Doc/fest – Notes on the Other + Men of the City

Notes on the Other

An essay on the nature of identity and the figure which Ernest Hemingway created around himself, Notes on the Other makes some fascinating revelations using the Pamplona bull running as a starting point for its investigation.

A photo of a man gored at the running is posited as the catalyst for what became Hemingways adventuring persona. As a tourist Hemingway never ran with the bulls, but watching a gored man dying in the gutter he was stirred to pen an article for the American press. Assuming that role of the runner on the brink of death Hemingway’s adventuring persona became separate from himself, creating an identity which continues to be aspired to and imitated by his famous lookalike club.

The film draws some forced lines between this and Hemingway’s descent into depression. Stressing that he would finally ‘blast his own face off with a shotgun’ is to poeticise matters to suit the film’s own end. Beautifully shot, the film makes little concession for its specific point of view and should be taken as just that: a single reading of a multifaceted persona.

Men of the City

When the programmer at Docfest introduced this film as ‘Dickensian’ I was immediately drawn back to the last season of the Wire, and how such an adjective had become synonymous with over-dramatisations of squalor and human tragedy. That Men of the City then came to match those negative prescriptions is more unfortunate than it is ironic.

A study of the men that fill the financial district of London is about as de jour as a documentary can possibly be at the moment, and the filmmaker had the tremendous fortune of being embedded with the fiery hedge-fund manager David as Lehmann Brothers folded, and the whole financial world came tumbling down around him. While the tensions are palpable the whole affair boils down to a live-action version of the facepalming brokers blog. No great insight, no candid moments; just shouting and faces buried in scrunched up hands.

A quick sojourn to one of London’s few remaining trading floors, the Metals Exchange sees cookie-cut City wideboys screaming, shouting, and gor-blimeying their way through a jungle of clichés. The camera fixates on one chap, a hunting and fishing sort, and with a little prodding the subject readily admits the parallels between trading and the hunt. The rush of adrenaline, focusing the cross-hairs, obla di obla da.

We also get to meet a self-reflective street sweeper and a Bengalese street sign holder, who offer small respite to the parade of city stereotypes that come before them. Their streets-eye view of the city is interesting, but their reflections are flattened by the overbearing soundtrack which marches relentlessly throughout. Horror classic The Omen seems to be the source for most of the score, with omininous chords preluding the arrival of an apocalypse which never happens.

Among all the bluster of the city boys the film does manage to find the ageing Norman; East End boy done good who deeply regrets the sacrifices he’s had to make to work in the city. A long life in the city has taken its toll on him, and he longs to breakaway as an independent insurance broker, to be his own man and to set his own terms. While he confidently brushes off the threat of redundancy that the crash has brought, he is visible shaken by matters. The uncertainty of his future and his push towards self-sufficiency leaves Norman open to the cameras, and from out of all the clichés the story of a real human being appears.

The revelation does however jar with the sections covering the exchange, the markets and notably David, whose performance is to the form of a cartoon hedge-fund manager, often drawing peals of laughter from the audience I saw it with. While it’s all fun and well sitting around lobbing rotten tomatoes at the orchestrators of the financial crash, the film’s cataclysmic soundtrack and heavily biased and over-dramatised perspective sadly preclude the few human portrait studies it finds along the way.

Doc/fest – Bastardy + Granddad

Bastardy

A character portrait that stretches over 8 years is by it’s very nature quite epic in scope, yet the emotional depths that Bastardy touches upon are of a level rarely witnessed in your standard ‘follow-a-junky’ doc. An orphaned child of the ‘stolen generation,’ forcefully extracted from aboriginal communities in Australia, Jack Charles struggled to find his place in the world. A founding member of the first Aboriginal Theatre company in the seventies, Jack found a home of sorts in the embodiment of others, performing as an actor on both stage and screen and gaining certain recognition for his work.

But our introduction to Jack comes in the contemporary world, where the now old man has dipped into a half-way house to cook up his hit for the day. His expletive peppered words insist that the filmmaker shows his life up front, and that the audience sees his personal focus on the needle right from the get go. It’s his cross to bear, and the doc thankfully eschews any attempts to justify his need, or even coerce him to go straight.

The film initially stumbles around with the subject, as he looks for audiences to play guitar to, or later searching for quiet corners to bed down in. There is no grand introduction, and Jack’s past only becomes clear throughout the course of the film, at the same pace it became clear to the filmmaker following him. His cat burgling past is introduced as a chance drive around the affluent parts of Melbourne sees Jack pointing out the dozens of houses he’s burgled. ‘I never break in. I just walk in wherever’s open’ he says almost glibly ‘if there’s any confrontation, I’m out like a light.’

The subject’s charm and quick-when-not-high wit does a lot to hold the momentum of the film. His appearance varies wildly throughout the film, and intercut photos and clips from his past reinforce the mercurial nature of the man. A blur of outward identity which contrasts a resolute, but tired, voice of experience. The swathes of friends he has found and lost are only hinted at in a short montage of endless hugs, yet the focus remains on the addiction fuelled kleptomania which awkwardly gets in the way of these friendships. His eventual reflection on the one love he found in life cuts through the film in a heartrending way, evincing quite how far the film has drawn the viewer into the film.

A vivid sequence at the end of the film shows Jack going backwards through time in a series of police mug shots, from capture in 2003, with a photo for almost every other year right back to 1961 when Jack was caught on his first charge at the tender age of 18. His hair and beard balloon in and out over time, each cut heralding the nigh endless cycle of addiction, theft, capture, release, addiction, theft, capture, release, addiction…

Seeing him cheerily Q&A the film after the screening I saw felt like seeing a man stand naked before the audience. One particularly uncharitable commentator in Australia felt obliged to post a reflection on the internet that “Regardless of the artistic representation, the man is a criminal.” Art does of course not excuse the man, but you’d need a heart of granite to conclude such from portrait as pointed and revealing as this.

