new film – 21

it won’t seem to let me insert a youtube video on wordpress.

so here’s a link

this scene made me cry with laughter

this one

Special Report: KARAOKE premieres in Edinburgh & catch-up

At long last a chance to update after what must have been the busiest few months of my life. It’s hard to know where to start.

Karaoke

Karaoke premiered at this year’s What They Could Do, They Did in Edinburgh, and was well received in most quarters. The paparazzi were on hand to shoot the hotly anticipated red carpet premiere event, and they weren’t disappointed by the array of stars on show, including the leads Tom Moore and Alice Saint, and soundtrack producer Daniel Jones, who attended with his beautiful girlfriend Julia Hodgson.

Pap photos by Julia Hodgson 

The rest of Edinburgh was a real treat too. If you take a look at my YouTube channel, highlights will be springing up over the coming months.

 

The Pictures (zine)

The Premiere Issue of The Pictures is now available for the price of an S.A.E. Its 38 pages feature a semi-argumentative interview with the legendary Jonas Mekas, a talk with Quiet City director Aaron Katz, gossip on The Curse of The Dark Knight and Karaoke production stills, with beautiful illustrations by Tom Moore and Katherine Hardy. All content is (so far) exclusive to the zine, and won’t appear here for quite some time. Drop me a line to get your copy.

Ecstasy

Here is a short film.

The Pictures (night)

Saving the best for last, The Pictures has found a home at Bardens Boudoir in Dalston where, starting from October 15th, we’ll be screening the best of London’s film scene (see below for submission info) alongside international premieres and exclusive screenings of anything that interests us. This is pretty fucking exciting. There’ll be free zines and free popcorn and bingo. Here’s the blurb:

PREMIERE NIGHT: 15th OCTOBER
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=26285297345

October Special Presentation:
Llik Your Idols: The Cinema of Transgression
no wave cinema documentary featuring Richard Kern, Nick Zedd, Lydia Lunch, Joe Coleman, Thurston Moore, Richard Hell et al.

View the trailer

WARNING: THIS FILM CONTAINS EXPLICIT IMAGERY AND SUBJECT MATTER WHICH WILL SHOCK AND CONFUSE YOU. IT IS RECOMMENDED THAT THOSE OF A NERVOUS DISPOSITION DO NOT PARTAKE OF THE FEATURE, BUT GO TO THE BAR INSTEAD AND AWAIT THE DANCING

all this plus Bingo, Free Popcorn, Happy Hour all night.
7pm-2am, Bardens Boudoir, Stoke Newington High Street N16.
FREE ENTRY

SEND US YOUR FILMS
submissions are always open for films, short and long, to be screened on our nights. we screen anything, in any genre, so long as it’s good and made with passion. get in touch for info.

we are your cheapest date”

more soon

Coming Attractions

forthcoming attractions

today is boring / short film night

i think this looks like a good event, and worth flagging up for your attention. a short film night put on by the good folks of Today Is Boring. i plan on heading down. maybe see you there.

more info: http://www.myspace.com/yourlifeisafilm

in search of…

Tonight i saw In Search Of A Midnight Kiss at the Curzon, followed by a Q&A with the director, producer, cinematographer and the main cast. The film owes a lot to a particular preceeding genre of dialogue driven romantic comedy-cum-drama, highlights of which would include Lost In Translation and Before Sunrise, in that it is built almost entirely around its two protagonists who are unknown to eachother, the romantic progression in their becoming acquainted, and the city around which they wander. In …Kiss, that city is LA, it’s new year’s eve, and the protagonists have come together as a result of a personal ad on Craigslist. Cajoled into posting the ad by his DJ flatmate, the hapless Wilson (Scoot McNairy) meets his intended, the beautiful borderline personality Vivian (Sara Simmonds) in an LA cafe, where she issues him the challenge that, should he not meet her standards for a potential true love, she’ll leave him at midnight.

In it’s opening gambit, the film has already made, in my mind, three crucial errors which leave you struggling to identify from that point onwards. Firstly, in foregrounding modern day social networking sites and internet culture in such a generalised, yet emphasised way (the opening ten minutes feature identifiable close-ups of myspace, MSN and a genuinely humourous episode involving photoshop) the film is screaming it’s contemporary status far too loudly in a way that instantly dates the film and renders it as something of a novelty. That someone, somewhere would produce a film that makes use of this plot device was so blindingly inevitable that, watching …Kiss, it never feels like a fresh idea. Watching it, you can see the boardroom meetings, and the floating buzzwords that undoubtedly led to much of the financing behind the film. This factor could, however, be overlooked if the charm and romance boasted in the promo surrounding the film were genuinely present, but sadly, they only appear as fleeting and superficial glimpses of what could have been. In the Q&A, the director made a point of the fact that the film was very traditionally scripted, and steered away from a faux-documentary, improvisational style that he labelled “we’ll sort it in the edit”. I can’t help but feel that, had they employed this technique, the film would have benefitted and the characters would have been much more believable.

