Watch this and Chill

Here’s a list of the most interesting films i have seen over the past ten years. I have only included films actually released during this time as I consider the reputation of most ‘classic’ films to be above the need for reiteration.

Citizen Dog (Thailand)

Some have called this film the Thai Amelie but its much funnier and less annoying and it doesn’t have Audrey Tatou fluttering her eyelashes and trying to be Audrey Hepburn. I don’t remember much about it to be honest, except for the scene where the guy and the girl sit atop a giant heap of plastic bottles. Its set in Bangkok,city of false dreams and real disillusionment.

Head On – 2004

This film, is so raw, so real and so moving. Akin is a German director who makes films about Turkish immigrants in Berlin. This is his most famous film. It contains some graphic sex scenes, some of the most explicit in a mainstream film that I have seen.

Spring, Summer, Autumn Winter…. and Spring (Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul geurigo bom), 2003, Kim Ki-Duk, South Korea

Everything about the film works magically. There is a total absence of unnecessary plot. The dialogue is kept to a minimum. The film is told in pictures not words. The film is about Buddhism, and it shows the struggles of its protagonist to cope with the dictums of the religion. In fact, the film is about life itself and how far we must go to realise who we are.

My Blueberry Nights – 2007. Wong Kar Wai

I have no idea why this film got such bad ratings. The story is good. It looks great (cinematography by Chris Doyle) and the cast is beautiful (Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz, Jude Law). The one weak link is Cat Power who can’t really act. But you get carried away with the story anyway, and the film is full of memorable moments, like the blueberry pie of the title, and the jar of abandoned keys left behind by separated couples that Law’s character keeps on the bar in case they return.

The Host

The South Korean monster movie was a big hit in Korea. You may have noticed I like Korean films. There is a scene in this that’s really jarring. You’ll know if you’ve seen it. the family have been told that their son has been killed by the monster. At first they are devastated and grief-struck. Then something changes and before long some photographers arrive, The tension is broken and they start to laugh uncontrollably at a joke we don not understand. The film is loaded with similar scenes of horror mixed with humour.

Battle Royale – 2001

In a near-future, law and order have broken down. Schools have been taken over. Students from Japan have been selected to take part in Battle Royale, a fight to the death where the winner is the last man standing. They are given a deadly arsenal of guns, grenades and crossbows. The film is in no hurry to get rid of the pupils, instead it allows us to get to know them, form a bond, and then we must watch them die. It has an element of Greek tragedy about it, some of the participants become crazed furies, charging into death and being blown apart. Others attempt to stay alive as long as they can, but previous rivalries and arguments come between even close friends. In this nightmarish world, the  filmmakers allow one couple to survive. Tarantino cries himself to sleep at night because he didn’t make this.

Dogville

Nicole Kidman has never been better than as Grace in Dogville. She plays a woman mysteriously arrived in a town and given refuge by its people, only for them to eventually turn against her and take away her freedoms one by one. eventually she is chained up, pulled around on a dog collar, whilst the men take it in turns to rape her. Towards the end, when James Caan turns up, I was literally on the edge of my seat when I first watched this. There is something so monumental about the film that takes away any ambivalence, it’s impossible to watch without being drawn in. The finale is simply devastating.

The Squid and the Whale

This is probably my favourite American indie (of recent times). Its a funny/sad film about a family whose parents try to ease the pain of their divorce on their children. The film has a very European quality, its very dialogue driven. I don not think its a mistake to say it has qualities similar to Truffaut or Eric Rohmer.

The Child

How many of you have seen this one then? The Dardenne brothers have won more Golden palms  (palme d’or) than any other director(s). Watch as a clueless young man attempts to sell his baby over the internet. It all goes terribly wrong. Its shot like a documentary, but unfolds like a classic thriller.

Sunshine State (John Sayles)

‘If there’s a more acute film about ‘community’ in America, it’s yet to be made.’  – James Christopher, The Times

 

a great piece of ensemble film-making – even the minor parts are well developed and acted.

Last life In The Universe, 2003

In Bangkok, a librarian with yakuza connections finds himself involved with the messy life of a prostitute. This is a very wistful, elusive drama. The performances are effective and the cinematography (Chris Doyle) is stunning.

