Resurrection Man/Marc Evans/1998

Resurrection Man/Marc Evans/1998

Arriving amid a welter of unfavourable reviews, and running for only one week, twice daily at UCI Tallaght, it would seem Resurrection Man, directed by Welshman Marc Evans, and scripted by Eoin McNamee from his own brilliant 1994 novel, never stood a chance of gaining any kind of audience acceptance in this country. (Whither the IFC, whither The Screen?) Which is a great pity, since it is perhaps the first screen representation of relatively recent events in Northern Irish history that has been made expressly for grown-ups. This is because, paradoxically, it is not really about violence in the North at all, but recognises that that violence has very little to do with the political and socio-economic context in which it takes place, but is more an immutable trait in individual human psychology, which would seek to find circumstances anywhere, any place, any time, that would help to sponsor and legitimise it. Thus a specific instance of aberrant and deviant behaviour is universalised, showing the arbitrariness of this particular set of origins.

    It has long been accepted that paramilitary groupings on either side of the so-called sectarian divide in Northern Ireland are little more than fronts for organised crime, who profiteer from extortion and protection rackets. But if the ideology and mythology of fighting for a cause can be used to cloak Mafia-style activity, it can also provide useful camouflage for various forms of psychopathology. In a recent piece in The Irish Times on filmic treatments of Northern Ireland, Fintan O’Toole criticised the character of the female IRA terrorist in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game, as being little more than a dominatrix figure from male fantasy. But this was to miss an essential point of Jordan’s film, which is central to Resurrection Man too. For, if there is a politics of sexuality, there is also a sexuality of politics. If the desire to right wrong can be seen as analogous to sex in a loving relationship, then killing for the sake of killing can be seen as analogous to sadism. Killing to right wrong has long since had very little to do with the Northern situation, except where it can be exploited by vested interests. And just as these vested interests manipulate misplaced idealism, they can make equally good use of aspiring psychopaths. Of course, the distinctions get blurred, and it’s rarely as simple as that. How many freedom fighters know they’re psychos, and vice versa? And if the terrorist is the transgressor in the political arena, how transgressive are squaddies, who kill with the backing of a democratically elected government, but are really just Pit Bull terrier keeping, lager swilling, low rent de Sades? And if the sadomasochist is the transgressor in the sexual arena, how transgressive are many married couples, whose bedrooms are little more than minefields of dominance and submission? And how many of these sponsored supposed transgressives know they’re psychos, and vice versa?  

    Back to Resurrection Man. Stuart Townsend is excellent as Victor Kelly, capturing the fine balance of edginess and smarminess exactly right. The product of a household classically Freudian in its recipe for an extreme outcome, Victor is the only child of a doting, indulgent Protestant mother, and a weak, marginalised Catholic father. Brenda Fricker is outstanding as the adamant, vehement mother, a study in control and controlling. Victor soon finds McClure (Sean McGinley), who with his fondness for imperialistic anthems and Nazi memorabilia, helps to channel Victor’s anti-social tendencies. Heather (Geraldine O’Rawe) is Victor’s sometime girlfriend, and Ryan (James Nesbitt) a drunken wife-beating journalist who writes up the unfolding story of the knife murders for his newspaper, his interest as voyeuristic, a RUC officer points out, as that of his audience. Granted, Victor and his mother are the only two fully fleshed out characters, but this is a morality play, so cardboard cut-out ciphers will suffice to surround them, especially since that is how they view these people anyhow.

    The perennial cliched gripe remains, that the film is not as good as the book, the repetition of the various victims’ plea “Kill me, kill me” in particular loosing some of its hypnotic force when transposed from page to screen. But, as McNamee said in a television interview about adapting his novel for the screen, “The money’s good”. He also commented, in a seminar held recently in Cork, that the difference between writing a novel and a screenplay is that with the latter, at the end of the day you’ve finished a page. The deficiencies resultant on the shift from one medium to the other are ameliorated somewhat by the dark, fluid, grubby, rainswept look captured by Pierre Aim, the lighting cameraman who shot La Haine. The movie is violent, but given the subject matter, necessarily so, and is not gratuitous or exploitative. It is far from being the splatter fest some commentators have suggested, and is certainly no more violent than your average vacuous cops and robbers Hollywood flick.

