How not to blend genres

 

My assessment of R-rated British horror-thriller Kill List, an attempt at blending an ultra-violent hit-man thriller with suburban drama  and The Wicker Man-style horror, is up at SBS Film.

Extract:

"It takes ambition to try to convincingly blend two genres, let alone three (social drama, crime thriller and horror). Unfortunately, it also takes the kind of craft skill and ingenuity that Ben Wheatley, the film’s director and co-writer, and his screenwriting partner, Amy Jump, fail to display. Instead, they deliver a film in which each of the three acts inhabits a different genre. That’s not a blend. It’s a list. But at least the film is well named."

Eyeswired reviews The Clash in Brixton, 1984

Joe Strummer

British punk rock in its classic form lasted at best three years - 1976-1979 - before the bands started getting tired of the limitations of short, sharp three chords songs with anthemic choruses and started looking over the horizon.

The Clash were one of the first to break away, surprising many, myself included, with their third album, London Calling  - a double set ranging across a broader range of styles - and the following, patchy three album set, Sandinista!, which included nods to funk and hip-hop.

The loss of the band's second guitarist and singer, Mick Jones - Joe Strummer and Paul Simenon sacked him in 1983 - produced an odd reaction. The pair, apparently having decided they'd moved too far away from their roots, re-launched the band with three new members, returning to the fists-aloft image of their earlier days in a way that appeared just a bit too retro and desperate to convince.

Rock's Back Pages has just posted my scathing review of the first London show by this  "greatest hits" style version of the band in Brixton, South London. I wouldn't have written this the same day today. After viewing Julien Temple's revealing 2007 documentary, Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, I saw a different side to Strummer - a vulnerable guy who, after The Clash finally disbanded in 1986, spent several long years in the wilderness looking for ways to get his musical life back on track. 

I guess many of us veterans from that time still feel saddened by his shockingly early death in 2002. That means I find the snotty tone I adapted back here, while not entirely unjustified, a bit cruel and over the top. Still, it captures something of the attitudes of the time. Mine, anyway.

Lynden Barber, Melody Maker, 17 March 1984 

ONCE UPON a time when we were a little more naive than we like to admit, The Clash seemed pretty important, like they were the fuel to the fires of creative rebellion. But now we've grown older, seen promises broken, lyrics mocked, times-a-changed and poses struck, we take them with pinch of salt. RIGHT?
Poor old Joe Strummer. It's 1977 all
over again up there on stage and he 
desperately wants us to believe in it, 
moreover desperately needs us to 
believe in him because it ain't too nice
 when people get cynical and think you
 don't mean anything any more,
especially when you realise privately 
that they've probably got good 
reason.



I got the Big Chill watching The
 Clash at Brixton tonight; found it even
 pathetic watching the spectacle of a
 whole bunch of people trying to feel
 the moment of ignition again – as if
 the punk rock explosion had been 
placed inside a bottle for several years 
and let out again without anything 
having changed.

Up there on stage Joe's got his microphone stand slung over his shoulder like a weapon and he still seems to think he can shoot Margaret Thatcher dead by commanding one of his guitarists to thrum an "E" chord like a machine gun in the direction of the Houses of Parliament on a weekday.

Perhaps he doesn't even realise that the most he can hope to achieve is a grand old reunion party where he plays the role of the host, poised over the turntable and yelling ceaselessly, "Hey, anybody remember this one?" But then acumen never was one of his strong points, even if his heart was (and is?) in the right place, bless the old sod.

It's a farce because the current Clash show is nothing more than a reactionary surrender to the forces of nostalgia, Punks-On-45, a greatest hits run through, let's-all-pretend-we're-Still-wearing-Pogo-On-A-Nazi-badges-and-head off-down-to-Lewisham, because, let's face it, those were the good old clays and we could actually believe that The Clash were some kind of radical force.

By playing a song like 'We Are The Clash' you are committing all the errors that your generation were supposed to have steered away from – brandishing your name as a fetishistic object, hoping we'll swallow the symbol before getting a taste of what it means. You are nearer to the current John Lydon than you realise – a pantomime for pogo-ers but at least Lydon had the sense to maintain some ironic distance between himself and his new Public Image, or at least an aura of ambiguity, just to keep us guessing as to what he was really up to. But then irony was never a strength of The Clash.

I find it saddening that the things about punk that are still celebrated and scorned are in every single case the wrong things. The easy-to-grasp slogans, the songs themselves, the dogmas, all these are sacrosanct, and woe behold anyone who dares to use an elaborate light show, like Siouxsie, even if it does advance their craft, jolt them out of some stultifying rut.