The character progression is obvious from the outset. Vivian lacks any credibility as a genuinely defensive and slightly unhinged woman (and may have done well to look to Julie Delpy’s example of such a character in Before Sunset) simply because, from the moment her character is introduced, her quirks feel so forced and scripted that you can see her eventual unfolding and confessions of suffering from miles away. From her first appearance onwards, instead of naturally revealing these facets of her character to you, the film reeks of a desperation to relate the “real” Vivian. The transformation is not a convincing one. In her early scenes, she dismisses books, museums and culture on the whole, talking only of her ambition, yet only a couple of scenes later, she reveals an art project of hers (photographing lost shoes) in a manner that is both predictable and completely unfitting. The project itself, actually a genuine project of the director’s ex-girlfriend, also rings somewhat hollow in its presentation here, though it does hint at a more experimental style that the film never pursues or commits to.

These jarring and forced transitions in character are equally applicable to Wilson, who starts the film as the archetypal slacker misanthrope, a failing writer whose Hollywood dreams seem ever distant. He too inevitably sheds these characteristics to become something of a salvation for Vivian, but again, the transformation just isn’t believable. He spends the film shifting uncomfortably between earnest romantic and actually quite creepy pursuer. At one juncture, he tells Vivian of his masturbation habits, then is surprised as she deserts him, then follows her across the breadth of the city, several paces behind and not talking, until eventually persuading her to let him take her out for a meal. His
countenance in these scenes is predatory, and it’s this desperate pursuit, and the discomfort it causes that provides one of the films genuine, emotionally raw moments, though its a moment which falls flat owing to being completely out of place in the surrounding narrative and soundtracked by an inappropriately sweet acoustic score and Will Shef vocals. It also makes the subsequent sweetness of the character, and his newfound determination come the film’s denouement impossible to identify with.

The way that the film is shot and edited is schizophrenic, and works in places, but not in most. Scenes taking place in an abandoned Hollywood theatre and on the walk of stars approach something special in their cinematography, but again are overruled by the inconsistency of the film. Much has been made of the comparison between this film and the so-called Mumblecore movement, but to my mind, there is a great deal more consistency and genuine verite in films like Aaron Katz’s Quiet City or Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation, both of which had budgets that would pale in comparison to …Kiss.

It is possibly the declarations of authenticity made by the film that do it the greatest disservice. In the Q&A, director Alex Holdridge went from talking about shoestring budgets and sleeping on floors one moment, to how Universal’s entire music rights department was working on their behalf the next. While I don’t doubt the both cast and crew worked extremely hard on the film, and seemed in person like a genuinely enthusiastic and spirited group, they’d have done better to pitch the film as a mid-low budget indie rather than the D.I.Y. work that they claim. Everything is D.I.Y. to a certain extent. This is certainly not the same as the aforementioned Mumblecore pictures, though it is clearly marketed as such, and many of the hallmarks and codes of the film falsely and self consciously attempt to speak directly to that audience. The film tries achingly hard to be hip and to wear that hipness on it’s sleeve, but it just isn’t there. There are familiar shots of buildings from above and out of train windows. The film is edited to appear loose and flowing, but is so obviously scripted that the film and the edit work against eachother. It’s a testament to the adage about writing what you know, and it’s readily apparent watching …Kiss that you can’t make a New York style film in LA, as was Holdridge’s stated intention. The romance in LA, and obvious way in which they attempt to portray LA as a romantic city in spite of itself, falls flat through precisely the elements that make a city like LA so alienating. Perhaps that’s the point, and there are moments of genuine emotion in the film – those of despair and loneliness. This is ultimately the feeling with which you leave the film, all it’s many protracted and signposted elements to make you feel something to  the contrary having fallen well short.

There is something genuinely exciting and uplifting about sitting in a room with a group of collaborative filmmakers. I missed work today as I have a stinging head cold, but my curiosity was piqued on seeing the listing for this event some weeks ago and, having tickets booked, I made the effort to get down to Soho, and do think it was well worth my while.

“Before he was Chaplin, he was Buster Keaton, but now he’s Chaplin.”

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS CRITICAL SPOILERS FOR THE FILM ‘MISTER LONELY’. IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE FILM, I WOULD HIGHLY RECOMMEND YOU SEE IT BEFORE READING THIS, AS THIS GIVES AWAY SOME HUGE PLOT POINTS THAT YOU’LL SERIOUSLY REGRET KNOWING IN ADVANCE. HAVE YOU GONE AWAY? OK, LET’S PROCEED…

The Chaplin vs. Keaton debate is one of oldest in cinema. On one hand, Chaplin, the populist, happy clown who fused sentiment with comic timing and whimsy with heart and became one of the most famous human beings in all history. Chaplin died surrounded with riches, his legacy ensured and statues built to honour him. Conversely, Keaton, the sad clown, the stone-faced existentialist (with no lesser a sense of humour) was largely forgotten by the time of his death, and, though to be later subject to a huge revival and arguably greater acclaim than his obstensive rival, knew nothing but heartbreak and drunken poverty as he passed out of the world and into the great nickelodeon in the sky.

