Haha, yes, of course… Holy s***!’ I looked up to the sky: ‘Please God, give me inspiration’, and what I came up with was this…”), ‘Lady Stardust’ – which emerges as a hymn to women – was inspired by watching Cate Blanchett working relentlessly on-board the set, four months pregnant. He dedicates a show-stopping ‘Life on Mars?’ to “you, the people of Manchester, Bowie and my father” – his dad, “who made me what I am”, having passed away just three days after the Thin White Duke.

It’s a beautiful evening. Uplifting, unique, but deeply moving too: speaking very personally to the sell-out crowd, many of them sporting those iconic red beanies. “I am glad to see so many members of Zissou Team here,” says Seu. (A Team Zissou member calling Team Zissou 'Zissou Team” is the most Team Zissou thing ever). As he leaves the stage, holding up his guitar like the spoils of battle – or as if it has done all the work – the audience rises to its feet. And then a hidden screen comes down and, when he returns for an encore, his backdrop is The Life Aquatic and you realise that though it’s only 13 years, it’s already 13 years, and that the passing of time set to music is a rhapsodically poignant thing (think of Johnny Cash’s ‘Hurt’ or Terence Davies).

Seu takes the word ‘encore’ delightfully literally, performing ‘Rebel Rebel’ and ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ for a second time, then closes with a lengthy, mesmerising ‘Queen Bitch’ that prompts another standing ovation. He yells a final: “Thank you, London!” into the mic.

It’s been joyous and enrapturing, but with an undertow of poignancy that constantly tugs at Seu and at us. It’s been just about perfect. Thank goodness his wife picked up that phone. (4)



Setlist:

Ziggy Stardust
Changes
Oh! You Pretty Things
Rebel Rebel
Starman
Lady Stardust
Rock 'n' Roll Suicide
Suffragette City
Quicksand
Space Oddity
Five Years
Life on Mars?
When I Live My Dream

Encore:
Rebel Rebel
Oh! You Pretty Things
Queen Bitch

***

I wrote that for the Royal Albert Hall blog (it's accompanied by some shots from acclaimed rock-and-pop photographer, Christie Goodwin). I've added a few personal thoughts here, as I didn't want to bore the hell out of our visitors (but you are my people):

The 50th anniversary release of Sergeant Pepper is just landing on doorsteps as I write this, a cover sticker informing purchasers that this is “Sergeant Pepper as you’ve never heard it before”, as it is has been “remixed from the original tapes”. Excuse me while I take a seat. Remixed, you say? From the original tapes?! Now call me Philistine McGrumpy, but I fear we’re in danger of making “as you’ve never heard it before” lose its currency. But when you apply it to Seu’s Bowie covers, it’s utterly true, and in the finest possible sense of the phrase. The old adage with cover versions was always “either do it different or do it better”. By doing the first so committedly, he makes the second almost impossible to judge, but it’s these versions I’m more likely to pop on in the flat.

For me, Seu’s music is one of The Life Aquatic’s most apposite idiosyncracies, and one of its great virtues. What sounds hipsterish and gimmicky on paper becomes utterly genuine – and devastatingly, quietly effective – in the hands of Jorge and his director. The offbeat beauty and deceptive humanity present in this music, and the way it’s employed as an on-screen soundtrack, is the key to Wes Anderson’s films, which are often celebrated – or derided – for their micro-managed compositions and impeccable, much-parodied stylistisation. Critics rage at how mannered and self-satisfied his films feel, missing the point that many of us keep returning not for the outfits and tracking shots, but for the movies’ quiet, straightforward sincerity and unique sense of humour.



My relationship with the film is intensely personal, all tied up with my life and the relationship I was just starting when I saw it. The imperfect film you see, with those mundane, prosaic failings, isn’t the same as my Life Aquatic, which is a bigger, greater, more sprawling thing: a series of elements that transcend celluloid and have flooded into my own life, into my vernacular, my image-bank (the second death scene, the stop-motion sea dragon) and even my character. If I’d thought, as a 20-year-old discovering this film, that one day I’d be running the press office at the Royal Albert Hall, as Seu Jorge – in full costume – played these beautiful songs to 5,000 people, it would have blown my tiny undergraduate mind.