    McNamee has also said that: “We have a moral responsibility to confront our history in this society. That’s what the film does and I think it does it responsibly.” But it also confronts the nature of violence in general. That Resurrection Man has touched a raw nerve in those from a loyalist background in the North can be gauged from playwright Gary Mitchell’s farcical claim in a recent Irish Times article that: ‘...they (the Shankhill Butchers) had reasons for doing what they did. For example, they understood that guns as murder weapons are extremely traceable; butchers’ knives, hack-saws, chisels and scissors are not.’ Strange, then, that one clean cut to the throat was not sufficient to dispatch a random victim, until a thousand small cuts were first administered all over the rest of the body. Strange, too, that prolonged blood loss by multiple minor incisions did not become the most popular method of murder for all factions in the six counties. Mitchell also wrote: ‘...when this small, thin man (Victor) suffocated a very large and heavy B J Hogg, any hope of realism left the auditorium. It is clear that the makers do not understand violence any more than they understand the Protestant community from which it was generated.’ But what Mitchell misses is that Hacksaw (Hogg) wanted to die, and that violence generated for an ostensible political aim but really as an end in itself always turns back on itself, punishing its own. Complicity is everything. By problematising these issues in an intelligent fashion, Resurrection Man makes most recent ‘Northern Movies’ seem simplistic to the point of childishness, still caught up as they are in trying to explain the conflict in straightforward political terms. As for where the buck stops, who are these ‘vested interests’, that’s another day’s work, involving arguments about the circularity of power and its exercise, but a good place to start looking would be the eternal heart of darkness, embodied in Mephistopheles, and delineated by Conrad, among others, including McNamee.

First published in Film Ireland

Films about Warhol’s milieu

Finally, my Film Ireland reviews of a couple of films about Warhol’s milieu.

I Shot Andy Warhol Directed by Mary Harron

Nico Icon Directed by Susanne Ofteringer

New York in the mid to late sixties, and more particularly Andy Warhol’s Factory studio, was the centre of the universe, if that constantly transmigrating and transmogrifying concept can be said to exist at all, and if the two films under review can be lent credence.  Both present portraits of independently minded, visionary women, who were drawn to that milieu.

Mary Harron’s biopic of Valerie Solanis, the militant lesbian feminist would-be playwright, founder and sole member of SCUM, (Society for Cutting Up Men), and author of the infamous SCUM Manifesto, is the less satisfying offering of the two. This has nothing to do with Harron’s direction, which although her debut, is very assured. It has more to do with the fact that she seeks to give us a balanced picture of an unbalanced individual, and so becomes an apologist for the psychopathology which leads to attempted murder. “I’m not justifying the shooting,” Harron has said in an interview, referring to Solanis’ gunning down of Warhol in his office in June 1968, but then goes on to defend her as a misunderstood, underprivileged woman who was ahead of her time.  “Even as a celebrity assassin she was in the wrong time,” Harron concludes. What next?  The Michael Chapman biopic, entitled I Shot John Lennon, a detailed account of how a deprived childhood and dysfunctional family background led another of life’s losers to take a pot shot at the former Beatle? Society’s to blame, as usual. Spare us.

Perhaps part of the reason for this kid-gloves feel is Harron’s choice of the soft-centred Lili Taylor to play the abrasive Solanis, which certainly isn’t type-casting. “But if you cast someone who was really grating, nobody could watch the movie,” offers Harron, by way of explanation. My point exactly. I rest my case. As it is, we get Solanis running around looking like a slightly more zany version of Janis Ian, a nicely neurotic Jewish girl you could take home to meet Mother, rather than the psychotic gun-toter she became.  Most of the other central performances, most notably Jared Harris as Warhol, but also Lothaire Blutheau as publisher Maurice Girodias and Stephen Dorff as transvestite Candy Darling, are excellent. Harris, in particular, captures perfectly the jittery aloofness of Warhol, while also hinting at the essential benevolence one imagines it masked. John Cale’s score and a marvellous soundtrack contribute to a film well worth seeing for anyone interested in the period, but probably best taken with a pinch of salt.