 

It  was a long, slow decline that took Veronica Lake from the 40 spy thrillers she made with Alan Ladd, to Flesh Feast (1970). But that was how it often was for stars of that era, on the top for a few years before retiring, only to return when very old for the money (it’s a frequent trajectory for actors who can’t resist the lure of celluloid.

Veronica Lake trademark ‘peekaboo’ bangs, her long blonde hair obscuring one eye. It was an artificial look that perfectly summed up the artifice of the time. 

It has been such an enduringly appealing look that it was immediately obvious which star Kim Basinger had been made up to look like in L.A. Confidential:

Kim Basinger as a Lake-a-like in L.A Confidential)

By this point it is clear how much the movies owe to Veronica Lake, and just how embedded her look is in the fabric of movies. She has been mentioned in  Manhattan, by Tracey, and scenes of her film This Gun For Hire are used as the film Goldie Hawn watches in Foul Play. That film is a wonderful summation of her talent in using her sexiness and likeability on screen to full effect. Her character is a dancer who gets caught up with Alan Ladd. In one scene she performs as a magician whilst singing Hocus Pocus  (as far as I know her own voice was used) and in another scene she performs as a mermaid in fishnets and rubber; its innocently sexy in a way only films of this period are. But its really the chemistry that she had with Ladd that makes her so notable. She has an upfrontness about her that few other actresses had. Watching that film, you get the real impression that you are watching two people slowly falling in love with each other. Its also a great thriller, with a story by Graham Greene. Lake and Ladd were together again in the Dashiell Hamnet story The Glass Key (by all accounts a very faithful adaptation) and The Blue Dahlia. 

 

I love this film so much

 

Lake appeared in another iconic film that inspired the Coen brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou, the Preston Sturges epic Sullivan’s Travels. The film mixed comedy with a more serious social realist element, the film-within-a-film had Joel McCrea making a film about the Depression. The film says much about the gap between making films for art or for entertainment’s sake, in doing so its become a work of art itself. Those looking for Veronica Lake glamour will be disappointed,as she spends most of the film dressed as a boy.

What else? 

Lake and Ladd were like two kids in a world for adults (they were both under five feet five). Her haircut was so popular that the government prohibited other women from copying it, fearing it would cause them accidents.

Her star waned after the war. She only made a few films after 1948, then filed for bankruptcy. By the time she made her last film, she was unrecognizable from the delectable satin moll who stole the heart of Alan Ladd and countless others.

Veronica Lake: “You could put all the talent I had into your left eye and still not have your eyesight impaired.”

 

This week’s been going in so many different directions, its hard to know where to begin.

I just started a new job at a school in Haringey. As a teaching assistant. I think I get on with the kids ok. But its hard to keep discipline. I get so stressed when I see even a few children being silly or not focusing in class.  I have a tendency to lose my temper very quickly and I start screaming or barking orders at them. Its not nice. i’d rather it was different, but the school day is so structured and every minute of the day is taken up with timetabled activities. I have to say that on the whole, even when children are being disruptive, they’re learning more than it might seem. Because children are like sponges. They take in everything around them without appearing to pay any attention. 

There was an autistic child at the school who couldn’t focus like the other the children when sat on the carpet when the teacher was talking to the class. yet when you asked him what the teacher had said he had perfect recall of what the teacher was talking about. I expect there are many other children very similar to that boy.

I went to Notting Hill yesterday (Sunday) for the Portobello Road market. I like that place a lot. I think its the most interesting part of London. You’ve got Notting Hill itself, part of the Borough of K & C, the richest area of London. Then you have the market area, all the way to Ladbroke Grove. There you can find some of the coolest bars, the most bohemian pubs, cafes and shops. Its easy to stereotype the area as only serving David Cameron types (peronally I like Cameron) and sienna Miller, but its the most egalitarian part of London. Maybe one day I’ll live there?

Theatre review

Smack Family Robinson at The Rose, Kingston

It’s  bizarre going to the theatre and watching a play that feels very much like a sitcom you’d find on Channel 4, specifically something close to the council estate drama Shameless.

This is the first revival of Richard Bean’s first play since the astonishingly successful One Man Two Governors played to packed audiences on both sides of the atlantic.