The handling of the film footage is a little mystifying – with irrelevant, ‘trippy’ effects, bad drawings of crabs and a decision to screen part of the credits through a mock porthole, so you can only read half of the words – but the weight of the footage, the 46-year-old Seu sitting in front of the 33-year-old one, snapshotted as a person who never existed, but feels a part of my life, is unconquerable.

***

Thanks for reading.

Friday 2 June, 2017


(L-R) JP Ruggieri, David Ford and Michele Stodart.

It took seeing David Ford live to turn me into a fan. That was in 2015 when he played a one-man-band show at Soho’s underground Borderline club, looping his multi-instrumentalism in a sweaty, intense show that revealed the unusual potency of both his performance style and his protest-songwriting. Watching him is like witnessing Tom Waits’ soul trapped in the body of Dermot O’Leary. I haven’t seen Ford since, though I’ve listened to him a lot. His new thing is a three-hour, 30-song ‘roadshow’ tour featuring two support acts, a drummer and himself, accompanying one another throughout all three sets. I found JP Ruggieri’s the least compelling: he’s a fine guitarist whose technical prowess perfectly complemented the later two performances, but his own songs are a little pedestrian, and he’s a pleasant rather than dynamic vocalist. Dynamic, though, is the perfect word to describe Magic Numbers alumnus Michele Stodart, whose magnetic presence, arresting mid-Atlantic twang and slew of singular mannerisms – from singing out of the side of her mouth to marching on the spot like a turbo-charged Jona Lewie – lit up the place. There were real echoes of Janis Joplin in her performance, and comparing someone to perhaps the most mesmeric live performer of all time is not something I do lightly.

At around 9:30, Ford takes centre-stage to play “a lot of new songs and a few old ones”, kicking off with a thrilling take on the sub-Waitsian ‘Let It Burn’ and torturing his fretboard for the benefit of the photographers in the pit. The new songs, from ‘Animal Spirits’ – a forthcoming ‘concept album about macro-economics’ – are a mixed bag, with the sleazy, somewhat platitudinal funk-rock outweighing the thoughtful ballads, and the oldies aren’t all his best, but ‘Pour a Little Poison’ (containing perhaps his signature line, “I’m just a whiny little English boy singing the blues”) is raucous, ‘I Don’t Care What You Call Me’ desperately sad, and ‘Waiting for the Storm’ blessed with an eerie foreshadowing and a weary poignancy. The audience misunderstands his desire to ‘not do an encore’ (meaning that he’ll do the songs without pretending to go home), leading to a delightfully silly bit where we have to stay as quiet as possible while he’s off stage in order to coax another song. He does an exuberant 'My Sharona'* with a full band ("Playing this has been a dream of mine for years"), then comes out – unplanned – for another by himself, as a result of the cacophony, breaking his pledge not to play a song with swearing in it as he blasts out ‘Every Time’, his unexpected, unapologetic, counter-intuitive anthem, which seems conventional in its sound and language, but almost revolutionary in its theme and ideas: that fame isn’t for him, and he doesn’t want your pity, that in order to get it he’d ruin the present and break up his happy life. It gets faster and faster, Ford spitting out the vituperative, sincere, self-justifying words as he cranks up the atmosphere and the angst.



It’s what’s been missing during his enjoyable but faintly pallid set: the singer-songwriter having traded the taciturn mystery of 2015 for a languid, appealing but less explosive approach, which befits the roomy, high-ceilinged venue with its proscenium arch, but perhaps isn’t what David Ford is for. It does, though, mean that we get some of his insights on current affairs: I thought I was bored of people just calling Donald Trump names now, but he really is “a fucking toilet with hair”, so thank you to David for that. I imagine that this show will get better and it better as it progresses, since the band had had just a day and a half to rehearse, but this second date was good enough: occasionally slightly scrappy and rushed, but also affable, great fun and with some truly special moments, thanks to Ford and particularly Stodart. (3.5)

*'My Sharona' by The Knack was a post-punk single by The Knack that got a second wind from its inclusion in the glossy, Hollywoodised but near-iconic Gen X film, Reality Bites. Tarantino had been about to include it in Pulp Fiction, but frustratedly dropped the idea as it no longer seemed fresh.