Susanne Ofteringer’s Nico Icon is a different story, just as its subject was as different from Solanis as could be, and as a documentary composed entirely of interviews and archive footage, doesn’t have the tedious historical accuracy and consequent manipulation of sympathy question marks hanging over it which spoil I Shot Andy Warhol, or at least not to the same extent.

Nico was, as former keyboardist in her band James Young says early in the film, “the Chelsea girl peroxide blonde Marlene Dietrich moon goddess vamp creature who turned into a middle-aged junkie.” At the risk of sounding indulgently romantic, what is interesting about this trajectory is how much of it was volitional, to the extent that the life became part of the art. The daughter of a ‘good German’ killed by the Gestapo, she wanted to be ‘not German’. She became deracinated, and subsequently lived in France, America, Italy, England and Spain. A stunningly beautiful woman who hated being objectified, she gave up modelling to pursue a career as a singer and songwriter. Unlike a Twiggy or a Samantha Fox, she had the voice and the talent to do it. In the process she went from being blonde and wearing white to hennaing her hair and wearing black. Both Young and Paul Morrisey comment on how she started hating her good looks, and became proud of her rotting teeth, her bad skin, her needle tracks. “She was so happy to be called ugly,” says Morrisey. She wanted to be ‘not beautiful’. When asked if she has any regrets, she answers: “No regrets...Only one, that I was born a woman instead of a man.” She wanted to be ‘not woman’. She wanted to be her opposite. In the end, the journey was completed.

Introduced to Warhol by Bob Dylan, having already recorded a solo single, ‘I’m Not Sayin’’, she sang on the first Velvet Underground album, (because, according to Morrisey, Lou Reed was considered “too seedy, not a good singer, not a good personality.”) She went on to make a string of solo albums, of which Chelsea Girls is perhaps the best known. John Cale says that of all the work that came out of the Velvets, what he did with Nico is what he is most proud of, and calls The Marble Index, which he produced, “a contribution to European classical music.” The ever highly articulate and intelligent Cale sums up the Nico odyssey best: “It was a solitary dream where occasional friendships were struck and abandoned, and was so highly personal that it was very painful.”

The film is very well edited and cut, with much use of split screens, and even seems to go in for a bit of imitative form, as the straight linear interviews of the early part give way to more fragmented excerpts as the madness kicks in. One tiny criticism is that the whole would have been enhanced by contributions from both Nico’s mother and Lou Reed, but presumably they refused to give their consent.

It remains to tackle the question of Warhol’s culpability in the decline and demise of these two very different women, both of whom died in 1988, Solanis of pneumonia and emphysema in a welfare hotel in San Francisco, Nico of a brain haemorrhage in Ibiza.  Sure, the casualty rate at The Factory was rather high, but as Billy Name says in Ofteringer’s film, “Anyone who had skills or talent was accepted”. Warhol wasn’t an exploiter, in that he made no money out of the projects other than his own work, but rather a facilitator who gave people the opportunity to do their own work. A line from ‘It Wasn’t Me’, a song from John Cale and Lou Reed’s tribute album to Warhol, Songs For Drella, where Reed sings as Andy, could be applied to Solanis: ‘It wasn’t me who hurt you, I showed you possibilities/The problems you had were there before you met me.’  Another line from the same song has equal force in the case of Nico: ‘I never said stick a needle in your arm and die.’ Of course Warhol was no moral philosopher, but he was a  highly influential artist and patron. Without him it is unlikely that the greatest band in the history of rock music would have existed, or at least become so influential themselves.  (“They didn’t have a lot of fans, but every one of them went out and formed his own band.” Brain Eno.) And far from being im- or a-moral, The Factory had the loose but highly evolved ethical system of a subculture. Warhol’s Catholic childhood always poked through. (Reed to Warhol: “That guy’s an ignorant fool.” Warhol: “Hey, what if he thinks that about you?”) He may have lived among messy people, but he wasn’t messy himself.  Warhol was right: Solanis should have got a job. He even gave her one, acting in one of his films, ironically, I, A Man. It was her own increasingly erratic and alienating behaviour which led to her excommunication from Warhol’s circle. And if she was so independent and sure of her beliefs, why was she relying solely on Warhol and Girodias to produce her play and publish her Manifesto, and then turning against them? Nico had talent, and partially fulfilled her potential. Solanis, despite what Harron would have us believe, was an idiotic ideologue who hung around The Factory, the kind of talentless psychopath who hovers on the fringes of the avant-garde, and of whom one must beware if, like Warhol, one chooses to work there. 