Smack family Robinson has been given a local feel in this adaptation, the play is deliberately set in Kingston and is liberally peppered with references that only locals would know about. All the mentions of Bentalls shopping centre and Canbury Gardens makes the play somewhat parochial. It’s a shame that they saw fit to tailor the play so slavishly to a particular audience.

But how they love it! It’s a fun enough play, certainly well written. They’re a family who let the son inject heroin on the living room sofa as long as he takes his shoes off. The mother has access to the porn channel. Dad used to be a roadie in the sixties, his one regret from that decade is supplying the drugs that killed Jimi Hendrix. Smart daughter goes to college with a hope to be a manager but suffice to say she ends up working in the family business. Its all remarkably  good –hearted knock about stuff. If these are what drug dealers are actually I don’t know what we have to fear.

Verdict: a funny play, a good night out if you live in Kingston. The play will be baffling for anyone else.

Right. That’s it. I’ve reached breaking point. If I have to hear one more conversation about a great TV series from America that is the best thing since the first loaf was sliced and  I shall be forced to, well, I’m not sure.

But put  it this way.I ‘d be very happy if each and every TV series box set was thrown into a deep pit and incinerated.

Oh but it needn’t be this way. I have loved with all my heart Friends, Seinfeld and Mad Men. But only recently have such series become part of the national conversation. Once, we watched TV as part of a diversion. we watched it in the doctor’s waiting room or before we went out. Or we put it on when we were with a lover and we wanted to provide the right background atmosphere.

But now, look what’s happened. We binge unthinkingly on endless hour after hour of box set. We’ve robbed TV series’ of their immediacy, their right-now-ness. I dread to think how much time people are spending watching these shows. a lifetime could be wasted without finishing every box set that we think we should watch (because advertising is relentless and unescapable). 

I think Charlie Brooker was on to something when he made a series called  How TV ruined your life. Most of the programmes people are watching are offering nothing but the same tired old plots, acting, the same situations. I put them into three categories: the crime drama: The Killing, Borgen, Lillehammer. The American ‘comedy’ sitcom: How I Met Your Mother, 30 Rock, The Big Bang Theory. Only one of those could be genuinely considered a comedy. Then there are the more gritty but still unsurprising American cable dramas. The Sopranos has a lot to answer for. Come on! The Godfather said all there needed to be said about the mafia in under 10 hours. Then there was the horribly overrated The Wire, not to mention The Shield, then Prison Break. Enough. There are other things we can be doing. I suppose if I am honest with myself I envy the simple pleasures (and believe me, they are simple, there is nothing simpler than lolling in front of a screen for hours on end) that are derived from watching these shows., But I regret that they are missing out on so many more rarefied, and mostly more organic pleasures that this life has to offer., Speaking of which, I’m off to enjoy some organic pleasure of my own, and I won’t be using a TV to do so.

1. American Hustle: David O. Russell

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Christian Bale, Amy Adams and Bradley Cooper

Why? After the knockout success of Silver Linings, I’m  thrilled that O Russel is making another film with Jennifer Lawrence and De Niro.

What’s the story?

Set in 1970’s, its about a true-life con-artist forced to inform on impoverished mayor of Camden, New Jersey.

When: December 23, 2013

The Bling Ring : Sofia Coppola

Starring: Emma Watson, Israel Broussard, Katie Chang, Claire Julien.

Why? the film is about fame obsessed women who use the internet to locate and burgle the homes of celebrities, and then sell what they steal. Its been filmed once as a made for TV movie. Coppola makes every film she makes totally fresh and interesting.

When? July 5

Pieta : Kim -ki Duk (2012)

Why? 

Ki Duk makes some of the most artistic and painterly films around. Recently an actress nearly died while making Breath (the director reflected on the experience in the documentary Arang). Luckily he hasn’t been stoppped making more movies. Pieta won the Golden Lion at Venice last year.

What’s the story? 

A loan shark is forced to rethink his violent lifestyle with the arrival of a mysterious stranger claiming to be his mother.

When? No release set

The Wolf of Wall Street: Martin Scorsese

Who’s in it: Leonardo Di Caprio, Jonah Hill, Matthew Mconnahey

Why: Its a dream for Scorsese: the mob, corruption and Wall Street.