If The Clash had opened with 'The Magnificent Seven' and 'Overpowered By Funk' instead of 'London Calling' and 'Safe European Home', or at least acknowledged their existence, it would have been easier to respect Strummer and Simenon and would have shown their feet to be placed in 1984. Instead – like some casually tossed token to the video age – we get nine TV screens flashing
 various images; in a hall the size of the 
Academy it's difficult to see exactly 
what's flickering away up there.

And the new members – Sheppard, Howard and White? They played well, and I wish them no ill. If the music sounded like one giant heavy metal thrash it's no fault of theirs – the sound of the early Clash has been copied so many times that it will never make the impact it once did.

Sure, there were new songs. Same as the old songs. I guess Strummer reckoned he had to make this "back-to-the-roots" move or risk losing the old Clash audience entirely. The "softer" side was always Mick Jones anyway.

"We Are The Clash"?

Ya boo.

Golly gee and aw, shucks....the Crikey profile

Luke Buckmaster, who writes the Cinetology blog at Crikey, recently started what will eventually be an extensive series of a interviews with Australian film critics, one a week. Buckmaster spoke with me over the phone from Melbourne for the third installment, which he's kindly given me permission to re-publish below in full (though I urge you to check out Cinetology for updates in this series and film reviews).

A brief note: the intro is flattering enough to make some readers people wonder  if he's doing a favour for a mate. Not so. We've never met. I will say this: given my rambling interview (which I was half-dreading appearing), this reads surprisingly well. That's largely because the original conversation has been edited so astutely. Gone are all my ums and ahhs, unfinished or borderline incoherent thoughts and conversational dead ends. A reminder that even interviews in the Q&A format often require the strict application of the editor's blue pencil.

Meet the Critics: Lynden Barber — film reviewer for The Oz and SBS, prolific tweeter and net-a-holic

February 3, 2012 – 10:07 am, by Luke Buckmaster

Few veteran film critics are as internet savvy as The Australian and SBS online reviewer Lynden Barber. Barber worked as a staff writer for newspapers and magazines in the 80s and 90s, banging away on stories during the days when “Google” still sounded like something you might use to shield your eyes, but has had no trouble evolving with the times.

In addition to his duties as a critic Barber is a website curator for the National Film and Sound Archive, runs a blog called Eyes Wired Open and is a social media hound, prolific on Twitter and a daily user of Facebook. His approach to blogging demonstrates how Barber uses the online world as a tool for research and organisation.

“In some ways I regard my blog as my personal note book,” he says. “Sometimes I put things up there that I find are really interesting. I can put in keywords which can help me pinpoint things — like a quote in an interview I might later want to turn into a story. The private notebook that’s open to the public.”

Born in the UK, Barber migrated to Australia in 1985. He was the staff film writer at The Australian between 1994-2004 and before that senior film critic at The Sydney Morning Herald for five years. He has also written for Rolling Stone Australia, Meanjin, NME and Lumina. A man of many reels, Barber served as Artist Director of the Sydney Film Festival for 2005 and 2006 and this year begins teaching film studies at Sydney Film School.

Like most critics, Barber likes to go into the cinema “cold,” not having fell privy to the whims of PR or even having read a synopsis.

“I love going into a film without knowing much about it, which is kind of ironic when you earn a living partly through describing films,” he says.
Barber knows he has a much sought after job — or jobs — but also acknowledges what every critic will tell you if prodded: that it isn’t always beer and skittles.

“When the general public ask what you do and you respond they immediately say something like ‘I wish I could do that job!’ I love my job, I love writing about films, I love going to see films, but there is always a downside to any professional work. The moment you turn a passion into work, there will be some part of it that will be extremely difficult.”

Barber is the third participant – after the ABC’s Margaret Pomeranz and The Age’s Jake Wilson – in Cinetology’s Meet the Critics series, which examines the viewing habits and philosophies of the country’s leading film reviewers.

Klaus Kinski in Aguirre: Wrath of God

Do you read much film criticism? If so, what publications and writers do you recommend?
I used to subscribe to Sight and Sound for many years, probably 20 years or so. I read it more or less cover to cover. Plus I’d buy other magazines like Film Comment and occasionally Empire or Filmink, the more pop culture mags, which can have some lively stuff in them too. I stopped subscribing to Sight and Sound because I found I wasn’t actually reading it. I got out of the habit of reading print magazines and I am just starting to re-assess that because I sort of miss it, and feel that so much of my life is spent on the internet.

One of the people I look to most commonly who I really enjoy — who’s a great appreciator of cinema and a fantastic, deceptively good writer — is Roger Ebert. He is the most well known film critic in America because of his TV show, which I’ve actually never seen. He has so much command of the writing craft of film criticism and I find him totally satisfying even if, of course, I don’t always agree with him.