First published in Film Ireland

Andy Warhol's Films

What was then the IFC (Irish Film Centre), now the IFI, had a season of Warhol’s films to coincide with the IMMA retrospective. I wrote about them too.

Taking Time, or Wasting It?

“I like boring things. When you just sit and look out of a window, that’s enjoyable. It takes up time. Yeah. Really, you see people looking out of their windows all the time.  I do. If you’re not looking out of a window, you’re sitting in a shop looking at the street. My films are just a way of taking up time.” So said Andy Warhol of his approach to film-making. And, of course, the time would have passed anyway, as Beckett remarked with reference to his many anti-heroes, whose major preoccupation is the filling in of passing time (which is the major preoccupation of all of us, it seems to me).

At first sight it may seem that drawing any parallel between Beckett and Warhol is the ultimate in the yoking together by violence of heterogeneous ideas, as Samuel Johnson declared was the modus operandi of metaphysical poets, but they are similar enough in their exploration of extreme areas of consciousness, in their paring back to its essentials and refinement of a given style while simultaneously testing the boundaries of that style just as they strip it back, and in their obsessively monocular focus, through an aesthetic methodology of replication or repetition, on an idea or image.

This article was commissioned to coincide with the ‘Andy Warhol’s Cinema’ season currently running at the Irish Film Centre, with the goading challenge of being written from the perspective of, ‘Why should anyone bother going? It’s as interesting as watching paint dry’, thus inviting me to cast myself yet again in the role of apologist for Warhol. So what follows will necessarily consist of a few observations and pointers about the films, rather than being an in-depth discussion of any of them, partly because I haven’t seen them all, and partly because, to quote Warhol himself from the last interview of his life in 1987, “They’re better talked about than seen.”

It is vaguely unsettling to think that Warhol lost faith in his films as films, that he was unaware that, as Amy Taubin wrote in her 1994 Sight and Sound article entitled ‘My Time Is Not Your Time’: ‘The intervention he had made in the society of the spectacle was as profound as what Godard had done in roughly the same extended 60’s moment. But if Godard framed his psychosexual obsessions within a political analysis of global economic power, Warhol, the American anti-intellectual, transformed his psychosexual identity into a world view.’

There is undoubtedly a link between the eerie visual effect of Warhol’s 16mm films (achieved by their being shot at 24 fps but projected at 16 fps) and the hyper-reality of his paintings and silk-screen prints. As Dennis J Cipnic noted in his essay ‘Andy Warhol: Iconographer’:

                   Warhol casts to character and lets his performers make up their

                   own lines to fit basic story requirements.  But it is his aim to

                   avoid wholly persons, and I think this has to do with his life-long

                   insistence on confronting reality. Just as he might have painted

                   fictitiously labelled cans, or anonymous bottles instead of Coke

                   bottles, Warhol could have used ordinary actors and given them

                   scripted dialogue. However, if his painted objects had been

                   entirely fictitious, they could not have been icons, and I believe

                   exactly the same principle applies to his films.