Grandad

A brief note for an incredibly brief documentary. A student project where director Scott Dawe tracks down members of his extended family to discuss his grandfather’s home movies. A mysterious woman appears in one, and the grand patriarch’s infidelity and fledgling commitment to his family are quick laid bare. Emotional interviews intercut with almost ghost-like super8 footage make for punchy if somewhat clipped film.

Doc/fest – Sacred Places

In the incredibly crowded, and slightly myopic sphere of a genre focused film festival the sheen of every filmmaker, every doc just pushing harder and harder slowly forces everything to be viewed through a dazed and distorted lens. Agendas to the left of me, oblique subjective camera angles to the right; here I am, stuck in the middle doubting my notions of what a doc actually is.

Thank heavens then for Sacred Places: a straight, observational, old skool doc, unburdened from the responsibility of pushing an agenda, or being wholly representative (even when it says it is not). Director Jean-Marie Teno takes her camera to the streets of St Leon in French speaking Burkina Faso, where Nanema Boubakar runs a cineclub screening films to all and sundry.

The festival notes salaciously describe this as an ‘underground’ cinema, but it’s nothing of the sort, it’s just a cinema that happens to be off the main distribution circuit. It is a smallish hut, with rows and rows of benches in front of a standard TV, the size of any you might in any western living room. Boubakar rents pirated DVD’s of the latest Hollywood action and kung-fu films for the evenings, and intersperses a programme thick with Jackie Chan and Wesley Snipes with the occasional African feature he can get hold of. Despite his illegitimate status, his margins are ridiculously tight, and Boubo (as he’s called) struggles to pay rent for the small hall.

To help him he enlists the support of Karo, his artisan friend who makes and plays the traditional djembe drum. He too struggles to make ends meet, but uses his talents as a musician and craftsman to find varied work as a music tutor, instrument tuner, and occasional the local troubadour/poet in the spirit of the West African Griot. In this capacity he does his friend Boubo a favour by doing the rounds, beating his drum and announcing the fine features expected at the cineclub that evening.

The status of these purveyors of culture is not raised, deified or criticized in any particular way. They are just working with the means they have, plying a trade and scraping a living with the arts that they love. When a director of one of the pirated films learns that his local cineclub is screening his films illegally the threat of high drama looms large.

But the ‘confrontation’ is left off screen, and in being interviewed after the event the director admits that he’s just glad that audiences are still being drawn to his relatively old film. He made it to be seen, it’s a shame that the pirated copy is such poor quality, but he still wishes he could make these films more affordable to the cineclubs. Exhibition is just as important as production, and cineclubs such as Boubo’s are giving new audiences the chance to find films they would otherwise be oblivious to. Boubo does of course pine after a particularly large TV, but it has less to do with his desire to present High Definition cinema, and more to do with his desire to draw more bums to his benches.

Western filmmakers/cinephiles/nerds would no doubt cry a river at the prospect of forcing 50+ punters around a 32” TV to see their widescreen, technicolour, 5.1 surround sound masterpiece, but this is cinema in one corner of the developing world. It’s not for us to say that this is or is not cinema, when droves of locals are more than willing to shell out a dime for the pleasure.

But then again, that’s the agenda I derived from the film, another point to illustrate my personal reflections on cinegoing past and present. The film itself stands well above that, and is a superb document of cinegoing in its own right.

Doc/Fest – RIP Remix Manifesto + Looploop

Looploop

Draw a Venn diagram with a circle for collage, art, and documentary, and you might possibly find Looploop sandwiched somewhere in the middle. A patchwork quilt which uses images to create an illusion of movement, possibly from the perspective of someone on a train, which can go both backwards and forwards. There really isn’t a lot of meat to these bones, but the film is really hypnotic none the less. But don’t take my word for it, watch it yourself:

RIP: a Remix Manifesto

There’s an open panel session here at Docfest this year titled ‘The Thin Line Between Passion and Propaganda’ and it neatly summises some of the Issues (with capital I) that I face in saying anything about this film. I could, and have previously, merrily spend a few hundred words dissecting all matters relating to copyright, copyfight, and the absurdities of modern intellectual property law. And I wish I could neatly summise that ‘the film is not the issue’ but then it is in the very way it’s constructed. Never was a film quite so demonstrative in its very fabric of the utter fallacy of current copyright legislation.

The Issue (with capital I) in question is how modern technology allows us to twist, bend, chop and remix media of any kind into just about anything we like. That and the thorny issue of whether downloading is illegal or not. Defend the rights of the artist/creative force or criminalise your average citizen. The film casts its net wide, covering everything from the patenting of medicine, mechanics and life forms, to issues of how a hundred a twenty year old staples such as ‘Happy Birthday’ can make rights holders millions and millions every year, when the writers of the song died well over half a century ago.

The film takes numerous examples, mini case studies, to illustrate some acute points about intellectual property law, as it stands. Every music anorak worth their salt knows that The Stones and Def Leppard stole all their greatest riffs from the old blues masters. What is more powerful is someone widening the scope of this analogy, audibly quoting Muddy Waters saying that he got a song from the cotton fields, which had already been published by Robert Johnson, who in turn was preceded by someone else who had already recorded the tune. That the same tune went on to be popularised by black pop musicians, who in turn were copied by the Rolling Stones just goes to demonstrate the neverending cyclical nature of things. That the Stones then sued the Verve for 100% royalties for using the tune in Bittersweet Symphony just illustrates the Western world’s attitudes to how they feel we should handle copyright even better.