When: 15 November 2013 (USA)

Paris Hilton – released as One Night In Paris

Many thought this would be the end of Paris Hilton. What, really? If anything it made her more famous.  Paris was the Kim Kardashian of the mid 2000s, starring in The Simple Life reality show with Nicole Ritchie.  One Night In Paris showcases Paris’s amazing body. The fact that she spends most of the time talking to the camera suggests she was entirely complicit in being filmed. The leaking of the tape may have been an attempt by her ex boyfriend Rick Salomon to get back at her. They made three sex tapes together, One Night In Paris is the most widely seen.

Virginie Gervaise

She was a high street honey for French FHM before it was revealed that she was also a pornstar. So no stranger to being filmed having sex.

Colin Farrell and Nicole Narain

‘slim, shapely, luscious stunner’ is how IMDB describes Narain, and after looking at her its hard to argue. The film was featured in Celebrity Sex tapes unwound, one of those crappy Channel 4 countdowns.

Alana Dante

She has been on Belgium Big Brother. 

Kim Kardashian

I knew there was a sex tape of Kardashian before I knew anything else about her. 

Having 

 

Let’s look at the evidence: Mia Farrow  was married to Frank Sinatra for two years. She drove the singer mad, Dean Martin pointed out that he had Scotch that was older than her, she was 19, Sinatra was 48.

Her role in Rosemary’s Baby encapsulates her elfin grace, showing her being consumed by something growing inside and is one of the few films to look at pregnancy as something terrifying, Rosemary’s Baby was a better choice than doing The Detective with Sinatra. It was the first of many ‘possession’ films leading up to Friedkin’s spectacularly disgusting The Exorcist (1972).

She hardly pulled her weight in her next films and needed the voodoo magic of Polanski to bring out her best work.

She was Daisy in The Great Gatsby, probably only because Robert Evans couldn’t get Ali McGraw (they were recently divorced), she looked the part but was not in any way sexy or alluring, so why should Gatsby have gone to so much effort to get her?

Her career was quiet for a years when she was away being a mother with Andre Previn (1970-1979). Then came Full Circle, Death On the Nile, Avalanche, and then along came Woody.

It is now the subject of dispute whether he did her very great good or ill.   Their living arrangement led to grotesque melodrama, with children biological and adopted as front-line soldiers. They were never actually married, although it seemed to the public that they were. Her films with Woody are: A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters and Radio Days. that list was as many as the Diane Keaton films Allen made in the seventies, yet she continued to work with Allen, even though the roles were no longer fresh: September , Another Woman, Oedipus Wrecks, Crimes and Misdemaenours, Alice, Shadows and fog, Husbands and Wives. As for the last film, it came as the Soon-Yi scandal was at its height, and seemed very much a case of life imitating art.

She has spoken badly of Allen, she found a nude photograph of Soon-Yi in 1992 which led to the custody battle, they have joint custody of their biological children.  She went to Ireland to make Widow’s Peak; Miami Rhapsody; Reckless; Anglea Mooney; Private Parts,Redux riding Hood; Coming Soon;Forget Me Never; A Girl Thing; Purpose; Black Irish.

Verdict: Mia Farrow is a highly intelligent woman who has made some good films, but her personal life has been brought into question. She has always needed a strong male presence in her life, but  the thought remains that her father – John Farrow, director, Catholicism and something of a wildman – may be the dominant male influence in her life.

So, not a villain, just sometimes misunderstood by the general public.

The Great Gatsby is one of the most intangible books I’ve ever read. The words slip through your mind like sand running through your fingers. It’s one of those books that is hard to follow because the story is ungraspable, it seems to escape understanding, the closer we get to it the more it eludes us. Well, I’ve attempted to read the book many times but haven’t finished it. No doubt I will try again before the new film.

The Great Gatsby was published in 1925, his seconds novel after This Side of Paradise. Fitzgerald had already published dozens of short stories. Winter Dreams was published in Metropolitan in 1922. In many ways it is a prototype of the Gatsby story, encompassing many of the same themes.