The most important thing about criticism is the reasoning people use — the knowledge they bring to explaining how they feel about a film. I think Ebert understands that and I am often in awe when I read his stuff, how it seems to jut drip off the pen. I think he’s been particularly good since he had his illness. He can’t speak now, lost his voice entirely, and I think he has one of those Stephen Hawking type throat devices. I think that’s intensified his need to write.

Someone else I think is very good who is only online is Jim Emerson, from the Scanners blog. Scanners is really good. Emerson is not an academic critic but he could be, and he’s obviously read quite a lot of David Bordwell. One of the things I like about Bordwell is that he’s an academic but he doesn’t write in an academic style. He represents quite a fresh approach to other traditional film theorists, coming from a school known as ‘formalists’ or ‘neo formalists’ which essentially means he’s less interested in grand theorizing and more interested in breaking down what is actually happening on the screen: logging it, noting it, looking at the way film works in its mechanics, in its editing, in the way shots are set up, etcetera. What I really like about that approach is there’s an element of objectivity. I think a lot of film theory is about setting up a theory and then using a film to justify it.

What if anything is wrong with the current state of film criticism and/or attitudes towards film critics?

I don’t have any major bug bears about film criticism. I think there is so much stuff out there, so many bloggers and people who have one foot in professional writing and one foot in blogging. The internet has enabled a huge amount of writing. It might be that 80% of it is pure rubbish — maybe even 95% — but that’s true for the internet in general, not just criticism. But once you know where to look that extra 5% presents a huge amount of great material.


I was going to ask next about your thoughts regarding the impact internet writers have had on film criticism, but I think you’ve already answered that.
I think there is something else going on, which is the amount of commenting, particularly on mainstream columns and websites. I’m thinking particularly about some of the discussion about Australian film that have been on The Drum and Jim Schembri’s blog on The Age. There was a period over about a couple of years when Schembri would do a think piece or a provocative piece on the state of Australian cinema. I read all of those comments and found them very interesting. Then I tired of them very quickly, because you realise that an awful lot of people have opinions that are based on prejudice. For example they’ll call all Australian films crap because they saw a bad one many years ago. I find that really dispiriting.



How did you become a film critic and when did you know you wanted to be one?


My background was as a music critic. I started writing film reviews when I worked on the London rock paper The Melody Maker in the early 80s and was living in London in my late teens, early 20s. It was only when I discovered foreign and independent cinemas in London that I really got the film bug. I can actually remember of the key incidents: I was on my way to see a gig by The Fall at The Marquee, this legendary club that was actually a horrible dive. I was walking down Wardour street and I walked past one of those micro-sized boutique cinemas and Werner Herzogs’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God was playing. I stood there, read one of the reviews outside and decided to see that instead of the gig. It amazed me. Blew me away. I had similar experiences watching Tarkovsky films in tiny cinemas, like the sort of theatrettes journalists get invited to. That then ignited a much keener interest in Hollywood cinema. Growing up I was not a mad film buff.


The general public love to munch away while watching a movie. What are your eating habits in the cinema? Are you addicted to popcorn, sneak in the occasional choc-top, or there strictly to watch the film?
A choc-top, maybe. Popcorn I have done in the past. I remember about ten years ago going to see a documentary about Sam Fuller at the Sydney Film Festival. I’d been going to several films in a row and it was my third or fourth film and I hadn’t eaten. You know what it’s like at a festival when you’re dashing around — you don’t get time to eat. I grabbed a tub of popcorn. I was sitting there as quiet as possible, trying to put the pieces in my mouth and not make any noise, and this woman in front of me turned around and glared. You get a few nutters at festivals. I said to her: “lady, you are sitting in a cinema. People eat popcorn in cinemas!”

Do you take notes in the cinema? If so, how extensive are they?
I do take notes and often they are very hard to read back because you end up writing on top of your lines. When I get a point I think is really key, or a I’ve come up with a point that really crystallises what I’m thinking about a film, or even a specific line, I put a big tick next to it. Then I can go back and transcribe the ticks or re-read passages I’ve ticked. Only in films I know I am going to be reviewing, though. If it’s a film I’m watching for pleasure or out of general interest I generally won’t take notes, because that turns it into work. I don’t like taking notes but it does help jog the memory. Ideally after I’ve seen a film I should write up my notes or even write up the review straight away. I always find it is much easier when you do that. But in practice, I often leave it to the deadline. A journalistic sin, I know.