The above example neatly underscores the first point of four points in the film’s titular manifesto, namely that all new culture is built on the culture that came before it. A rally call for all proponents of copyfight, it places the creative process, the reinvention of old into new, as a core tenement to usage beyond fair use. The film points to the past, and the copyright laws of old, which ensured certain copyright protection while the property was still new, but which nonetheless opened up the floor after a fixed period of 14 years. Long enough to become established, but not long enough to be exploited.

The film also boldly points towards other feasible models, such as that of Baile Funk in Brazil, which actively reinterprets, remixes and integrates well know tunes into a musical form wholly unto itself. And a nation whose school curriculum supports lessons in turntablism and beat juggling! Below the radar of most corporate rights holders of the western world, developing nations such as Brazil are casting copyright law into a new light to support emergent artists, and in the case of strictly patented HIV medicines, vastly improving the lives of those in dire need.

Throughout the film fair use, and the application free speech to use of copyrighted material in a manner with which to criticise it is put to full use. It almost lends the film a slightly agonising feel, as the project tentatively pushes harder and harder, sampling the samplers who sample freely without seeking permission. Through the fabric of fair use itself the film spins an incredibly compelling argument.

Bold, cogent and absolutely invaluable, thing doc encapsulates the passion and frustrations surrounding copyfight without being too agitprop about it all. It would be wonderful if it could find a home on broadcast networks, so all and sundry (and not just geeks like me) could look and learn from it. But that isn’t likely, so take the directors’ advice and see if you can’t just torrent it instead.

[and here's the manifesto in full. But don't take this at face value, go and find the film instead!]

Doc/Fest – The Living Room of the Nation + Bob

It’s Doc(umenatary)Fest(ival) time in Sheffield again! My relationship with the festival has been patchy over the years, not through any acrimony but purely through my continued ability to be out of town when it’s on. But not this year! Having harangued my way to a pass I shall attempt some madcap, whistlestop overviews of the films I do manage to catch.

This will be pretty roughshod stuff, an experiment in the regurgitated opinions that festival coverage demands. The mainstream press were forced to sit through Inglourious Basterds at 08:00 in the morning in Cannes, and most only given until lunchtime to send their copy back. In circumstances such as those it’s not too surprising that Tarantino’s brash revisioning of World War 2 failed to win the old duffers over. But what happens when you apply the same ‘fresh-out-of-the-screening’ logic to a lovingly nutured independent documentary film? There’s only one way to find out:

The Living Room of the Nation

Anything that claims to be ‘of the nation’ is bound to be setting itself up for a fall, swiped away by the broad brush strokes that any such overview might entail. Yet ‘Living Room of the Nation’ manages a wonderous thing in taking any preconceived notions of ‘Finnishness’ that the viewer may carry with them into the film, and then merrily skimming along said cliché with glad abandon.

Following six individuals over an unclear timeframe, the camera work sets up an extremely simple perspective: widescreen, with the frame generally covering the length of the room. Taking the very definition of fly-on-the-wall and going with it lends the film an uncanny observational tone. The Finns in focus just sit around speaking their brains when on their own, or interacting with friends and family on a level of borderline absurdity that would put Beckett, Pinter and Roy Anderson to shame. The breaking of big news seems to frequently come as a minor distraction to the hockey that seems to be permanently playing on the tv in the corner of the room/frame.

The hero/lynch-pin of the film is the expectant father Tarko, who is in permanent conflict with his emotions and his responsibilities. Scaling the whole range of emotions in one man’s life, we see him cavorting with his best buddy at the news that he to become a father, but also bearing his soul to his infant son about his worries about his crumbling relationship to the mother. Inbetween come agonisingly stifled conversations with the grandfather to be, as well as numerous slapstick interludes as Tarko bumbles about in life in a way that feels all too familiar.

The moments of profound reflection from other characters, sitting in the dark, looking out of their living rooms, might feel a touch contrived to those unfamiliar with Finns beyond the stereotypes. For those who have ever had the pleasure of raising a glass with a Finn, these instances of seemingly bottomless insight will feel more than a familiar.

Bob

Intimacy is a difficult thing to capture on camera, but the short doc Bob does an amazing job of making you feel like you’re practically in Bob’s armpit. Partly because for a sizeable section of the film, you are literally in Bob’s armpit.

Bob is a 90 year old communist who also happens to be nudist. We follow him as he goes through his morning routine; extensive stretching, making an elaborate fruit breakfast, and a basic scrub-up before he goes out to tend to his small garden. All completely stark naked, of course.

The nudism becomes a point in and of itself, the sharp, narrow focus camera floating over the strange curves, sags, moles and lumps you would expect to find on a 90 year old man. It’s not just a map of the life he has lived, nor is it just a motif of mortality or human fallability. It’s a strange anchor, an underscoring of quite how happy Bob is with the life he has led.

So take it from Bob: stretch, eat your five a day, don’t worry, be (politically) active), live a long life.

Don’t Look Now on a laptop in Venice

Film is defined as much by its’ content and form as it is by it’s context. A boring discussion could be had volleying about film theory ‘til the cows come home on such a broadside, but film is about how we personalise the viewing experience; the company we kept, the events that led up to the screening, the location and quality of the material itself. A small revolution in mainstream film criticism could be enacted were critics not forced into a room full of other grumpy men on a Monday morning to watch the latest GenericRomCom®.