***

Thanks for reading.

... in which I arrive five years late to the Line of Duty party to find that all the bent coppers have already been caught.



Black Dahlia Avenger by Steve Hodel (2003/2015)− In 2003, former LAPD homicide detective Steve Hodel held a press conference to announce that he had solved perhaps the most notorious unsolved murder case in American history: the 1947 slaying of the 'Black Dahlia', an aspiring actress named Elizabeth Short, whose brutally mutilated body was found in a parking lot in Los Angeles. The unforgettable appellation − often misattributed to tabloid hacks repurposing the film noir title, The Blue Dahlia− was actually Short's nickname in life, and, with the singularly horrifying manner of the body (cut in two with surgeon-like precision), may explain why it became such a sensational newspaper story. Yellow journalism fanned the flames of a tale that had everything − a beautiful victim, a sadistic villain, and innumerable conspiracy theories − turning the hunt for the killer into a dark parlour game, rather than it remaining what it should always have been: the search for justice after the death of a young woman, almost certainly murdered by an abusive ex-boyfriend. By 1950, she was a line in Sunset Blvd. Four decades later, James Ellroy revisited the crime in the dark, semi-fictional opening novel of his LA Quartet.

Hodel's theory, which made his book an international best-seller, is that the killer was his own father: a doctor, former musical prodigy and bona fide genius, by the name of George Hill Hodel. And for a third of its 500-page length, Black Dahlia Avenger − the name the killer gave himself, and Steve's self-appointed role here − is a gripping read: clumsily written and riddled with typos, but presenting a compelling narrative piecing together a timeline from innumerable press cuttings, fascinatingly documenting George's past, underscored by Steve's uneasy but loving relationship with him, and incorporating a remarkable gallery of supporting players, from Maltese Falcon director John Huston to surrealist, sadistic photographer Man Ray, and the big players in law enforcement in 1940s LA.

Then we get to the 'evidence' and it's sketchy as hell, Steve consistently going about a third of the way to proving something, and then considering the job done, and calling back to it, with an "as I have shown". The bits at the beginning were decidedly questionable too, including two supposed pictures of Short in George's personal effects which don't look like her at all (one of them has since been proven, by Steve himself, not to be her), but I'd hoped that was just the catalyst for his investigation, not a central part of it. Parts of the investigation at least support the case for further analysis of Hodel, Sr as a suspect − particularly handwriting comparisons − but the author seems conspicuously unable to differentiate between credible evidence, coincidence and batshit conspiracy theory. He'll also do things like (on p. 275 of the 2015 edition) show how his dad looked just like a composite picture, by airbrushing out his dad's moustache. Yes, OK, but your dad had a moustache. At one point he suggests, without further elaboration or investigation, that the "wealthy Hollywood man" being sought by police must have been his father.

"Who's your father?"
"George Hill Hodel."
"Ah yes, George Hill Hodel, the only wealthy man in Hollywood."

I do have some sympathy for Steve. His dad was clearly an awful, awful person − as evidenced by his rape of Steve's 14-year-old half-sister, of which he was cleared, but clearly guilty − and he may well have been capable of this crime. He may even have done it. But the author's obsessive attempt to link him to every unsolved rape and homicide in LA in the 1940s is less than convincing. His cries of a cover-up, as supposedly evidenced by the 1949 grand jury hearings into the failure to find the killer, are also patchy. In the 'Aftermath' section, added in 2005, we hear from Lt Jemison, appointed by the DA's office to look into the initial LAPD investigation, who attributes the failings to incompetence, rather than wrongdoing.

