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Not Dark Yet #284: Is you or is you ain't my baby?

3/10/2018

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​Paweł Pawlikowski won an Oscar (Best Foreign Language Film) for Ida. And this year, he won Best Director for Cold War at the Cannes Film Festival. The latter award has greater resonance in this household and so we embarked on a Google search to find a showing within travelling distance and ended up, yesterday, in Oxford.
 
It is the first week of the Michaelmas term, and the streets and restaurants were crowded with freshers and their proud parents. But Screen 2 of the imposing new Curzon cinema was deserted apart two women of a certain age who whispered throughout the film in what we think was Polish, and probably was, because this film is set primarily in Poland during the Soviet era and it blends the personal and the political, the poetic and the prosaic in a quite mesmerizing manner.
 
Cold War is a musical, a love story and a political chronicle. It takes place over the course of a couple of decades, half a dozen ‘chapters’, and is punctuated throughout by music, which points to the cultural and political changes against which the doomed and destructive love affair takes place, moving inexorably to its conclusion through a series of scenes, spots of time, which illustrate the two hearts, four eyes of the affair and the film.
 
Paris is contrasted with Warsaw; Rock Around the Clock with the faux-folk of the Polish peasantry; the passion of the lovers with the ever-present politics - “I’m ratting on you” she tells him. “Is you or is you ain’t my baby?” asks the soundtrack.
 
The Best Director award is justified by any of so many delights. The ravishing, high contrast black and white. The square format. The meticulous framing.
 
But his greatest triumph is to draw out of his actors extraordinary performances. Tomasz Kot as the chain-smoking musician Wiktor and, particularly, Joanna Kulig as the ‘mountain girl’ Zula are superb in a New Wave kinda way, which is appropriate of course. And as each chapter addresses another spot of time, the suffering, the melancholy, of the intervening years are immediately and powerfully present.

The brevity of each scene, the short span of the movie as a whole (90 minutes), is not merely exquisite. The conciseness, succinctness, is perfection.
 
I doubt I shall see a more beautiful film this year. And certainly nothing more poignant than the dedication, at the end, in lower case out of black, bottom right of the screen: “to my parents”.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: I’ve been re-syncing about 100GB of shows and the process has thrown up some fascinating stuff which I had forgotten I had and not played for some time. Currently, it’s the sound track from Zabriski Point – some of Jerry’s most inspired noodling.
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Leamington Letters #101: The spectre haunting Europe

10/11/2015

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Photo credit: slashfilm.com
A SPECTRE is haunting Europe, and probably the rest of the world. It is, of course, the spectre of James Bond.
 
I sat through this cinematic smash (Smersh?) hit, this latest sprouting of the Broccoli franchise yesterday afternoon, even though (or, rather, because) I had far too much work to do. I confess I did not go with any great expectations, being a fan neither of the original books nor of the movies, although I accept that the humour of the cinematographic treatments has mitigated to some extent the casually misogynistic and racially patronising tone of Fleming’s novels.
 
I didn’t see any of the previous Daniel Craig outings, so this visit was something of a revelation and, when I offered a tentative critique of the film’s mores on the walk home, Jill cut me off. “For Christ’s sake” she said, “it’s a Bond movie”.
 
Of course it is. And it has its moments, notably a stunning opening tracking shot which lasts for about five minutes without a cut. It is a tour de force, dramatic and dynamic, but it does not set the tone for the next two and a quarter hours.
 
What does is the epigraph. The dead are alive it announces, reversed out of funereal black.
 
Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.
 
In the form of Daniel Craig, Bond is very much alive and, as a nod to the contemporary, the evil Blofeld is not now concerned with blowing up the world but putting it and everyone on the planet under surveillance.
 
There is a movie in here somewhere, something along the lines of a macro-The Conversation. But it sinks without trace like an Aston Martin in the Tiber. For Christ’s sake, it’s a Bond movie.
 
Which means we get the action sequences, the love interest, the mandatory torture scene, the random changes of scene and costume, the smashed cars and helicopters, the technological wizardry, the full Bond monty. We get the occasional apparent profundity – “a licence to kill is also a licence not to kill” – which informs us of the essential decency of the traditional British spook-cum-assassin. And we also get the stereotypes, the clichés and the conventions. Pretty much all of them.
 
It’s the equivalent of going to see a rock band performing nothing but their greatest hits note for note. But if that’s your bag …
 
For me, the final hour especially was tediously repetitive and the final twists predictable. But the saving grace was Ben Whishaw as Q, who actually made me laugh out loud. And, coincidentally, we were watching Ben again later last night in London Spy on the Beeb. It's by Tom Robb Smith, who wrote Child 44.
 
Apart from inhabiting the same genre, this could not have been more different. It was atmospheric and intriguing, it was carefully calibrated. It was a spy story but, primarily in this first episode, it was a love story. It was beautifully shot, beautifully acted, beautifully scripted. In other words, everything that SPECTRE is not.

​But no-one at SPECTRE will give a damn about that.
 
For Christ’s sake, it’s a Bond movie. The dead are alive.
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Leamington Letters #35: Jimi Hendrix (slight return)

28/11/2012

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Jimi Hendrix by Bill Zygmant. This is the photograph of which I have a print.
I never saw Hendrix. I don’t know why. I was going to a great many gigs during his London period, listened in awe to his early albums, and cried the night I heard he had passed as I came out of a showing of Zabriskie Point, the soundtrack to which featured the other great guitar hero of the times, Jerry Garcia.

The closest I came – physically – to Jimi was a brief period a couple of years later, when I worked in a short-lived advertising agency which had taken over a couple of floors of the house opposite Claridge’s in which he lived and died. And today, amongst the pictures of Dylan and Sartre and Ted Williams on the walls of my office, is a wonderful portrait of Hendrix taken by Bill Zygmant a few days before he died. (You can find out more about Bill and his sensational photographs at www.billzygmant.co.uk.)