Regional cinemas have tremendous history of tapping into the value of films of local relevance. From the birth of Cinema, with the factory gate films of Mitchell & Kenyon in the North of England, but also in recent history with special screenings or the director Q&A for titles of local interest. Entrepreneurial spirits have even taken it a step further with rolling projection booths that can show John Ford westerns in Monument Valley, or Repo Man in an abandoned lot in downtown LA. Using the immediate locale to bolsters the core cinema experience beyond that of mere consumption is about as great as cinema gets.

With cinema drifting away from the communal experience more and more, the value of the private experience of a film needs to be considered. It might make filmmakers cry (or piss and moan) to think of people watching a film on a phone or a laptop, but loss of quality aside how does watching a film in 40 min bursts on the plane/train/automobile commute affect a viewers’ digestion of a film? How might that come to affect filmmaking in 20 years time?

My decision to kill an evening travelling through Venice by watching Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now was a personal experience which went above and beyond the norms of most bricks-and-mortar cinema experiences. Fighting exhaustion and sleep deprivation on arrival, I opted for a film on the laptop over idle and banal conversation with the gaggle antipodean travellers that filled the hostel I was staying at. For my sins I’d never got around to Don’t Look Now, and by gum if this wasn’t the time and the place to catch up with this British classic.

The viewing wasn’t in-and-of-itself too horrific, and my proximity didn’t bleed into the experience of consuming the film. The frantic build up to the twist-I-already-knew-by-osmosis was pretty intense, but the film was over before I knew it. A few interesting echoes to Antichrist, the meaning of parenthood, loss, subjective memory, and so forth and so on. Still, yes, lovely, good film, lights out, time for sleep.

While my sleep didn’t feel broken, I didn’t realise quite how stupid I was to leave the processing of a film like that to my slumbering self. At breakfast the next day I learnt from my Australian room-fellows that for reasons unknown I was repeatedly calling out and screaming at five in the morning in a language wholly foreign to them. I’m not prone to night-terrors in the least, but then I guess an unconscious exception had to be made for Don’t Look Now.

Walking around the city the next day I can’t say I was particularly weirded out by my experience (and nocturnal response) to the film. The city was the same, though the pale and washed out colours of a wintery Venice felt a world away from the sweltering day of Indian summer I was experiencing. Anorak-ish compulsion forced me to track down the church being restored in the film (the eglise San Nicolo dei Mendicoli). But that wasn’t particularly cathartic. A very nice church, which surprisingly makes zero mention of the film, or its production, anywhere in it. It’s just another church in Venice, just a bit off the beaten track.

Strolling about in the evening was a little eerier, as it recalled the claustrophobic, echoing back alleys which Donald Sutherland seems to endlessly be running through in the film. The fact that you can be completely isolated one minute, and in the middle of a high street the next is strangely unique to the historical architecture of Venezia, and is unnerving enough without the recollection of Sutherlands waking dreams. The strange parallel between the crowded ‘real’ or conscious world, and the labyrinthine unconscious world and its’ lurking shadows/killers is an obvious if extremely effective one, really underpinning the flitting perspective between premonition and reality. The city’s casting is absolutely integral to this, and it’s a small miracle that Venice as a location hasn’t been done to death in horror films since. Only the recent Shark in Venice seems to think of the city as a natural backdrop for terror, and that was shot in Bulgaria.

Getting back and re-watching the film in the comfort of my own home I can’t say I was able to find any obvious seeds of deep set horror in it. I can only assume the film is actively working on levels I cannot even begin to comprehend. Which is terrifying in its’ own right, but this does explain how the film manages to both grow in the memory and get better and better on successive viewings. By all means watch it where you like on what you like, just don’t watch it before going to bed, in Venice.

The Joel Schumacher Film Noir

8MM: A Joel Schumacher Film Noir about Snuff films, starring Nic Cage.

That’s as effective a review that can ever be written about 8MM. Its’ short pitch neatly ties together just how awful this film is. But then it is bizarrely compelling at the same time.

It pains me to admit it, but 8MM is a guilty pleasure. A wafer of a film, it’s impossible to defend its artistic worth to either the Cinerati or to the average-punter-in-the-multiplex. Its’ hooks (Nicholas Cage + grotty porn-ish narrative) are obvious; its’ look, its’ soundtrack and its’ plywood acting even worse. But I just can’t resist having it on in the background. Cheap and charming wallpaper, you could say. But then there’s still more to it than that.

The premise is drawn from the cod-noir trope of the gumshoe hired into clean up the dirty business left behind by the Establishment. The feature revolves around the titular home, a snuff film found tucked away in the safe of a deceased Captain of Industry. The dirty secret of a seemingly respectable family man, his widowed wife recruits Ol’ Horseface Cage to come in and prove that the film isn’t a real snuff film. It’s just very cleverly faked, of course, using make up and special effects. Of course.

The tale of a flick which carefully depicts the slow and deliberate execution of someone in an almost pornographic manner is a myth many have capitalised on before, most notably in the predictably named Snuff. A sub-standard exploitation horror, it reached new heights in headline grabbing by having a ‘real’ faked murder tagged onto the end of a unsellable film, a reel that the dastardly filmmakers ‘forgot’ to cut out. Ee-gads, if the morbid teenagers didn’t queue around the block to see the notion of someone really being killed, crikey such a thrill! As an individual somewhat obsessed about film censorship, and getting a glimpse at what shouldn’t be seen, I should perhaps not go throwing rocks, but Snuff is about as cynical as exploitation cinema gets. And that’s saying something in its own right.