It's in the Aftermath section − missing, of course, from the original 2003 edition − that we realise Steve wasn't as mad as we thought. He may have begun the investigation because he decided that a photo of a random woman was Elizabeth Short, but his father really was a suspect, to the extent that he was bugged, and his phone tapped, by the DA's investigators. And there, in the transcripts, he seems to hint at some complicity in the Black Dahlia killing ("Supposin' I did kill the Black Dahlia? They couldn't prove it now"), while practically confessing to the murder of his secretary, Ruth Spaulding. But, as we see from Jemison's subsequent report, something cleared Hodel, Sr from suspicion, and he was eliminated as a suspect. Steve's contention that Jemison was being forced to drop the investigation into his father, and used the phrase "tends to eliminate him as a suspect" to show his unease, is unconvincing and not backed up by any evidence.

It's a frustrating book, then, and by no means 'case closed'. And while Steve clearly cares about Short, and makes a good fist of reclaiming her as a lovelorn young woman, rather than the dissolute slut painted by misogynistic cops and writers down the decades, he also wallows in the depravity and sadism of her murder and countless other murders of young women. I was suckered in by my fascination with Ellroy, LA noir and an unsolved mystery, but found myself feeling sickened, exploited and depressed by the end.

Hodel has since alienated most of his defenders by asserting that his dad was also the Zodiac Killer. (2.5)

See also: For a long time I avoided 'true crime', because it made me feel either guilty or unhappy. Those concerns were overridden by a couple of books which sounded too fascinating to neglect: Michael Finkel's True Story and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Now I may be back where I started.

***



The Folks That Live on the Hill by Kingsley Amis (1990)– Amis’s blinding wit can’t always rescue this poisonously misanthropic book about outwardly avuncular academic Harry Caldecote and his troubled family: the bereaved Clare, alcoholic Fiona, henproteckted Freddie, brutalised Bunty, and feckless, possibly criminal Piers, who exist in a Torily-realised London of crushing mundanity, waspish disgust and drab, brownly toneless multiculturalism. And at times even that voice fails altogether, turning in on itself to birth such laboriously self-satisfied sentences as the Amis of Lucky Jim would himself have lampooned, and necessitating that one read each of them several times to unpick the text, subtext, etc. That’s a parody of one of them.

There are others when the author’s unparalleled, deliciously English turn of phrase still dazzles, Amis cramming deadpan observations and dismissive putdowns into exposition and description, places where most other writers wouldn’t dare (or indeed bother). But he’s forever punching downwards, the malevolence and jaundice of his worldview rendering his work less than human, while he articulates the working class experience about as effectively as David Mitchell attempting a cockney accent. Or Andrea Leadsom. Occasionally, particularly towards the end, he offers his characters a little solace and understanding – if not a lifeline – but for far too long Amis seems to treat his characters with contempt, smugly revelling in not only their imperfections, but in the misogyny and absence of compassion that he mistakes for charming roguishness.

It’s also boring: rooted in a time and place (the Primrose Hill of 1990) that seems not only fleeting but also desperately uninteresting, people by characters whom it’s difficult to care about, since the man who created them can’t really be bothered. Amis displays flashes of lucid empathy – particularly in the deeply moving final chapter – where he effectively humanises and empathises with Clare, while I found the passages dealing with why an alcoholic like Fiona drinks truthful and even profound, but the bulk of this detached, inert book has uninteresting characters doing almost nothing aside from thinking about why they dislike one another, a prejudice that ultimately I couldn’t help but share. (2)

***

FILM



CINEMA: Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970)– This revisionist Western from Bonnie and Clyde director Arthur Penn is unfocused when it should be freewheeling, and cartoonish in a way that undermines its seriousness and integrity, but it has a few vivid moments, and helped pave the way for not only Blazing Saddles and Altman's Buffalo Bill, but Jarmusch’s deadpan Dead Man and Costner's brilliant Dances with Wolves, which also portrayed the bluecoats of the U. S. Cavalry as lying, duplicitous murderers.