Moving onto the subject of eye moistening: when if ever was the last time you cried while watching a film and what was it?
Well, I didn’t cry during War Horse. But the moment with the barbed wire — and I’m trying to phrase this so it doesn’t give anything away — was quite shocking. I thought any kid would be traumatized by that. It’s not like the scene in Bambi where the mother is shot. It’s much more vivid and real.
We had a family viewing of The Sound of Music this Christmas. My son had never seen it and decided to get it out and screen it for us after our family Christmas dinner. After The Lonely Goatherd I started tearing up. I thought, how ridiculous! The Lonely Goatherd is a happy song!

Who are your five favourite living directors?
I don’t know that I can even answer this question. Five is far too many for me. I know this is not a very film critic-y kind of answer, but I don’t really think in those terms. There are very few living directors who I so admire, whose whole body of work is so great, that I want to rush out to see their new films. I find some of the greatest directors can also produce shockers. One of my favourite films of the last year has been Melancholia, but some of Lars von Triers films I’ve barely been able to sit through. Probably the most consistent for me in terms of having a fascinating style — creating his own world, technique and philosophy of making films that is absolutely unlike anybody else — is Mike Leigh. He would come close to being one of my favourite directors. Herzog, yes, generally, but going back to some of his earlier films.

What are your five favourite Australian films of the last ten years?
Ten Canoes, Animal Kingdom, Boxing Day, The Square and Three Blind Mice. Close runners-up would be Balibo, Mrs Carey’s Concert, The Tracker, Samson & Delilah and Kenny.

What is your first memory of the cinema?
Sleeping Beauty, the Disney film. I was probably about four years old when I saw it and I remember being taken to the cinema by one of my mum’s friends. That obviously made an impact on me. I remember I used to go and see a lot of Hayley Mills films, which shows how old I am. She was John Mills’ daughter, a child star of the early 60s. I loved the original 101 Dalmatians, Jungle Book, the Disney animations. I just adored them as a kid and I assume everybody else did as well. Particularly the King of the Swingers scene in Jungle Book, I just adored that. I grew up to be a jazz fan; I don’t know if that had any influence or not.

Can you describe the strangest experience at the cinema you’ve ever had?
I remember one day at the Sydney Film Festival, preparing for a film, with the audience sitting in the State Theatre. I’d been told to make sure to look after the director because it was the first time her film had been screened in public. But there was a problem: a piano was being delivered to the theatre, and the State Theatre doesn’t have proper back stage facilities — nor does it have proper backstage doors. Things actually have to come in through the roof. This piano, which should have come in at eight o’ clock in the morning but turned up eight hours late, was hovering in the air behind the curtain, behind the screen, up at roof level, very slowly coming down on wires. When it finally came down the delivery person said to me “now we just have to take it out in into the audience to assemble it, put the pedals on.” I said “you’re not doing that!” and the crisis was eventually resolved. It was very surreal.

Looking back over your filmic life, what is the cinematic experience you recall most fondly?
One of my fondest memories is going to see the world premiere of Pulp Fiction at Cannes. There were more people trying to get in then there were seats, but I finally squeezed myself in, and that was a buzz. Particularly going along to interview some of the cast and (Quentin) Tarantino the next day, including (John) Travolta. Travolta was basking in the fact that he’d just been rediscovered. He was charming and lovely. Bruce Willis was bad tempered. He was immediately defensive and aggressive and I thought wow, he has a chip on his shoulder.

There’s a common assumption that critics have a very large home collection of films. Is that true for you?
I’ve got quite a few DVDs but I’m generally much more obsessed in finding films I haven’t watched before. I just don’t feel like I have to have a big collection. You can usually find titles you want to watch in stores or online. The other thing is, I have so many bloody books taking over the house, and a large vinyl collection too. I like to actually have some space to live in as well.

With regards to philosophy re: sitting in the cinema, are you a back row sitter? A front row sitter? Why?
Usually I like to sit somewhere around the middle of the cinema but lately I’ve been sitting near the front, because I’ve had an eye problem, an acute case of dry eye. I was getting to the point that I felt if I sat further back I would have to strain my eyes more. I quite enjoyed sitting up the front. Too close to the front can be disorienting, though, if you can’t see the whole screen.

Finally, what advice would you provide to a) aspiring filmmakers and b) aspiring film critics?
I suspect the best advice to aspiring filmmakers comes from other filmmakers. For starters, watch lots of films and think about them.  You don’t have to shy away from watching bad films, because you can learn a lot from them too.
In terms of film critics, I answered that quite recently on my blog. I wrote a few points, including not to run with the crowd. You don’t have to follow sheepishly; the best critics are leaders. At the same time don’t go to the opposite extreme and be perverse. An opinion doesn’t become validated just because it’s widely held. Going to either of those extremes I think are real traps.