I remember that balmy 1970 night outside the cinema in Leicester Square. I was with a university comrade called Phil Geddes, who was subsequently blown up by the IRA in 1983 outside Harrods. We discussed not the movie we had just seen but the importance of Hendrix. The discussion, I recall, focused on the political importance of the man and his music, and the role of rock music in the struggle. At the time, I would have placed more importance on the overtly political bands and on those, such as the Airplane, which were revolutionary both lyrically and musically. And maybe I was a little dismissive of the playing of the guitar upside down, the flames, the smashing of amps and speakers ( I’m pretty conservative at heart)..

I would have been wrong.

But I suspect that is why I did not see Hendrix live. Instead of seeing him, I was probably attending a gig by Edgar Broughton, or analysing each line of A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall, or organising a demonstration against Enoch Powell or writing an article about the Greek junta.

All worthy activities, but none of them as fulfilling, in retrospect, as seeing  Hendrix in person. 

My loss.

Today’s listening: Winterland, 12 October 1968. An extraordinary 15 minute Red House is the highlight of one of the great improvisatory gigs of the time.

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Anonymous. An 'incredible' movie.

4/11/2011

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To quote the opening line of the Rolling Stone review, by the great Greil Marcus, of Dylan’s 1970 album Self Portrait:

What is this shit?

I have no difficulty with light-hearted speculation about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. Back in 1972, as a young adman, I was given the task of re-branding and re-launching a failing restaurant in Stratford-upon-Avon. In an attempt to make it stand out from the crowd, I suggested that it be re-named Marlowe’s and I wrote a series of ads based on the hypothesis that Marlowe had faked his death and written his subsequent plays under the name of Shakespeare. I am delighted to say that, forty years on, Marlowe’s is still in business.

Nor am I much exercised by the ludicrous liberties with historical fact which the scriptwriter has taken in order to promote the Oxfordian proposition. I don’t go to the cinema to learn history. I loved Shakespeare in Love at the same time as I was noting the errors that Stoppard had introduced. And, come to think of it, Shakespeare himself played fast and loose with historical accuracy in his plays.

No, my problem with Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous is that it is awful.

Sure, it has some very good digital recreations of Elizabethan London. And it has a great cast: Sir Derek Jacobi and Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson, Rafe Spall and David Thewlis amongst others. To be fair, only Jacobi is particularly egregious, but one does wonder what these people are doing. They can’t need the money, and the allure of getting out the dressing-up box for yet another costume drama must have worn off long ago.

But here they are, going through the motions, bestowing their theatrical truth on the banalities of a script which must push credulity to the limits in order to create a scenario in which de Vere’s authorship might possibly be fact. The more unlikely the theory, the harder it is pushed, the longer and more lingering are the scenes of court intrigue.

I have seen Ifans quoted as saying that the movie is “not fiction”; I have to believe that he has been mis-quoted. He is an intelligent actor and must surely be aware of the distortions, chronological absurdities and historical impossibilities that lie at the heart of the movie.

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast” said the Queen in Alice.

In the 130 minutes of this movie, you have to believe a hell of a lot more impossible things than that, and in a shorter time. (It just seems longer.) 

But even if you do, you will still struggle to believe that the whole thing is any good.

Today’s listening: The Thelonius Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall, Thanksgiving 1957. 

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Lettres d'Uzes #2: Temps perdu

13/5/2011

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Minuit a Paris, the new Woody Allen movie, opened the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday. We saw it at Le Capitole in Uzes last night, an un-forecast thunder storm having prevented us from pursuing our usual early evening occupation: an apero in the courtyard.

You find Le Capitole along rue Xavier Sigalon, a beautifully renovated, cobbled street just off Place Henri 1ere. From the outside, it looks tiny; but one walks through the entrance doors into a vast area with an old zinc bar running some 25 metres down the side, and faded posters on the wall. A barman is wiping down the zinc in a lacklustre manner and an elderly couple sitting at a small table in the rear look up at you as you enter, their glances flickering over you before their eyes return to their glasses of rouge.

It is as if one had stepped back half a century or so in time.

Which made it the perfect place to see Minuit a Paris, Woody Allen's 'American in Paris' tribute to the city and its cultural heritage. Or rather, to Woody Allen's idea of the city and its cultural heritage.

The conceit is simple. Gil Pender/Woody Allen, a hack writer of Hollywood screenplays, is working on a novel set in a nostalgia shop. On a trip to Paris with his fiancee and her caricature Republican parents, he is transported by the midnight bells of the city to the '20s, where he meets the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Dali, Matisse and loads of others - yeh, I remember, Man-Ray, Bunuel, Degas were there too; as was, of course, the girl of his dreams, the ex-mistress of most of the above. And no, he doesn't get the girl - or not this girl anyway.

But the list of heroes provides the opportunity for some lovely cameo performances - Dali, for example,is brilliant. There are also a couple of gratuitous appearances by the wife of the President of France, which is fine if you like that kind of thing. And the camera relishes and revels in the recreated, but stereotypical, Paris.

It's a slight and sometimes lazy movie. But it runs for merely an hour and half, ending just as the nicotine monster needs feeding.

If you want to see it, see it in Uzes. Because the tribute to le capitale is less impressive than Le Capitole.

Today's listening: Francis Cabrel, Des hommes pareils. This was playing in Monoprix the other day and I can't get it out of my head.




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     Max Smith

    European writer, radical, restaurateur and Red Sox fan. 70-something husband, father, step-father. and grandfather. Resident in Warwick, England.

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