Swan So Long

I hear Natalie Portman got a gong or two for this, which is believable enough; it's a florid and hysterical marathon, with more than enough Feelings to make an American film panel feel like it had been hit by a train.

Portman does a good job of having the sheer stamina to deliver a drama queen with no life skills; the bulk of the film away from then dance sequences has all the electricity of a desultory early rehearsal for a dance routine nobody gets yet.

The characters are without exception manipulative, preening, self-serving, hackneyed, and living at a fever pitch of performativity.

The central theme of transformation and duality ends up imploding, as the credible character required to act out (and when I write Act Out, I mean act out) these processes is completely absent.

Any of my (few) readers who gave this vomit of a film any house room needs simply to be directed to the glorious drama and globally choreographed "The Red Shoes". There's even a full review of it earlier in the blog.

TV Sky

The gangways and cobbled dockside spaces at Liverpool were almost spectrally quiet, even at the weekend; I flicked my eyes over my shoulder regularly, waiting for the packed throngs of gallery-shufflers who just never appeared. Like Tate After The Triffids.

There's a genuinely meditative air around some of the pieces, particularly the candle being CCTV'd and re-projected on the walls of the space it sits in, surrounded by the paraphernalia of camera, tripods, wiring.

At moments it all looked very dusty and old, the battered instruments that he disembowelled and jury-rigged with barged wire and glued-on detritus appeared as if they really belonged in Paik's garage, as they carried only a very poorly mediated folk memory of the incidents they lived and were destroyed in.

As if the Aktion, performance, Moment that was constituted by the physical violence visited on them necessarily meant their uselessness as Memoriae of that event. The pianos, especially, were almost bathetic, only ever gesturing at what was absent from them.
The 'family' of robots, even though apparently the most recognisable of Paik's work, were quite sad specimens, museum pieces, garden-shed approximations of an idea.

Disco Drizzle

I could have sworn that I saw Holly Johnson in the crowd for this. My mate Mark had some commitments abroad that meant he had to give away tickets for Hercules and Love Affair and very kindly punted them my way. Holly (if it were indeed he) was a in splendid shape, almost rotund, very sharply turned out in a rubbery black jacket and thick-soled low boots; a slicked back Offizer hairdo completed things nicely. I saw him again, drifting away from the stage about the time I left, and can only imagine what he was thinking: "Good God, I could swear me and some ropey Scousers in moustaches and iffy brickie drag were whipping up more of a libidinal frenzy with bad equipment in patchy L3 clubs in 1982. These people have all the computing power Apple can provide and a very forgiving and very naive audience of Shoreditch poseurs; all they end up sounding like is a high-end provincial gospel-house karaoke. Dance music glissandi cliches from 1987 rain from the skies."

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what Holly was thinking. Don't worry Mark, you didn't miss much, and it's a hell of a way from Reading to Hoxton.

Ruins and Nation

We saw the final instalment of the magical 'Robinson' sequence by Patrick Keillor, at the Rio in Dalston. There was a dreadful burden of excitement on my part, having been entranced and suffused with my own and multiple other histories during "London" and particularly "Robinson In Space". Keillor again tries to weave obliquely traumatic commentary on the entanglements of an itinerant, sexually complex researcher; this ticker-tape of news is now planted within a painfully slow, politically incontinent narrative of localised and architecturally located protest. The tear-jerking timing of the cuts from Vauxhall Park to the Thames, Reading town centre to Aldermaston, that propelled the gradual realisation in the first films that these are distracted, obsessional, admirable, lonely people making the film, are here in the third part sadly absent. Multiple longeurs of mould on signs, dusty flora, lose faith with the momentum needed to keep us caring about the reportage of these landscapes.

It's the Queen's English, Innit?

The first and most unnerving thing about this film are the scenes that feature 6, 7 or eight year-old princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. It is completely impossible to see them without feeling jarred and second-guessed by our own memories of the dessicated, pinched, cornered vision of Englishness that the Windsors have come to represent.

It's a wonderful piece of drama in spite of the protagonists. Deceitful, fraudulent Australian 'therapist' hoodwinks desperate, pompous Royal into bizarre theatre-based treatment regime for his stutter. You'd think it would be hard to make anything dramatic or engaging cinematically with this. By the simple expedient of using a chilly, foggy, dusty lighting and design aesthetic (thereby side-stepping the emetic heritage visual cues that get these films flogged to death abroad) and getting brilliant actors in close-up like Rush and Bonham-Carter to, well, act, and not do anything to distract from this, it works rather beautifully. Guy Pearce is pallid, acidic, petulant, honest and thereby blends into the film excellently.

Wasp Lights

This 25 minute short film only came up on my radar when it found its way on to the bonus features of a DVD of Andrea Arnold's gob-smacking "Fish Tank".

It's a torrent of a film, plunging us down stairwells, plonking us on the pavement outside council-estate pubs, unceremoniously dumping us on the scrubby grass between residential tower blocks as vindictive rows play their joyless way out over our heads.

Within about 45 seconds of the film starting I knew I cared about this woman and her children, and about what would have happened to them by the end of the day, and about whether the simple business of finding some food and going on a date would be too much for her.

It just goes to show that the Oscar committee might not be completely dominated by star-struck cheese-merchants that "Wasp" won an award for best live-action short film.

Heart-rending and brutal in the same frame.

All-Day Hollywood

A 10 hour flight from Seoul to London, living in the non-time, non-place of the (very decent) Korean Airlines Boeing. This non-experience in a non-environment is exactly the right time to watch Hollywood films. The place where time drifts confusingly and illogically; where people behave very consistently but completely insincerely; where workers in the most unhealthy and grindingly repetitive, toxic jobs retain first-class skin care and make-up; where camaraderie is forced and dictatorial; where the network lives on completely independently of the people in it.

All three of these films were completely preposterous: Oliver Stone tried to shoehorn a family drama into his torrent of stable-door moralising and his film's credibility drowned early doors; Clooney remains very watchable on a big screen (though this is a very poor re-heating of the leftover excitement from "Michael Clayton") but the story here vanishes in the vastly-cinematographed Italian hill-scapes; "The Town"'s producers could afford to supply enough excitement for a crime caper, but ran out of cash when they had to buy some character-development and writing talent.

All that sounds harsh, but I'm dreadfully jet lagged.