Anyways, Ol’ Horseface sets off on his investigations after the girl featured in the snuff film, and his path leads him towards the sordid backwaters of Hollywood and the ‘adult entertainment’ industry that Cage feels certain the girl fell into. As he trawls the seedy bars, and the red light districts of the big smoke the soundtrack rolls out a bizarre arabesque of pure Orientalism. Fresh off his commission for Fry’s Turkish Delight, the score’s composer goes wild on chanting arabs, oud’s and dulcimers. An allusion perhaps to the taboo vices of Marrakesh, and the sweaty boys that fill William S. Borrough’s fevered vision of Tangiers in Naked Lunch. It’s all playing with notions of the Middle Eastern that are non-kosher at best, pretty racist at worst. These associations are continually spun as Cage enters the underground filth bazaars of LA. Imagine a second hand record fair, but for paedophiles. When Cage starts asking around for the Xtra hard ‘snuff’ stuff, these high principled nonces take the moral high ground and shout him out of the market. Tsch, come on Nic, there’s paedophilia, and then there’s going too far!

A few dead-ends later and he’s chasing the trail to a porn casting agency run by a porn baron, played by none other than Tony Soprano! And here the film takes an amazing turn, as brilliant actor after brilliant actor start stumbling into the roles of the devious trio behind the snuff film. First Tony, then Peter Stormare shows up as the visionary S&M director behind the snuff film, and then finally Frank Sobotka (from Season 2 of the Wire) is unmasked as the murderous gimp in the film. We’ve already had Joaquin Phoenix pop up as a Nic’s side-kick/inside-man from the porn shops, sporting a look styled after a pensioner’s distracted recollections of seeing the front man from Janes Addiction on TV last night. One solid actor is one thing, but four has you doubting quite how bad this film actually is.

Frank Sobotka is revealed in a dramatic flourish right at the end of the film [not a spoiler per se] and the shock of having the murderer revealed is only surpassed by the shock of seeing a genuinely good actor beneath the mask. And all these assorted actors do a tremendous job of pulling their weight with a by-and-large leaden script. Their work however, remains built on the shaky foundations of the acting talent that is Nic Cage, and that is quite possibly where the whole film comes undone.

The film wastes no time throwing Nic right into the deep end when it comes to pooling his thesp-y skills, giving cinema of the highest cringe factor as we watch him pretend squirm infront of a pretend snuff film we are forbidden from pretend seeing. He’s a father, a husband, and the outrage and the disgust at the horrors he sees knows no bound! The poker face he has, the lies he has to tell to get into the close circles of these perverts, the double lies, the deceit! Such anger, such frustration, such emotion!

It’s a demanding role, and Cage wholly, uttely and desperately fails to even approach the heights or nuance the role actually demands. The conflicted dick is the unshifting anchor of a good film noir; Bogey in the Maltese Falcon, Joseph Cotton in the Third Man, Fred MacMurray in Sunset Boulevard. Cage is an unguarded sledgehammer through every scene in this film, a cardboard cut out of himself that occasionally amuses but predominantly reminds you that you are watching a Nic Cage film.

Because that’s what it is. A Nic Cage film. A Nic Cage film with some very interesting notions about the value of the recorded image, the sexualisation of violence, the aggressive undercurrents of pornography, the parallels of the legitimate and illicit film industries in Hollywood, the myth of the snuff film, and the bizarre compulsion to hide from the most gruesome sights known to man, while simultaneously watching it through shielding hands. The awfulness of this film could be read as perfect illustration of this repulsion/attraction at work, but that really would be giving this film a lot more credit than it’s due.

There are distant echoes of Cronenberg’s Crash in all of this, and many other fine film besides. Perhaps knocking the budget down and making it a bit more ‘indie’ would have stood this film to good stead. Perhaps recasting either Stormare/Sobotka/Soprano in the lead role would have stood the film even better. Either ways, it still won’t stop me from watching the-amazing-film-that-could-have-been again sometime in the not too distant future, Nic Cage be damned either ways.

The State of Swedish Cinemas Today

It’s not often you can blame a single supermarket (branch, not chain) for both winding you, shattering your childhood memories, and brining a glaze of tears to your eye. Unimposing as it may seem, this very supermarket did just that.

But first some clarification: growing up I had the good fortune of living in Sweden, and being of certain stock both in genes and culture I will forever be pining for the Holms. Or more precisely the Stock-holm, and its’ southern isle where I grew up.

In primary school I remember brashly boasting that I could see the new multiplex, the Palace of Cinema (or Biopalatset to give its indigenous name) from my bedroom window. It took some precarious leaning out of said window, but I could see the red glow of the sign, and it took me less than two minutes door to door. Lasting memories of seeing Jurassic Park with both my parents at a very tender age (as allowed with the Swedish 11-A certificate) was unquestionably a formative experience. Countless 90’s Batman films, less so.

Biopalatset was run by the Sandrews corporation, whose rivalry with SF Bio was a constant thorn in the side of every child post-Christmas. Everyone was guaranteed to receive cinema gift vouchers for Xmas, and the days up to New Year would be busy with cine-going. Yet making plans with friends was always compounded by the fact that I would have vouchers for SF and Alex would have vouchers for Sandrews. Two incompatible sets of vouchers meant that instead of 1 free cinema visit for the both of us, we instead had to make do with two discounted trips. I’m sure it was tremendously profitable for all conglomerates involved. But that was life, and ultimately I saw more films, which was probably for the best.

When I was a fair bit older I moved back to the UK to start university. A year later Sandrews went bankrupt. Now I’m not saying anything, but then who am I to say if it was more than coincidence?