Now screening at an Art Cinema near you: Kentucky Fried Movies

I publish this information, taken from the entertainment  classifieds in today's Sydney Morning Herald (Tues 31 Jan, 2012), without comment:

Screening today at the Dendy Opera Quays "art cinema" in Sydney:

A Few Best Men

J. Edgar

The Descendants

The Iron Lady

Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Screening today at the mainstream multiplex Event Cinemas, George Street, Sydney:

A Few Best Men

J. Edgar

Tailor, Soldier, Spy

The Descendants

The Iron Lady 

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Sherlock Holmes: a Games of Shadows

(and eight others)

Screening today at the Palace Verona “art cinema” in Sydney:

J. Edgar

A Few Best Men

Tailor, Soldier, Spy

The Descendants

The Iron Lady

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Sherlock Holmes: a Games of Shadows

The Women on the 6th Floor

Aah, so THAT's what the new AACTA Awards are about....

Geoffrey Rush, AACTA nominated for The Eye of the Storm

Tonight sees the new local screen awards night take place in Sydney – The Australian Academy of Cinema And Television Arts Awards.

They involve a new organisation, run by the screen industry but still allied to the AFI (Australian Film Institute), and replace what used to be known as the AFI awards.  But are they really new, or merely a much-hyped branding exercise? 

Over at SBS Film website I askedl AFI chief executive Damien Trewhella to explain what it all means. I entered the interview sceptical and ended up feeling convinced it was a timely move that amounted to more than a merely cosmetic exercise. 

I still think the name's daft and suspect in a few years the new Academy will be forced to change it after realising that 99% of the public hears it as the "Actor Awards". (Still, it's an improvement over "the Lovelies", the cringe-inducing name the AFI briefly decided for the awards only a few years ago before quietly dropping it in embarrassment.)

Extract:

LB (asking Trewhella what‘s really new about the move to awards given by a film and TV Academy): It’s not as if the old AFI Awards had been staged without reference to film and television practitioners. Consultation with industry professional bodies over the award rules had been constant – or so the AFI had long been telling us.

Trewhella: “On one hand you’re right, we have been kind of doing that to a point. I’m not saying the awards process was terrible, it probably the best in the country. I used to be questioned internationally all the time – ‘What are the AFI Awards?’ And it would take minutes to explain this thing, and eventually you’d say, ‘It’s the Australian Academy Awards.’ We’re just breaking down all those barriers that were there. 

"The AFI Awards probably made sense back in 1958 when they started but the world has moved on and the benchmarks for the economy, prestige and media space are certainly  ‘Academy Awards’ for film. That is not going to change for at least 100 years, I would imagine.”

But surely, I put it to Trewhella, the international media always referred to the AFI Awards as ‘Australia’s Academy Awards’ anyway - in the same way they call the Goyas ‘Spain’s Academy awards’, ditto the Cesars in France, and so on.

“It is good that some of the media internationally understand it,” he says. “But if you’re a Hollywood executive or at Working Title in the UK whatever, you might not have that granular understanding of all the countries in the world because there’s so many now with production industries. 

"My experience and that of so many practitioners and performers you talk to is (that) you arrive in LA or London with an AFI Award and you’ve got to go through the process of explaining what it is. In America there’s an AFI already, which creates further confusion. So there’s a whole level of development there purely around being able to be understood and recognised..." More at SBS Film online.

Meanwhile on ABC Radio National’s Drive program I took part in a panel discussion last night on that hardy perennial, "the state of the industry", timed to coincide with the awards. My fellow panelists were federal funder Screen Australia's acting CEO, Fiona Cameron, and chief executive of the screen producers’ association, Geoff Brown, and the host was Waleed Ali. You can livestream or download the 20-odd minute discussion here.

My core argument: the local screen sector has given cause for cheer over the past two or three years with successes at both the aesthetic and commercial level and a broader spread of filmmaking than previously. Only this weekend we've had news that Stephan Elliott’s A Few Best Men has earned the best opening figures for a local comedy in more than a decade – better even than the equivalent period for 2011 hit Red Dog. 

Maia Thomas in Black & White & Sex

I could also have mentioned that, at the other end of the scale, John Winter’s low budget drama Black & White & Sex (due for local release in March) has just been voted the third favourite in the Rotterdam film festival’s audience poll (number one was Scorsese’s Hugo). 

Naturally the relationship between box office and artistic success is complex and therefore best tackled on a separate occasion. Nonetheless filmmakers of all types - commercial, genre-oriented, aesthetically rarified - need to connect with audiences, even if those audiences are small and specialised.