Warhol’s cinema is a response to the Hollywood films he grew up with, films that were available to every American, just like Campbell’s Soup and Coca Cola. Lou Reed and John Cale enlarge on Cipnic’s point in ‘Starlight’, a song from their 1990 Warhol tribute album, Songs for Drella: ‘You know that shooting up’s for real/That person who’s screaming, that’s the way he really feels/We’re all improvising, five movies in a week/If Hollywood doesn’t call us – we’ll be sick’. This verse neatly brings together the iconic quality mentioned above, and the fact that Warhol’s films were both a furious parody of Hollywood’s norms, and an attempt to seek its approval because, even though he criticised it, he also admired it. “I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They’re beautiful. Everybody’s plastic.” But Warhol’s remit was larger still. He saw the beauty in the everyday, and in the ugly.

He was an autodidact with a motion picture camera, and obviously regarded the camera exactly as he did the tools of a painter, as a mechanical means to an end, with certain contingent characteristics of its own, of which he could make use. He saw that with newsreels and documentaries, where the cameraman is concerned almost exclusively with content, these characteristics become very apparent: lenses go in and out of focus; exposure is not always precisely correct; framing wanders; shots may be held for too long or not long enough. Warhol and his assistant Paul Morrissey both felt that to retain this quality of technical improvisation greatly added to a film’s verisimilitude and believability. The more attention is drawn to the means of production, that we are made aware that it is not a transparent medium through which we view a given reality, paradoxically the more real what we view seems, while the supposedly transparent processes Hollywood uses in the service of realism actually give us pure fantasy.

As for the subject matter, the ‘content’, the amount of space allotted here forbids lengthy consideration, but is worth quoting from Thomas Crow’s essay, ‘Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol’: 

                   Yet the quality of “dead-pan” is significantly different from the

                   passivity that Swenson (an interviewer) expected Warhol to endorse.

                   It is a consciously maintained absence of expression intended to

                   disguise interest and engagement.

Warhol meant it, maaan. Personal statements can be made through the fissures inevitable in B-movie production, since they have low budgets and are largely free of high-level interference. If you had to reduce Warhol’s cinema to one theme, say what his films are about in one sentence, it would be that they are a camp send-up and full-frontal attack on the Hollywood myth of sexual normality. Sexual identity is problematised, constructed as a masquerade which is an imperfect shield for a terrible anxiety about sexual difference. So now you know.

  Of course, it is the absence of traditional narrative thrust that is so off-putting to an audience conditioned by Hollywood, and wherein lies a lot of the satiric comment which makes him the anti-Hollywood director par excellence, the prince in exile. The number of walkouts at the first evening of films in the IFC, Kiss, Haircut and Blow Job was gratifying, especially because the people who left were not leaving in chagrin due to being shocked, but because they were bored to death. But boredom is perhaps the most constant feature of life, and it is a wonder it faired so badly in the novels which are filed in the canon as nineteenth century realist fiction. Boredom, for Warhol, is both not boring at all, and more boring than you ever imagined.Watching paint dry? That’s what artists do all the time.

First published in Film Ireland magazine

John Murry /Whelan's - July 19th, 2023

Desmond Traynor                                     John Murry / Whelan’s, July 16th, 2023

It’s a decade since the release of John Murry’s breakthrough album, The Graceless Age, and the 10th anniversary is being celebrated with three band dates in Ireland – Galway, Limerick, and now Dublin (with a solo stop-off in Galway again, for the Film Fleadh – where Sarah Share’s film The Ballad of John Murry has just bagged the Best Documentary Award).