In the short term Sandrews was sold onto a new conglomerate called Astoria cinemas, who after considerable restructuring attempted to carry on business as usual. Yet in the face of the established SF cinemas the new Astoria chain was unable to secure enough exclusives from America, and after two years they too went bankrupt. SF leapt on the chance to buy up the competition, but many expected Sweden’s stringent anti-trust laws would defer any risk of a monopoly. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case as no other bidders were willing to shoulder the multi-million kroner debts that had been building up.

The monopoly was set, and all that was left outside SF were the independent cinemas. Former Sandrews cinemas like Victoria fell under the mantle of indie out-fit Svenska Bio, others were boarded up or sold to other interests. Victoria is a fine example of a cinema working hard to survive in the pockets outside the mainstream. As can be seen in the photo, the cinema is now subtitled ‘barista’ supplementing film exhibition with the sale of coffee. A bit of a shame, but then you can’t begrudge the efforts of the indies to stay afloat.

And so to the supermarket. The multiplex I could see as a kid was Biopalatset, run by Sandrews, and built into the basement of the Söderhallarna shopping centre. When I was a teenager SF opened another multiplex, Filmstaden Söder, in the other end of the shopping centre, for such were the heady ways of this cinematic rivalry. Opening to great pomp, the complex boasted ear-blisteringly loud speakers in every imaginable crevice. It was the local cinema of choice for epic fare like the Lord of the Rings, or even the Epic FAIL of Star Wars: Episode 1.

It was to my horror then that on a recent trip to Sweden I found the still relatively fresh multiplex Filmstaden Söder had been turned into a brand new, not even day-old supermarket. As if to echo the irony of the two multiplexes’ close proximity/competition, this new supermarket is built underneath a rival supermarket. Who says markets cannot effectively compete under the shiny mantle of Swedish socialism?

Walking into the former foyer of the cinema I just felt a wave of sadness for the disappearance of something nominally ‘cultural’ and part of my youth having been turned into another surplus-to-requirements supermarket. Beyond my own nostalgic feelings for a multiplex of all things, a deep seated worry towards the precedents of exhibition history also presented itself. Simply put, the transformation of cinemas into supermarkets is the death knell of a cinema trade in recession. In broad terms, in both Sweden and the UK, the death of the weekly cinemagoing of the post-war generation was brought about by television, with the conversion of cinemas into supermarkets being a direct result of the widespread closures. The marks of the last wave can be seen in both Stockholm (with the kvartersbion) and Sheffield (with the suburban cinemas) with the sites of previous cinemas clearly marked on the sites of modern supermarkets. The Co-op in Crookes, the Nettos in Walkey and Hillsborough for Sheffield, and a number of ICA’s in Östermalm and Kungsholmen are but a few you can mention.

This latest wave started in Stockholm thre years ago when SF sold off the historically important Röda Kvarn cinema in central Stockholm. Opened in 1915, Röda Kvarn was the oldest surviving cinema in region, a proper picture palace of the grandest ilk which was meticulously maintained. It cost a margin extra to go there, but there was little chagrin in paying to see modern film in a bizarrely historical setting. When it was sold off there were a few voices of discontent, balanced with an appreciation for the (at the time) struggling SF to sell off a cinema on Stockholm’s equivalent of Bond Street. In a matter of months the cinema was turned into Stockholm’s first Urban Outfitters, and the private boxes of old now took a different role as changing booths for the cities well moneyed hipsters.

With cinema-going in Sweden on a marked upturn in recent years you would think that the selling-off would have ceased, but with the monopoly that SF has on the mainstream it carries on regardless, cherry picking what stays open and what gets shut. As the closures show, their priorities lie solely towards profit over quality and diversity. Prices go up, the number of screens drop, the range of films gets slimmer, overall accessibility decreases, audiences miss out.

It’s difficult to say what impact this is all having on the nation’s film production, as to many eyes it’s in rude health. Let the Right One In and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo have caused ripples internationally this last year, but these success are far too irregular for a nation which consistently punches above its weight in the world of popular music and literature.

But there are glimmers of hope. The last single screen local cinema (or Kvartersbio) in Stockholm, Bio Rio in Hornstull struggled on for a long time, run by a very old but very determined man. It used to be my grandparents weekly cinema of choice, and only a couple of years ago I saw Death Proof there. Truly a cinema across the generations.

Box office, ticket tearing and projection were all run by this one guy, who was persistently in the local press telling of his struggles to keep the rent from skyrocketing. When he announced his retirement many thought that was another cinema shut, but full plaudits to the cultural organisation Folkets Hus och Parker (the National Federation of People’s Parks and Community Centres) for stepping in and reviving it. Renovation, installation of digital projectors with the option for 3D film and live link ups to New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and a bursting film programme aimed directly at increased audience engagement. And reasonable prices too.

It’s only a 200 seater cinema, and it deserve better than parallels drawn to David and Goliath. It remains a tremendous hope in an otherwise dark situation. A glimmer of hope for the way things should be. A real palace for cinema, and not just another filmic supermarket.

Kill Switch and the DTV Star System

Being of a certain age I can unfortunately not claim to have seen one of the Big Man’s films on the Big Screen. Yet by the peculiar quirk of advertising I have still seen the Big Man himself on the Big Screen, so with begrudging gratitude to Orange telecoms I direct you to this:

It is, almost without question, one of, if not THE best thing he has done on screen in the last ten years. Needless vehicle-based chases, inexplicable explosions, a flourish of spoken Japanese, a sense of humour, and most astonishingly some genuine ass-kicking (albeit without any nut-cracking) from Seagal himself! No stunt-double!

