Archive for February, 2009

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Come on, “Man On Wire” is actually mediocre…

Friday, February 27th, 2009

Last night I saw Watchmen at the London Imax. The film is, of course, pure spectacle and if you’re going to see it in the UK, then don’t bother unless you’re going to the Imax, the largest screen in the country. The movie is way too long but its over-financing means there are plenty of really expensive shots that look good if you’re watching on a big enough screen. However, enough of that, what about so called ‘quality” film these days?

The flick that won a shed load of awards recently was Man On Wire, a documentary about Philippe Petit, who pulled high-wire stunts culminating in an illegal walk between the New York Twin Towers in 1974. The stunts Petit engineered required elaborate preparation and this is used to give Man On Wire the feel of a caper movie but one tailored to middle-brow tastes. The archive footage of Petit is mesmerising but the re-enactments of those parts of his story not filmed at the time are a TV-style snore fest. Worse yet is the dreadful music ranging from Eric Satie via Michael Nyman to early Fleetwood Mac, all deployed in a really clumsy and intrusive way.

The soundtrack is used to reassure catatonic middle-brow viewers that they are watching something supposedly imbued with ‘artistic purpose’. The resultant bollocks may convince the dim-witted their tastes are superior to those of your average street gawker, but the critical judgements of anyone who falls for a gambit of this type cannot be taken seriously. As a documentary Man On Wire would have been much better either as sleazy exploitation or something that was genuinely high-brow. If director James Marsh had shown some taste and used the tune Tightrope by Inez and Charlie Foxx instead of the truly awful Albertross by Fleetwood Mac, and tracks like Ho Ho Rock & Roll by Pete Roberts instead of Nyman and Satie, his movie wouldn’t suck quite so much; his cack-handed attempts to use music to signify ‘gravatus’ really infuriated me.

I rarely like movies that win awards, and Man On Wire is simply yet more mediocre fluff that the culture industry wants to hype up through its hierarchical prize system.

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in film | 19 Comments »

Loot Oxford, burn Cambridge!

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

Thought I’d give it a couple of days to simmer up, but the Guardian on Tuesday was a groove sensation. The front page headline promised: “Britain faces summer of rage – police. Middle-class anger at economic crisis could erupt into violence on streets”. Nice! Although middle-class anger clearly lacks the staying power of working class resentment. Talking of which, the pull out quote from a Trevor Phillips interview in the second section read: “The task today is not to shout for black people or women, but to break the grip of white men who went to public school. And that’s why I’m here.” Fine as far as it goes, but typically liberal in not going nearly far enough.

We know that race isn’t real but is experienced as real because of racism, and that race and class are inseparable. That said, public schools and so called ‘top’ universities aim to spit out a certain kind of alumni: on the whole these institutions don’t seem too bothered about the colour of people’s skin, as long as they can brainwash those they process into adopting a white bourgeois consciousness. There is also a more easily identifiable and specific target than the generic public schools Phillips speaks out against, viz Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Thus Philips suggests placing a limit the number of times an individual can sit as an MP; fine, but until we get around to abolishing parliament, why not place an outright ban on anyone who went to Oxbridge standing as an MP?

I’d also suggest kicking all Oxbridge graduates out of public institutions such as the BBC, and at the same time enforcing a blanket ban throughout the Beeb on interviews with those who attended these ‘top’ universities. Similarly, publicly funded art galleries could get rid of directors and curators who attended Oxbridge, and all other universities should dispense with the teaching services of zombies brainwashed by these ‘top’ institutions. Oxford and Cambridge are the capstone of the formal system of inequality that blights the septic isle known as ‘Britain’, so isn’t it about time we abolished them? These are the kind of policies Trevor Phillips would be pursing if he was serious about his role as head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). But all he’s offering on this score is a sop.

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in humour | 19 Comments »

Sinclair’s new London anti-classic again

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

Nice to see Iain Sinclair’s Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire being bigged-up in the Saturday Guardian by Andy Beckett this weekend. I don’t read The Times or The Telegraph so we won’t talk about how I know there were thumbs up reviews in those papers too. Talking to a few people after I blogged the book I realised there’d been the odd misunderstanding because I’d only really dealt with the ‘Mundus Subterraneus’ section that devotes more lines to me than any other part of the book; oh I just love reading about myself! ‘Mundus Subterraneus’ really is the most fictional part of the tome, and the rest of the work is far more factual. Sinclair hasn’t written a conventional history of Hackney, since the focus is bohemia, but there are plenty of hard facts for those that want them. Sinclair is even surprisingly polite about assorted Hackney-linked Trotskyites and liberals; you’d think his nihilism might make him more critical of them… but maybe it’s a generational solidarity thing going on here. That said, Sinclair is still more than capable of the odd mordant spasm, as the following jibe at the expense of one section of the professional middle-classes shows:

“The (Chambers) bequest was a nuisance, paintings of variable quality, curious objects, to be catalogued, stored, exhibited. The best that could be said of this stuff was that it gave employment to an emerging human type, the conceptual curator. Bureaucrats schooled to replace unreliable and indigent artists. Professional explainers: even when there was nothing to explain. The Chambers Collection was unfit to view, but it couldn’t be sold off at auction or dumped in a car boot sale at the Hackney Wick Stadium….”

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in books | 18 Comments »

Screamtime at the BFI…

Saturday, February 21st, 2009

I hadn’t seen Stanley Long perform in public since the BFI screened Primitive London a couple of years ago, so last night it was off to the South Bank to catch the veteran exploitation producer and director in action…  Rumour had it that Stanley was in bad shape after various surgical procedures, but he didn’t look much different from last time I saw him. He did his usual stock-in-trade bad jokes to laughs and heavy applause: “My writer Michael Armstrong has put on a lot of weight since he wrote these scripts for me, but I’m not going to embarrass him.” And when the Q & A was curtailed due to the event running late, Stanley suggested we could find the answers to all our questions in his newly published autobiography which is “on sale in the BFI bookshop”! So yes, it was a vintage Long performance.

The three films shown last night at the BFI belong to the quota quickie tradition, shorts made cheaply but for a considerable profit because they enabled UK cinemas to project the proportion of British films they were legally required to screen; and in the case of Long’s horror movies they were also eligible for public subsidy in the form of the Eady Fund. That’s The Way To Do It (1982) is about a put-upon children’s entertainer who batters his nearest and dearest to death, but blames the murders on his Mr Punch puppet. Lots of seafront shots in this one; it looked like Brighton to me but was apparently Eastbourne. Dreamhouse (1981) concerns a newly married woman apparently undergoing a nervous breakdown; it eventually transpires she’s got second-sight and was seeing a series of bloody murders that would take place in the very near future. It could probably happen to anyone who unexpectedly found themselves living in a large house in Ruislip, north-west London. Finally Do You Believe In Fairies? (1982) features murderous garden gnomes that come to life, plus a couple of zombies that rise from a suburban flower bed. This one even has David Van Day of the unbelievably naff pop groups Guys n’ Dolls and Dollar in it; in his introduction Stanley Long was unable to resist a joke about Van Day’s stint on a hot dog stall when his show biz career hit the skids!

The films were extraordinarily tacky and tended towards a British music hall/luvvie vibe. That said, the dreadful early eighties fashions kept me transfixed, as did the Stanley Long women -  what he seems to look for in younger actresses is a broad pelvis. Weird! Long films are complete rot, but nonetheless they are highly entertaining bollocks. And since I’m old enough to remember the mainly documentary shorts shown before American features in British cinemas, I can also assure you that Stanley Long’s three thirty plus minute horror outings tower above the average example of the quota quickie.

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in film | 22 Comments »

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