The line quoted above is spoken by a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) in Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely. She’s talking about her husband, the Chaplin impersonator (Dennis Lavant), and the line spoken early on – together with her later assertion that sometimes Lavant more closely resembles Hitler than Chaplin – is a very revealing one, both in terms of the film’s central theme of identity crisis and the motivation and discourse that underlies it.

The film’s narrative follows a solitary Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who, while entertaining in an old people’s home, meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator who takes him to the Highlands of Scotland where she lives on a commune with other impersonators, including her husband, Chaplin. Michael falls for Marilyn while the members of the commune work towards putting on ‘The Greatest Show On Earth’ in their D.I.Y. theatre. Running parallel to this is the story of a group of nuns in South America, led by Werner Herzog’s priest character, who come to realise that they can jump from planes with no parachutes and survive, a genuine miracle. The impersonator’s show, though spectacular, fails to attract a significant audience and Marilyn hangs herself, leading Michael to move back to Paris and, after receiving a reassuring visitation from Marilyn’s spirit as a painted egg, take off his disguise, wandering the streets as himself, bewildered. The nuns load up in their plane to travel to the Vatican to meet the Pope (the real one, as opposed to Leo Carax’s Pope impersonator character). The film concludes with Michael, alone in full impersonator gear, riding his motorbike around a race track, the same image with which it opened, while in South America, the nun’s plane has crashed, leaving them dead on the beach, waves lapping over their bodies.

While Michael is ostensibly the central character, and, according to Korine himself, drawn from Korine’s own experiences in Paris, I found Lavant’s Chaplin character to be the more interesting and perhaps more authorial voice in the film. He is far from the loveable tramp figure we’d expect from Chaplin, which is why Marilyn’s comment about his resembling Hitler is a significant one. In one scene, the couple are out sunbathing. Chaplin promises Marilyn that he’ll wake her before her skin burns. As soon as she falls asleep, he skulks away, leaving her to fry in the sun. She returns to the house, furious with him, and, in a particularly physically evocative and effective scene, he forces himself on her sexually, pressing his hands down on her sunburned breasts and shoulders. In another scene, he sits alone, talking to himself about “the show”, repeating each phrase twice. He concludes that his life is worthless and empty.

I single this character out because the most frequently observed aspect of Mister Lonely in reviews so far has been it’s optimism, it’s sweetness and sentimentality and it’s general lightness (and through this it’s mass appeal, something some have labelled ‘selling out’), something which is impossible not to remark upon when considering Korine’s body of work – Kids, Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy and much of Korine’s other work, while undoubtedly possessing a sense of humour and a certain poetry, has a definite bleakness to it. It’s an element that Korine himself has talked extensively about in the promotion for Mister Lonely, even going so far as to say that making the film saved him, that he needed to find that optimism.

I would argue that while on the surface Mister Lonely broadcasts its optimism, through Luna’s voiceover and the moments of catharsis it presents, it is in fact no more or less optimistic than Gummo or Julien. That, while the film is certainly dressed in colours of hope and positivity and faith, this hope and faith is empty, and Korine has actually shown it to us before. It’s in the Jimmy Durante routine performed by Tummler in Gummo. It’s in Julien’s wrestling match with his brother. There are positive sentiments and expressions of universality – as opposed to the marginality represented in Gummo or Julien – in Mister Lonely, certainly, but the film is Keaton uncomfortably impersonating Chaplin. It is not Chaplin.

The impersonators in Mister Lonely demonstrate a total faith in their unique and unreal existence, and the joy it brings them, and it is through this that many of the film’s moments of ‘optimism’ are presented. Yet, this faith is also their undoing. When their audience fails to show, Marilyn kills herself. Prior to this, the characters all express their doubts about whether an audience will appear. They realise that their performances will not satisfy anyone outside their isolated circle, so any attempt to do so is destined for failure. Yet, the very purpose of their performance is to reach outwards to an audience. It is effectively doomed from the outset. Their faith, though assertive and joyful for a time, is ultimately empty and pointless.

The same can be said for the nuns. Though they do demonstrate to themselves, through their faith, that a miracle is possible, they cannot in any way follow through on their miracle and demonstrate or relate it to the outside world. They are killed by an – unseen in the film – act of either chance or faulty technology (their plane) which was to carry their message.