    With backing from three young, crack musicians, unsurprisingly the set features every song from that classic album, although not in the original running order. Murry can be an intimidating stage presence, and his between song patter isn’t always coherent, but he achieves many moments of intensity over the course of the evening. Not least among them is the record’s 10-minute+ centrepiece, ‘Little Coloured Balloons’. Like any artist required to play the same song every night, especially one as harrowingly autobiographical as this, Murry is not unaware of the freak show element of a piece in which he opens up and bleeds. Rather, he is conscious of the multiple ironies involved in re-enacting his own near-death experience – due to a drug overdose – and resuscitation, giving a performative display of his own internalised trauma time after time. Also, he has to keep it interesting for himself.  To this end, he fairly deconstructs the song with an ongoing commentary while singing it (at one point he throws in a reference to its ‘emotional pornography’), without diminishing any of its inherent weight. Indeed, he brings it home with all its requisite heartrending power intact. There is even an improvisatory lyric change from ‘I took an ambulance ride/They said I nearly died’ to ‘I wish I’d died.’

    The encore sees an airing of ‘I Refuse To Believe You Could Love Me’, from most recent album The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes, plus a raucous rendition of Hank Williams’ ‘I Saw The Light’.

    As The Life Partner remarked to me afterwards, it’s like watching a beautiful car crash. Playing to an audience of devotees in Whelan’s on a Sunday night, it is interesting to speculate how many are there for the beauty, and how many for the car crash. But that is a risk any edgily spontaneous performer always takes. Besides, maybe the car crash is part of the beauty. Anyway you look at it, what a show – with entertaining support from Longford-based band Cronin.

Films of the Year 2019

I’ve already posted my Albums of The Year (a list that could already do with substantial revising.) Here’s my Films of the Year, 2019.

1)         US

2)         Dolor Y Gloria

3)         The Border

4)         Marriage Story

5)         Amazing Grace 

6)         Knives Out

7)         Ash Is The Purest White

8)         Maradona

9)         Joker

10)       Burning

Bubbling under: The Souvenir, Woman At War, Hustlers.

I didn’t like Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir at all the first time I watched it, but I really liked it the second time. So why did I watch it a second time if I didn’t like it the first time? Well, there must have been something there that drew me back, even if it was only to find out why I didn’t like it, and a nagging thought that there was more to it than I was getting. Which, happily, there is. Not enough to put it in the Top Ten, mind. It’s slow and episodic, and demands commitment and concentration and attention to bring out its nuances. It can even seem self-indulgent at times. But even if it makes few concessions to the audience entertainment-wise, it is worth the effort. I kind of watched it is fragments the second time, which may be the ideal way to watch it. Like reading a novel, do it a chapter or two at a time. 

Many of the films which are featuring heavily on critics’ end of year lists I either thought were so-so, or downright crap. In the ‘it is what it is’ former category: The Irishman, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Birds of Passage, Monos, Holiday.

I didn’t think much of In Fabric – fairly vacuous. Long Day’s Journey Into Night was all style and no substance – a bit like the dreams it purports to represent, although in my opinion there is lot more to dreams than beautiful but insubstantial images (see Maggie Lee’s excellent review in Variety, the only one that nails it, even if it goes against the critical consensus). And Midsommar was a downright utter campy hoot fest – not its intention, I think. 

Her Smell was alright, Vox Lux not so much so – even if it had more of a story to it. I still have to see an indie film which deals successfully with the experience of the indie music scene, or contemporary commercial pop music. Both of these films suffer from the same problem that beset Lenny Abrahamson’s Frank: they come across (at least to me) as a straight’s idea of what it much be like being in an indie band. “They’re all fucking crazy.” Why do all film makers think all rock/pop stars are obnoxious, narcissistic egomaniacs? I’m not saying some aren’t, but the constant negative representation is irksome. Some of the nicest people I know are or have been in indie bands (myself included). The thing is, you don’t get to rise in that business if you have a bad reputation as being an asshole (unless you have an overnight mega hit which places you in a protective bubble). Most of the time you’ve got to make nice to get anywhere. 

My Best Gigs of the Year to follow shortly.