Megan Washington at Sydney Festival: my verdict

Continuing the female performer theme (see post on Anna Calvi and Laura Marling below), my review of last week's Sydney Festival show by Megan Washington is up at The Australian.

I'd been non-plussed by her recordings but this stage show, dubbed Insomnia and inspired by an emotional crisis behind her last two years in the public spotlight, was a different story.

Extract:

"SOME artists can't be properly appreciated until seen live. So it is with the ARIA award-winning singer Megan Washington.

"Her recordings appear to reveal a voice lacking in truly distinctive colour, and while her video clips show an appreciation of visual ingenuity, her eyes can look oddly lifeless as she gazes into the lens.

"It's fitting then that a sense of personal disengagement and emotional turmoil should provide the singer - stage name Washington - with a theme for this live performance, which is due for one-off repeats in New York, Paris and London only.

"Described in the program as a conceptual work, it is more intimately adult cabaret than spectacular pop concert, closer in theatrical spirit to Ute Lemper than Lady Gaga..."

Marling and Calvi hit Australia - the interviews

Two of the performers in my top albums of 2011 list are about to tour Australia, both of them insanely gifted young British women - Laura Marling (pictured directly below) and Anna Calvi. This week I interviewed both of them for features in The Australian. Extracts below:

LAURA MARLING

THE idea that popular musicians naturally react against the culture of their parents took root in the early-to-mid 1960s. But while that notion might have been seductive enough to last several decades, it's now essentially meaningless.

For evidence you need only turn to interviews with some of Australia's top new year's musical visitors from overseas. Fleet Foxes lead singer and songwriter Robin Pecknold, for instance, talks intently about getting his inspiration from his folks' Crosby Stills Nash and Young and Fairport Convention albums, while Britain's Anna Calvi is open about how much she gained from her Italian father's love of music.

Now Laura Marling, named best solo female artist last year in the Brit Awards, tells The Australian how much she gleaned from her musical parents in Hampshire in the south of England. "I was quite lucky," says Marling, 21, who last year released A Creature I Don't Know, her widely acclaimed third -- and predominantly acoustic -- album. "My dad used to run a residential recording studio..." 

ANNA CALVI

Callas and Piaf may be singing legends but they are not often name-checked by rock performers. Calvi -- who grew up in West London and takes her name from her music-loving Italian father -- clearly doesn't occupy their respective genres of chanson and opera. Nonetheless she doesn't see this as a barrier. "If you take Edith Piaf, I love her because there was such a rawness to her voice," she says. "In a way she was very rock'n'roll. She was a tough woman. Maria Callas, a lot of people complained that her voice was really ugly, because it was very distinct. That's something you get in rock music as well."

These stated influences are best thought of not as literal touchstones -- she doesn't really sound like either of them -- than the inspiration for a stirringly theatrical approach. In weaker hands, a desire for heightened dramatic effect in song so often leads to sentimental melodrama, hence the dreaded power ballad. In key Calvi songs Desire and Suzanne and I, the intensity is unmistakable yet the performance never overwrought. There's always light and shade, and plenty of atmosphere, much of it inspired by Calvi's reverence for the music in David Lynch's films (particularly Angelo Badalementi's scores) and Ennio Morricone's writing for the Sergio Leone westerns...

 

Filmfests team up with distributors to support niche releases

Stephen Sewell

This media release just hit my in-box. The initiative it announces immediately hit me as a very positive and interesting one.

"The Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane Film Festivals today announce a new partnership which will see the festivals working together with distributors to support the national release of niche and art house Australian films, both online and theatrically.

"The organisations will undertake targeted marketing for the releases in each territory, collectively mobilising their extensive networks of Australian cinephiles. Combined, the festivals have over 95,000 e-newsletter subscribers, and the partnership will tap into this valuable resource to support new release Australian films.

"The first project to receive mega-festival support is Andy X, developed and directed by Jim Sharman from a script by Stephen Sewell, featuring original music score by Basil Hogios and lyrics by Sewell and Hogios, which is scheduled for an online release on 22 February 2012."

The festivals already  give selective support to independent commercial releases through their e-news bulletins for subscribers and members, so the initiative is not entirely new. 

But in co-ordinating the support of the four major festivals across the board it ensures more targeted and effective marketing for those more creatively lively but harder-to-sell titles that festivals instinctively support. In other words, those films designed to leave us thinking as we leave the cinema, to quote Iranian director Asghar Farhadi in yesterday's post (see immediately below).

 More here. 