This futility rings through all the characters, and embodied especially in Chaplin as the only truly cruel character in the film, and the only real voice of hard line pessimism, expressed as such, as opposed to the self doubt that Michael relates. Chaplin, who used to be a Keaton impersonator, is the most animated, most expressive, and least ‘real’ of the impersonators, and the one with the greatest sense of desperation. It is also notable that, while the film features three directors cast as actors, Chaplin is the only director character in the film – though it is admittedly arguable that his directing is not what Chaplin was best known for. It is perhaps for this reason that his character brings with it a greater sense of authority and experience than the other impersonators, and perhaps through this that he achieves the authorial voice that I referred to earlier.

He has tried to be one person, and was dissatisfied, and so is trying his hand at being another, more pleasing personality, yet remains cruel and bitter. This is where I see a parallel with Korine. He too has been known for his nihilistic and existential work, a Keaton side perhaps, to continue to mine this metaphor, and with Mister Lonely is markedly attempting to travel a very different path, one with arguably wider appeal, a more Chaplinesque side – this new optimism has been noted in almost all reviews of the film – and yet the basic theme of the film, it’s essential heart, remains as it has been in his previous work. It’s a celebratory heart, one that revels in the splendours of human imagination and potential and aspiration, but equally one that realises that this potential can never be reached. “Does anything really change?” asks Marilyn in her final sequence of dialogue. “Yes,” replies Michael. “But does it really change?” she asks. “No,” he replies.

Yet, Mister Lonely is a joyous film. Were a similar statement to be made about Gummo, it would be met with widespread scepticism, but the elements that make Mister Lonely so joyous are equally present in Gummo, and they relate to Korine’s knowing handling of cinema itself.

Mister Lonely is perhaps the most cinematically self-referential film to emerge in recent years, possibly only matched by Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE (and, incidentally, is it coincidence that Mister Lonely opens with a colour-saturated sequence and a Bobby Vinton song?). But while INLAND EMPIRE is about cinema in structural terms, and the process of creating it, Mister Lonely is about the people who populate it, the not-quite-real characters who glide across the screen in projected light and live there, and can only live there, and who, in the real world, are so easily crushed. Those dubbed ‘stars’.

The most striking, effective and emotionally powerful sequences in Mister Lonely are those divorced entirely from the narrative. Little Red Riding hood walks along the train tracks singing an old blues song about hanging. Marilyn Monroe stands at the foot of a pond, her skirt blowing upwards in slow motion. The entire cast of impersonators perform a dance to Fred Astaire’s Cheek To Cheek and take a bow. Korine’s manipulation of aesthetics, and his presentation of these sequences that feel so familiar – because they are the distillation of what film itself is – and yet so unique are in fact the very faith that is felt by his characters. This faith amounts to nothing, it is true, but then, what does cinema itself amount to? You leave the cinema, your life is as it was. The very basis of the medium is escapism, it’s lifeblood is entertainment. The myths of the modern world are those of aspiration to stardom.

Perhaps this is the faith that Korine talks about (re)discovering in his promotional interviews. An individual living in reality can never be Charlie Chaplin, with his sentiment and catharsis and everything his more populist cinematic world contains. An individual living in reality can, however, be Keaton, panicked and worried and never entirely satisfied. To impersonate Chaplin though, to pretend, is possible.

Mister Lonely celebrates the futility and nihilism and necessary isolation that lies at the centre of all faith, be that in god or fiction or the cinema – and, crucially the creative process. It challenges you to remain stone-faced in the face of it’s empty revelations. In that, it not only re-establishes Harmony Korine, post-hiatus, as one of the most important directors working today, it makes impersonators of us all.

The Biograph Girl

In 1910, Carl Laemmle (later founder of Universal Studios) published a story in the St Louis Post-Despatch. It concerned a motion picture actress, known only to this point as ‘The Biograph Girl’ because of her notoriety in the early studio Biograph’s nickelodeon motion pictures, and stated that she had been killed in a tragic streetcar accident. The public mourned her loss.

The following day, Laemmle posted an ad in the same paper decrying the previous story as lies, and reassuring the public that, not only was Ms. Florence Lawrence alive and well, but that she was newly signed to his fledgling IMP film company.

This Barnum-esque publicity stunt marked the founding of the movie star system. It was the first time a star’s name was known and the first time it appeared on an advertisment. It was also the first time the motion picture industry had manipulated the image of their star as such commodity.

Lawrence went on to have a prosperous career for some time, appearing in many of IMPs successes and for other studios.

She was badly burned in a studio fire in 1915 and, though she continued acting, never regained her popularity, and ended up a charity case of MGM, who instituted a policy in the ’30s of giving roles to aging stars for a vastly diminished salary. A string of failed marriages and creeping disease led to her suicide in 1939 by eating ant poison.