The Killing Of A Sacred Deer by Yorgos Lanthimos

So I saw the widely ecstatically-reviewed The Killing Of A Sacred Deer during the week. Didn’t like it much. I’d like to know how Martin (the kid) puts his curse on Steven (the surgeon’s) family, and why it works. I’d also like to know why Steven (or his wife Anna) don’t ask Martin how he’s doing it. Or why they just didn’t go to the cops. I know that with Yorgis Lanthimos one is just suppose the interior logic of the world he creates, and take oddities and discrepancies as givens of those worlds, but there is a bit difference between ‘everyone will turn into an animal if they don’t get married within forty-five days’ (The Lobster) and ‘first, every member of your family be paralysed from the waist down, then they will stop eating, then they will start bleeding from the eyes and die' (The Killing Of A Sacred Deer). Something to do with agency. Or with everybody in this world accepting a universal given, as opposed to a given being generated by one person. Like, with Kafka’s The Trial, it really doesn’t matter why K is arrested or what he’s accused of or guilty of, because it’s a metaphor for general guilt (original sin?) in humanity, or a metaphor for a bureaucratic, tyrannical state not needing a particular reason to condemn you (they can always Trump (aha) one up). But it actually matters (at least to me) how Martin is doing this and why Steven doesn’t call him on it. Dogtooth remains Lanthimos’ best flick: that was an enclosed, incestuous world, and the parents made damn sure the outside world wasn’t going to intrude on the fictions they were peddling to their children (even if their reasons for doing so were entirely capricious). My feeling is that Mr. L has been given too much rope, and he’s run out of road.

Human Capital

"You gambled on the downfall of this country. You won."

I caught this morning at a press show a new Italian film, 'Human Capital'. A nice slice of contemporary Italian life, with a multiple p.o.v. structure. Apart from anything else, so good to hear the language spoken again, starved of it as I am when I'm not there.

http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/tribeca-film-review-human-capital-1201157301/

Frank

I saw Frank this evening. Not a bad movie, but nothing to do with Frank Sidebottom. Do not consider it a biopic. A bit suspect the way they make him American. Also a bit suspect the way they retrospectively superimpose social media on a scene for which it had not even been invented. Meh! Alright, but a bit of a cynical exercise.

I loved Adam And Paul, and liked Garage, but with What Kevin Did, and now Frank, 

Lenny Abrahamson has gone right downhill.

A straight's idea of indie music.

The Double, Calvary

So I was at a couple of press shows of films this week. The Double, on Monday, is not very good, quite ordinary in fact. Certainly not as good as it thinks it is. But, then again, Richard Ayoade's previous film, his debut, Submarine, although it has a few nice touches, wasn't that great either. On the evidence of two films, he seems to specialise in deeply annoying central characters. Either you have sympathy for them, or you don't. Or maybe they just wear out your sympathy.

Happily, Calvary, on Tuesday, more than made up for yesterday's disappointment. At the risk of critical hyperbole, I have to say I think it's almost perfect. Probably the best Irish film since Adam and Paul. 'Irish and so black', as Robert Forster of The Go-Betweens had it, in a different context. Following the enjoyable romp that was his debut The Guard, this episodic, immersive study of faith and existential doubt (as well as being a casual who-is-going-to-do-it), marks director John Michael McDonagh out as not merely one to watch, but someone who could be destined for greatness. Brendan Gleeson is great too, as are all the other familiar actorly faces. Most importantly, it doesn't sentimentally bottle it, but follows through.

I always get so cheered up when I see a great film after a medicare or bad one.

American Hustle etc.

So I went to the press preview of American Hustle today. Happy to report that it is well worth two hours of anyone's time. There's something of Scorsese about its proportions and manic rush. Also, extremely witty. Great performances too.

We also saw Nebraska on Monday night - cool, and Philomena on Tuesday night, a film that wasn't high on my list or priorities to see, but it turned out I was extremely glad I saw it.

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues was sold out on Wednesday night, damnation, but I'll catch that before the year is out. Warmed up last night by watching the first one, The Legend Of Ron Burgundy last night. 