Those dear marketing execs really outdid themselves in boiling down the essence of what we, the baying hordes, demand from a Seagal film. The irony is that this is literally what he is trying to escape with the Rom-com script he is touting to the fictional Orange execs. The double irony is that this mirrors Seagal own attempts to break out of the action mould, evident in traces through films like Kill Switch and other recent DTV films. Granted, the advert takes it to an extreme level of absurdity, but there is a bizarre poignancy in seeing Steve play out the bizarre Catch 22 he will forever be stuck in. It’s the self-reflexive postmodern genius of JCVD all over again, only condensed into a single minute. Call ‘over-analysis’ all you like, the dogs-dinner script and editing of Kill Switch is proof if any where needed that what Steven wants and what Steven gets are two very separate things.

For all the collected mistakes and shoddy breaks in almost all of Seagal’s recent DTV output, Kill Switch bears the marks of a film with grand intentions that just came crashing down in the edit. As executive producer, writer and lead actor in the film, you cannot help but wonder how much beyond mere finances Seagal had invested in this film. The Making-of that accompanies the film paints the picture of a team genuinely set on pushing some boundaries in terms of your average Seagal action DTV

Steven, the director, all the main actors, everyone lines up to discuss the nuance and the complexities of the story. Jacob King, the controversial detective at the heart of the film is discussed and Steven goes into some detail about the challenges of getting to grips with a man who is just as obsessed an perverted as the serial killers he pursues. The director also goes to some pains to describe a couple of scenes in the film and how he chose to shoot them, even going so far as to show a storyboard for the flying-out-of-a-window-seventeen-times sequence. He doesn’t corroborate my own rather bold reading of the sequence as a revisionist take on Hollywood editing, but there is proof at least that this wasn’t a wholly unplanned hodge-podge.

Perhaps most telling is that the interview with the director is shot in the editing room, in front of the editing suite with a cut of the film running in the background. Said cut of the film features a edit of the window-seventeen scene that differs significantly from the cut in the finished product. Fewer cuts, a shorter sequence, and another argument against my revisionist reading. It is impossible to guess at what stage in post production the interview was conducted, but on some level it does illustrate the different stages of where the Making-of was made, compared to the final edit of the film.

Indeed I feel it is safe to say that the film that the cast discuss in the Making-of is separate from the film as it ended up on the DVD. It is possibly the most incoherent mess you could ever conceive of outside of experimental filmmaking. Characters appear and disappear, the story progresses without any sense of purpose, with more plot holes than a rural backlane. Almost worst of all, Steven’s character unexpectedly lashes out in brutal acts of ultra-violence. Think American History X curb stomping, but without the emotional impact.

Seagal’s character is wholly and totally morally irreprehensible. A chauvinist, a sadist, and a down right Arsehole.

He could very well pull off the nuance and complexities of such a character, and his fellow cast and director seemed to believe so too. The producers evidently, much like the Orange execs, did not and saw fit to chop and change the film to make it best fit the picture we all have of Seagal as an action hero. The simple fact is that DTV producers play the market much as the exploitation producers of the 1970’s did. Catch the eye with a bold poster (or DVD cover), and to hell with whether it actually lives up to the promise, as long as the punters just come flocking.

Seagal is a name everyone recognises. It is a hallmark of certain kind of rather conventional action film. Hire the name and you have a certain amount of box office guaranteed. Simple.

Exploitation producers didn’t care much whether a film actually lived up to it’s title, provided the title was good in the first place. Seagal’s name is on the poster, so why are these DTV producers so desperate to recut the film? A crying shame, as it would have been refreshing to see Seagal at least try to flesh out a multidimensional character.

Oh yes, and did I mention that Isaac Hayes is in this film? There’s another name for the poster. As a pathologist no less.

The Long Road to Rumba

I love films, I love reading about films and I love hearing what people think about films. Far too much of my idle time is spent keeping up to date on what the so called legitimate opinion-makers have to say about a film. Trawling through the newspapers in a café considerate enough to oblige me with a few, is just about my favourite way of spending a Friday morning. ‘What’s misery-guts Bradshaw got to say about this week’s blockbuster?’ ‘How many borrowed French terms can Sandhu squeeze into his review of this latest Apatow comedy?’ ‘How many sentences will it be before Philip French actually mentions the film he’s reviewing?’

Half the joy is in knowing the quirks of the pay-rolled reviewers, almost anticipating how they’ll handle some tent-pole genre film which is inevitably going to rile them. Might they be won over? Might they harbour some unexpected respect for the feature? Some of the blandest opinion pieces invariably come from anonymous film reviews, where the publications’ ‘line’ comes before the individual’s opinion. After all, how can you trust an opinion which is on some level decided by committee?

Reviews are obviously a product of the huge clunky PR machine, and a consequence of this is the sometimes headachingly London-centric nature of the criticism. I’m sure it’s wonderful that the National Film Theatre in London has put on Hitchcock’s Notorious, and I’m sure if we’re lucky us hicks in the provinces might get a peek at it 3-4 months down the line as the one copy of it goes on tour. But do we really need all the critics to come chiming in that it’s a five star film? A re-issue of Great Expectations doesn’t need the critics to come out and tell us that it’s ‘A Literary Classic: 5 out of 5’ so why so with film?

Maybe picking up on Notorious is a petty example, and god bless the BFI and the NFT and everything they do. But the gap between criticism and distribution came crashing and screaming to the fore last week with the wide reaching coverage of Rumba. A ‘deadpan, vivid-coloured French comedy’ with ‘the spirit of Tati’ about a couple discovering life after a car crash. So the critics tell me.

The Guardian liked it, 500 words, 4 stars. The Telegraph didn’t, 50 words, 1 star. Time Out weighed in, as did the Observer, The Scotsman, Total Film, Empire, The Shitty Free London Paper, as well as Filmstar and Little White Lies. Even a mention on Radio 4’s The Film Programme. A resounding success in terms of blanket coverage, as this rather small film got picked up by such a swathe of non-tabloid press.