Farhadi: there are only two types of movies

I love this (partly indirect) quote in The Washington Examiner from Asghar Farhadi, Iranian director of A Separation - named best film by Berlin and Sydney film festivals last year and best foreign movie last week in the Golden Globes.

"There are two types of movies, he argued: those that leave audiences thinking afterward, and those that let them go to bed without a thought afterward. He wants to make the former.

"'Maybe your answers are different from my answers and the other audiences'. It doesn't matter. It matters that you think. Today, the world needs thinking'." My review of A Separation, which finally gets Australian release on March 1 via Hopscotch Films, is up at SBS Film.

Kids films: where the magic is

After viewing Scorsese's magical ode to silent cinema,  Hugo, the delightful The Muppets and now the latest Studio Ghibli, Arrietty, in a short period, I have decided to apply to officially be declared a child. I can't remember the last time three such wonderful kids films were released so closely together.

My full review of the last-named is at The Australian here , and a couple of extracts are below:

Introduction: "THE latest film from Japanese animators Studio Ghibli is an enchanting story of a family of little people living secretly beneath the floorboards of a house inhabited by humans.

"Like the studio's 2004 film Howl's Moving Castle, it's adapted from a popular English children's novel, in this case The Borrowers, written by Mary Norton and first published in 1952....

Conclusion: "Nearly all Studio Ghibli films to date have been directed by either Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away) or Isao Takahata (Grave of the Fireflies), who are now getting on in age. This film is the work of a new, younger director, Hiromasa Yonebayashi, who has served a long apprenticeship as one of their key animators. Judging by the results, the studio's creative future is assured."

 

Review Round-up - from Pedro to Payne

I've put together a series of links to some of my recent reviews published in The Australian and Limelight. The Australian content requires registration - which doesn't take long and so far it's free. (Postscript Jan 19: it seems you may have to sign up to read some content on the Australian site. It's complex though. Some items are open to everyone for free. I've no idea which, since I signed up for a free 3 month trial a while ago and therefore get access to everything without paying).  

 

Almodovar's The Skin I Live In: "a luridly macabre melodrama with enough outlandish plot developments to fuel three separate movies...offers up a fascinating meditation on beauty, sexual obsession and the putative
male desire to mould, gaze upon and own the female body." Review online and in print at Limelight. See also my musings on female star Elena Anaya and screen beauty in this Eyes Wired Open post from August.

The Muppets: "Exactly the bunch of reprobates we've come to love, and that is cause for celebration." Review at The Australian.

Guy Ritchie's sequel, Sherlock Holmes: a Game of Shadows: " as a characterisation it (Robert Downey Jr's Holmes) fails to add up. Downey again ditches the deerstalker, all the better to show off his long, tousled locks  – an affectation that makes him look more like a dissolutely Byronic hero than any previous incarnations of Holmes. 

 "This master detective retains the dazzling mental ability familiar from previous interpretations but adds a new layer of sadism that makes a mockery of the character. In line with Conan Doyle’s Holmes, he’s also a genius at disguises, giving the film its best running gag, especially in the delightful final scene. Less traditionally, he mumbles at great speed - a long-standing affectation of Downey Jr's." From original draft, edited from published review for space reasons - The Australian review here.)

We Bought a Zoo, Cameron Crowe's family film starring Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson: "Sentiment is milked; the characters often behave in obvious ways. Motives and thoughts are spelled out in a literal-minded fashion." Review in The Australian.

The Descendants, Alexander Payne's drama-comedy starring George Clooney: "The film’s appealing use of Hawaiian locations dovetails perfectly into its themes of cultural identity and family versus public responsibility. " Review published in Limelight print edition only.

The Iron Lady: "The deeper issue is narrative-related...it's as if Maggie's Greatest Hits...is playing in "shuffle" mode." Limelight, print only.

How to direct comedy: try serious

Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr.

 

I've never cared for comedies that look as if they're bending over backwards to make me laugh. With truly effective comedy, you never see the gag coming. The director and writer don't seem to be striving to get laughs and neither do the characters on screen.

 The most extreme examples can be found in the silent comedies of Buster Keaton (The General, Sherlock Jr. et al), but Leslie Nielsen's Frank Drebin displays the same principle in The Naked Gun films - mayhem is all around yet Frank never notices.

I'm not saying all great comedy has to be deadpan - that's just one approach among many - but filmmakers and actors should decline to underline the humour. Viewers want to feel they've discovered it themselves.

Howard Hawks, whose great Hollywood comedies included Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday and Ball of Fire, put it well in a 1976 interview:

"You don't find a good comedy so easily. There are a lot that are made that are supposed to be funny, but aren't. There's another thing about making comedies - they start out with funny main titles and with ridiculous gags, this attitude of 'Look, we're going to be funny and we want you to laugh at it.' 