The Broken Circle Breakdown

      The Broken Circle Breakdown

     There was nothing I didn’t like about this film. Elise (Veerle Baetens), a tattoo artist, takes up with the slightly older Didier (Johan Heldenbergh), a farmer and bluegrass banjo player, and they shack up on his spread outside Ghent in Belgium. Elise, possessor of a wonderful voice, starts singing in Didier’s band. She unexpectedly falls pregnant, after initial resistance he is completely supportive, and their daughter Maybelle (Nell Cattrysse) is born. Maybelle gets cancer at four years old, and dies. The couple’s relationship slowly and painfully ruptures. However, this reductive précis does little justice to the richness of director Felix van Groeningen’s extraordinary film.

     
      For a start, there is the non-linear storytelling, which is not some gratuitously pseudo-cool postmodern device, but integral to building the contrast between past and present. There is something of the European hipster’s ambivalent relationship with America reflected in the film’s attitudes – love the music and movies, hate the politics – a version of Greil Marcus’ Two Americas. In dealing with their grief, post-bereavement, Didier’s finding a rationalist consolation in music while Elise relies increasingly on magical thinking, is rehearsed a head/heart, reason/instinct debate.

    
      To be specific, there are so many deft little touches on show here. At their first meeting, Elise suggests an Elvis tattoo for Didier, intoning ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’, to which the replies: “Hank Williams! Elvis is a pansy. Bill Monroe is the greatest musician who ever lived.” The secondary characters, mostly the other band members, are never obtrusive but quietly present. We see how they progress from playing bars to halls to theatres, but this is never commented on. The recriminations after Maybelle’s death are sadly recognisable: “I drank and smoked during the first three months’ of pregnancy”; “You were drunk for a week and got jaundice and so I couldn’t breast-feed”; “There’s no cancer in my family”.

    
      But perhaps the overriding recommendation of this movie is that it has one of the most effective uses of music in a non-musical, non-documentary feature film I’ve ever seen, emotionally resonant but perfectly integrated into the plot. If the band’s performance, and the context in which it appears, of Townes Van Zant’s ‘If I Needed You’ doesn’t reduce you to tears, nothing will.

   There are minor quibbles: it gets a bit preachy towards the end (but since this proselytizing is directed against fundamentalist religion, and George W. Bush in particular, that’s okay – it reinforces my worldview); he survives, she doesn’t, which might seem like an unfortunate gender stereotype (but hey, grief can do that, and just because it happens in this story, doesn’t mean it’s being extrapolated into some universal truth). So these are, as noted, minor quibbles. Taken as a totality, it is rare to see a film of such emotional intelligence, which does not obviously patronise or manipulate its audience. Yes, nothing I didn’t like about this film.

Before Midnight

Before Midnight                                                                                   

Perhaps inevitably, Before Midnight compares unfavorably with its predecessors, Before  

Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004). But then the giddy rush of romantic teen love 

found, then thought lost forever but rekindled again ten years later, is bound to be more 

exciting, enthralling, entertaining and life-affirming than the tetchy complications of 

middle-aged partners-for-life. Also, although it was probably difficult for director Richard 

Linklater to avoid at this stage, the opening out of Celine’s (Julie Delpy) and Jesse’s (Ethan 

Jawke) obsessive dialoguing to include Other Characters, however minor, may not have sat 

well with purist devotees of the series. And yet…the third installment of this on-going 

project (it seems presumptuous to call it a trilogy since, all being well, who’s to say there 

won’t be a part four, five or even six – Linklater’s spin on Haneke’s Amour, anyone? – ?) 

has much to recommend it. Celine and Jesse are our friends by now, after all, and while 

their squabblings in sunny Greece may verge at times on the tediously generic, they are 

still a long way from the soft-focus bourgeois boredom of Home Counties twits having an 

eternity of ennui in Provence or a cocked-up summer in Chiantishire. Moreover, there is 

something innovatively compelling about revisiting these characters in almost real time, in 

terms both of the elapse of years and the frameworks of the discrete films. As is by now 

customary, we terminate on a cliffhanger. See you again in 2022, or thereabouts?