Dustin Hoffman is Jack Crabb, at 121 years old the only white survivor of the Battle of Little Bighorn (or 'Custer's Last Stand'), that monument to arrogant, genocidal, imperialist complacency. During the film's 139 minutes, Crabb becomes a multitude of genre archetypes, from orphaned pioneer kid to gunslinger, Indian to Indian Fighter, medicine man to town drunk, hermit to trail scout, as the film swings wildly between sincerity and surrealism, subversion and sex comedy.

It’s possible to be both cartoonish and deftly satirical – Frank Tashlin did it with his 1957 masterpiece, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?– but Little Big Man is far too erratic to sustain that for more than a few minutes of time, drifting from its fine opening 30 into spoofs of Stagecoach, Shane, The Searchers and My Darling Clementine and some risible sex comedy little better than what you’d find in a Carry On film (the same year, Peckinpah interrupted his superb, elegiac Western, The Ballad of Cable Hogue with Benny Hill-like inserts), even if having Faye Dunaway deliver it means that you can at least gorge yourself on her translucent beauty (those cheekbones, fuck me).

Its passages in the Indian camp are often affecting, sensitive and richly ironic, deeply rooted in a wise, glowing humanity, and blessed with a fantastic performance from Chief Dan George as Hoffman’s adopted grandfather (George played a similar role in Clint’s The Outlaw Josey Wales). There are also flashes of brilliance in Penn’s direction: Sunshine framed in the tepee doorway, silence after a killing, and the chilling and unforgettable first appearance of the cavalry – announced by Hoffman’s desperate sprint through the camp-site, which is captured on handheld camera, and eerily, masterfully utilising the music and iconography of the bluecoats familiar from a hundred films in which they were the heroes (perhaps most memorable, Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.

But the film as a whole is a bit of a shambles: tonally incoherent, frequently and offputtingly aloof, and rarely as pointed and furious as it needs to be: Richard Mulligan’s Custer is amusingly trivial, but playing him as a vainglorious imbecile makes him seem more like Maid Marian and Her Merry Men’s Robin than the deluded, arrogant bigot of history, and the climactic battle – crucial to the whole picture – is irritating and badly-staged, trading comprehension for what it imagines wrongly to be visceral excitement, and then trading any vestiges of that for low comedy and sledgehammer satire.

Hoffman is also way out of his depth for much of the film. Perhaps he’s here as a post-modern joke – because you wouldn’t expect to find a titular Jewish nebbish as a Western hero, because his recognisable persona only really makes sense in 1970s America – but he seems merely miscast, and cast adrift by a script that chucks out its sense of anger and purpose not only at will, but for not discernible reason, aside from the instant gratification of a cheap laugh. (2.5)

***

TV

Here are some thoughts on Line of Duty. My 8,000-word fan theory on how the length of Vicky McClure's hair relates to the scale of her inner turmoil is still to come.



Line of Duty: Season 1 (2012)– OK, I'm finally diving in. A principled counter-terrorism officer (Martin Compson) botches a case and winds up in anti-corruption, where he's asked to investigate the charismatic, popular Tony Gates (Lennie James), whose crime-solving stats are off the scale. It's not great timing for Tony, who's just helped his mistress (Gina McKee) cover up a hit-and-run, or perhaps for ambitious young cop Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure), trying manfully to get on his team. This gripping, consistently surprising cop series is simply too far-fetched and melodramatic at times, but it's also beautifully acted – especially by James and McClure – with above-average dialogue from creator Jed Mercurio, and intelligent, extremely effective direction, with a blue tint to proceedings, and characters up-close-and-personal, or dwarfed by monolithic buildings or the enormity of their burdens. Its greatest virtue, though, and it has a few, is its scope of characterisation. It's not non-judgemental, exactly, it's more that it's even-handed, with Mercurio assured in his ability to economically, and without warning, skewer our sympathies: to engender sympathy for a villain or cause us to rage at a hero's sanctimony. That shifting perspective, allied to an impeccably-plotted narrative, saw me race through the bulk of this in one sitting. (3.5)