"I try to start it as if it is all serious then all of a sudden surprise them. It's much easier to do it my way than to do it their way. If I go to see a movie and they start off trying to be funny right from the beginning, I get up and walk out."

10 lessons for aspiring film critics

Jim Hoberman

The Village Voice's retrenchment of its senior film critic Jim Hoberman  was the big news in the world of film criticism this week - yet another sign of the decline of paid film criticism in the US. I thought the whole point of a magazine like the Voice was to display informed criticism on the arts among other vital aspects of New York life. It's hard to imagine who it now sees as its readership. 

On the positive side I note that Hoberman, a deeply knowledgeable writer always worth reading, including when you found yourself disagreeing, lectures on film at NYU, so it's not like the Voice was his only paid gig. Plus I'd be surprised if he didn't crop up somewhere else, just as Todd McCarthy was picked up by Hollywood Reporter after being dropped by Variety, where he'd been the senior film critic for ages.

While in the short term this is obviously bad news for smart film criticism and for the appreciation of cinema as art, in the longer term I think it's merely part of an upheaval and re-arrangement in the way things are done.

For an example of the way the net has enabled smart film writing, it's hard to beat David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson's site, Observations on Film Art. It's an unpaid blog, ultimately supported by academic work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and their various books.

I find it interesting, in this context that they've been able to use the blog as the basis for their most recent collection of writings, Minding Movies (University of Chicago Press). I think this kind of model, where the barriers between paid and unpaid work start to break down, is something we're going to increasingly see more of. The one major problem for this is that it's going to make it harder for newcomers to break in though.

 

In the meantime, thanks to music and literary critic Bruce Elder for drawing my attention to Hoberman's 10 pieces of advice for aspiring film critics, posted by one of his former students this week on the website of theIndependent Film Channel. All the points are valuable. My comments appear in italics.

On the fundamentals:
“Ask yourself the question, ‘What do people want to know about a movie that they’ve never seen?’”

On plot:
“Plot synopses automatically ruin a review.”

Detailed plot synopses, yes. It's almost impossible to write about a film without giving something away , but try to keep those restricted to the earlier scenes that set up the story. Be sensitive to the moments you personally found surprising and try to preserve their mystery. 

I'd add: good film writing is never just about plot. It's about the totality of elements that go towards making a film, from music and sound design to performance and everything else between.

On brevity:
“Watch for excess words. If there’s a shorter word, use it.”

Indeed good advice for all writers, not just film critics. I'd add: be aware of your readership. "Mis-en-scene" makes sense to a sophisticated, cine-literate audience  - film students or readers of a serious periodical. If you're writing for a general audience, most people won't get what your point is. If you can't find a concise way to explain mis-en-scene, perhaps you shouldn't be writing about film.

On editors:
“Work with them for the good of the piece. Don’t have ego. Don’t compete.”

One of the most valuable reactions I ever had from a section editor was when he handed back a piece and told me it wasn't what he'd asked for and that I could do better. I went away. I did do better.

On interviewing filmmakers:
“If you’re thinking about it, ask them about it.”

Obvious, perhaps, but there's no point being shy. Spit out what's on your mind. 

On digressions:
“The longer the em dash, the weaker its impact.”

Great rule. In general, it's a good idea not to let your sentences get too long. At the same time, don't fetishise short sentences. Sometimes you need to contrast sentences of different lengths to create a more dynamic rhythm.

On taste:
“Always ask yourself why you like what you like.”

That's what good criticism is: the reviewer exploring their reactions, finding out why they felt the way they did, and bringing their knowledge and personal insights to bear.

On bad movies:
“Vent your spleen. In criticism, it’s better to be angry than depressed.”

Can't argue with that.

On the competition:
“Never read other critics’ reviews. They cloud your judgment.”

"Never" is a bit harsh. Reading critics you admire is immensely stimulating.  But in general it's better not to read them on a particular film until first you've written your own review. The exception: writing on older films,  you might want to hold upearlier critical reactions to scrutiny. You may want to argue with them. You may even want to agree with them.

On deadlines:
“Never miss a deadline.”

Can't emphasis that one enough. If you mess around editors, they won't invite you back. Can't blame them.

I'd add a personal piece of advice missing from Hoberman's list:

Don't run with the crowd. Just because your peers loudly declaim a film you've just enjoyed as banal rubbish or pretentious tripe, it does not mean you have to follow sheepishly. The best critics are leaders. At the same time, don't go the opposite extreme and be perverse. An opinion doesn't become invalidated just because it's widely held.