So what was its’ nationwide box office takings for the opening weekend?

£1158

Maybe you shouldn’t expect more from a film only shown on three screens, but man alive, a pinch over a grand? At a conservative estimate, taking ticket prices at between £6-£9, somewhere between 150 and 200 people saw this film. I know critics don’t pay for tickets, and won’t have contributed to the box office, but by those calculations about 1% of the total audience for this film was the press.

You might mistake this for a dip-into-the-cinema-before-an-almost-direct-to-video release, much as happened with the inwardly looking ass-kicking antics of JCVD earlier this year. A week in the art houses of London, and then nationwide on DVD. C’est la vie, as our man Jean Claude might say, nothing wrong with getting some press coverage of an action film otherwise easily overlooked. At least we still have the DVD.

Not so with Rumba. A week at the ICA seems to be it for this intriguing if irritatingly elusive feature. No word of a nationwide tour, no word of a DVD release. I could import it without subtitles from France, and maybe I’d manage to grasp this (by all accounts) slapstick heavy comedy. But €23+ is a lot of money for a film I can only partially understand. The internet gophers tell me that this film can be found on the usual channels of peg-legged contraband, and that some wonderful person has even gone to the trouble of making their own English subtitles for it.

Tragically that seems to be my only avenue for seeing this film, and I’m not overjoyed at the thought of undercutting a movie whose UK box office I could knock up 1% by going to see it in a cinema with a friend. For the time being I’ll pass on it, fingers crossed it might break out nationwide. Or at least near-me-wide. I’m glad the critics (by and large) enjoyed the film, and thanks for letting us know, but it begs the blunt if honest question: Why Bother?

I love films, I love reading about films and I love hearing what people think about films. Far too much of my idle time is spent keeping up to date on what the so called legitimate opinion-makers have to say about a film. Trawling through the newspapers in a café  is just about my favourite way of spending a Friday morning. ‘What’s misery-guts Bradshaw got to say about this week’s blockbuster?’ ‘How many French terms can Sandhu squeeze into his take of the latest Apatow comedy?’ ‘How many sentences before Philip French actually mentions the film he’s reviewing?’

Half the joy is in knowing the quirks of the pay-rolled reviewers, almost anticipating how they’ll handle some tent-pole genre film which is inevitably going to rile them. Might they be won over? Might they harbour some unexpected respect for the feature? Some of the blandest opinion pieces invariably come from anonymous film reviews, where the publications’ ‘line’ comes before the individual’s opinion. After all, how can you trust an opinion which is on some level decided by committee?

Reviews are obviously a product of the huge clunky PR machine, and a consequence of this is the sometimes headachingly London-centric nature of the criticism. I’m sure it’s wonderful that the National Film Theatre in London has put on Hitchcock’s Notorious, and I’m sure if we’re lucky us hicks in the provinces might get a peek at it 3-4 months down the line as the one copy of it goes on tour. But do we really need all the critics to come chiming in that it’s a five star film? A re-issue of Great Expectations doesn’t need the critics to come out and tell us that it’s ‘A Literary Classic: 5 out of 5’ so why so with film?

Maybe picking up on Notorious is a petty example, and god bless the BFI and the NFT and everything they do. But the gap between criticism and distribution came crashing and screaming to the fore last week with the wide reaching coverage of Rumba. A ‘deadpan, vivid-coloured French comedy’ with ‘the spirit of Tati’ about a couple discovering life after a car crash. So the critics tell me.

The Guardian liked it, 500 words, 4 stars. The Telegraph didn’t, 50 words, 1 star. Time Out weighed in, as did the Observer, The Times, The Scotsman, Total Film,  as well as Filmstar and Little White Lies. Even a mention on Radio 4’s The Film Programme. A resounding success in terms of blanket coverage, as this rather small film got picked up by the bulk of British non-tabloid press.

So what was its’ nationwide box office takings for the opening weekend?

£1158

Maybe you shouldn’t expect more from a film only shown on three screens, but man alive, a pinch over a grand? At a conservative estimate, taking ticket prices at between £6-£9, somewhere between 150 and 200 people saw this film. I know critics don’t pay for tickets and won’t have contributed to the box office, but by those calculations about 1% of the total audience for this film was the press.

You might mistake this for a dip-into-the-cinema-before-an-almost-direct-to-video release, much as happened with the inwardly looking ass-kicking antics of JCVD earlier this year. A week in the art houses of London, and then nationwide on DVD. C’est la vie, as our man Jean Claude might say, nothing wrong with getting some press coverage of an action film otherwise easily overlooked. At least we still have the DVD.

Not so with Rumba. A week at the ICA seems to be it for this intriguing if irritatingly elusive feature. No word of a nationwide tour, no word of a DVD release. I could import it without subtitles from France, and maybe I’d manage to grasp this (by all accounts) slapstick heavy comedy. But €23+ is a lot of money for a film I can only partially understand. The internet gophers tell me that this film can be found on the usual channels of peg-legged contraband, and that some wonderful person has even gone to the trouble of making their own English subtitles for it.

Tragically that seems to be my only avenue for seeing this film, and I’m not overjoyed at the thought of undercutting a movie whose UK box office I could knock up 1% by going to see it in a cinema with a friend. For the time being I’ll pass on it, fingers crossed it might break out nationwide. Or at least near-me-wide. I’m glad the critics (by and large) enjoyed the film, and thanks for letting us know, but it begs the blunt if honest question: Why Bother?