***



Line of Duty: Season 2 (2014)– A sometimes stunning second season: a bit messy, a bit silly, but keeping you guessing throughout, and with a fantastic performance from Keeley Hawes. She’s DI Lindsey Denton, the sole survivor of a hit on a protected witness, and so ripe for investigation by Steve (Martin Compston), Kate (Vicky McClure) and their hard-nosed, Roman-nosed boss (Adrian Dunbar). But is she a criminal mastermind, a victim or something else entirely? Line of Duty can be gimmicky at times, with a bit of screenwriting-by-the-book – the oldest trick in that book being to give every supporting character a quirk (like the pathologist with a heavy cold in the first series), or to half-inch your highlights, the hospital sequences here using tricks familiar from both The Godfather and Nighthawks– but it’s also thrilling and gripping and with truly great set-pieces, including the powerhouse interview sequences that are its calling card, and are now prefixed by that ominous, unpleasant honking on the tape.

The show does a good job, too, of drawing you in, both by developing its characters and by withholding information about them: that tends to work better when you’ve got an actor like Mark Bonnar (as a questionable DCC) rather than Sacha Dhawan (whose performance I found both flat and unconvincing), a truth underlined by McClure working wonders with a somewhat underwhelming subplot about an affair. Former Ken Loach discovery, Compston, is also so effective – and defines the tone and feel of the series – with a very definite style that initially struck me as woodenness, but is a sort of unyielding, unpolished and awkward stoicism. The important thing, I think, is just how wrapped up in this all I became: it’s possible to pick holes in it, perhaps even to pick it till it unravels, and I don’t think it quite matches The Shadow Line– that weird, dark and bleak vision of endemic moral and professional corruption – but I just can’t wait to return to it. I’ve started Season 3 already. (3.5)

***



*A FEW SPOILERS FOR SERIES 1 AND 2*
Line of Duty: Series 3 (2015)– One of my problems with the (delightful) French cop drama, Spiral, is that is has no memory: it ended its first series on a cliffhanger that was never mentioned again, while undercover agent Sami disappeared from the series for four years, and wasn’t brought back again until the writers got a bit stuck in Series 4. Line of Duty looked to be going down the same route for a while, but by the beginning of Series 3 it became clear that the revelations of its past two seasons hadn’t been forgotten about, they’d just been put on a timer, and they were about to blow. The result is the best season yet, taut, compelling and compulsive, giving two knockout characters – historically corrupt DI, Dot Cottan (Craig Parkinson), and it’s-way-more-complicated-than-that DCI Lindsey Denton (Keeley Hawes) – extraordinarily gripping storylines.

This one kicks off with hotheaded, bullying tough-nut Danny Waldron (Daniel Mays) shooting dead a suspect, and dressing it up as self-defence. As always, it takes a little time to acclimatise to the new characters (I just want to see Ted, Steve and Kaaaaaate), but Mays is explosive and arresting (ironic, really), and his storyline’s topicality is just the sort of thing TV should be doing, even in this showy, tabloid way. The other new cops are less than convincing – with the supporting cast members either average (Arsher Ali) or actively poor (Leanne Best and Will Mellor, who was once excessively rude to my secondary school am-dram group at a charity event) – but our intense personal investment in these people (and particularly the relationship between Steve and Kate) informs the programme’s balance of characterisation and rug-pulling revelation, which reaches fever pitch in the final two episodes (the last a bumper edition).

Its imperfections, particularly its underwhelming bit-players and concessions to ridiculousness (not to mention unnecessary inaccuracy) can frustrate, because it is so nearly great. As it is, it’s great fun: addictive, immersive and with passages of brilliance. A mention too for Neil Morrissey, whose supporting bits are always welcome, even though the second series changed his storyline from one of quiet, bitter pathos to one of astounding and off-putting cynicism. (3.5)

***

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