Dexter Green is a shy, middle class boy who longs to be part of the old money elite. He caddies for the rich at a golf club. He meets and falls in love with Judy Jones, daughter of the owner Mortimer Jones, but can’t abide her knowing he is a servant to her.

Eighteen months later Dexter meets Judy whilst swimming on the beach, she is now extremely beautiful, they date, and he learns that he is one of 10 men she is stringing along. Soon they are engaged, but she breaks it off after one month. Dexter goes to fight in World War 1. After five years, Dexter is a very successful businessman, working in New York. On a particular day, a man named Devlin visits him, and mentions Judy Simms who is married to one of his friends, her beauty has faded and she is now a housewife. The news affects Dexter greatly as he still feels love for Judy and has hope for her. Dexter realises he can never go back home now:

For the first time in his life the tears were streaming down his face. But they were for himself, now.

‘Long ago,’ he said ‘there was something in me, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back more.’

1922

The story of Winter Dreams has never been filmed. However, Ali McGraw had wanted to adapt it in the seventies and suggested it to head of Paramount studios Robert Evans, she gave him a leather-bound notebook in which the story was copied meticulously in her own handwriting.  

To get you going for the latest Gatsby offering here are some screenshots of Lurhman’s film:

‘I’ve always loved dating shows,’ announces Eva Langoria (executive producer of Ready For Love), ‘but lets be honest, they don’t work too well at matching people.’

I’ve enjoyed my fair share of dating shows too, but my tastes run to cheesy early nineties shows that I watched in my childhood, Blind Date being one of them. In that program a single  man or woman asked three questions (carefully scripted to involve as many double entendres as the pre-watershed scheduling allowed). The format would be irredeemably naff today, but it gave me my first awareness of male/female couplings. Davina McCall’s Streetmate is another one I can remember watching

Ready For Love uses the ‘blind’ element too, so the man, in this case ‘rock star’ Tim, stands behind a screen and asks questions to women and must select each one in order of preference, leaving one last woman who must go home at this point. Except that all of these women have been carefully selected by Amanda Kelleher – in case we weren’t sure of her credentials, ‘I’m match-maker to the rich and famous, through the last twenty years I’ve been able to build the worlds’s largest match-making service.’

Got that? It turns out that match-makers are a dime – a -dozen on this show. There’s even a frankly rather creepy English chap, about whom more will follow.

The four girls, contestants, who are looking for love are presented as though on The X-factor, auditioning for Tim’s approval. Apparently they have applied for a part on the show, but I’d bet they were looking to get famous and thought that appearing on this show would be as good a chance as any. Let’s be honest, these aren’t women who should have any difficulties finding love in the real world, but maybe  no-ones meeting anyone in the real world, not in the workplace, especially where political correctness means even a compliment can lead to a lawsuit.

I felt sorry for the women on this show. Tim seemed bland, undeserving of any of them. Although after listening to some of their comments, maybe they were made for each other: (Sara – realtor) “I came here for you, because after watching your video and hearing you say the words you’re not going to have your career with you at your bedside, I instantly connected with you”). The show is full of lines like that. Only Siham (her name is Arabic for love at first sight) can break through the mush, coming across as sexy and fairly human, saying she would like to give him a real french kiss and reads him poetry. Inexplicably Tim sends her home, and chooses Hailey instead (elementary teacher).

The show throws a spanner, and then the entire toolkit into the works when it brings out one of Tim’s exes, who feels that now is the last chance for her to declare her love for him. The show lost all credibility right there, and sunk to new levels of cruelty when it set the girls up in a house together, like a harem in which nobody had sex with anybody else.

“I have never been on a date with nine girls,” said Tim. No shit. In case I haven’t made it clear, the show has three matchmakers, who each select four women, and Tim must say goodbye to one of each four. That’s still  nine women. Phew. that’s more than most men date in a lifetime, I’ll bet.

Matchmaker Matt, ‘we care about emotion not logic’ uses some kind of NLP to get the women to bring out who they are and get Tim to fall in love with them. Make no mistake, this is big business and has made him a lot of money. A lot of money for some fairly dubious advice. If there’s one piece of wisdom people used to give for those looking for love its to be yourself. But what if yourself is a total loser? In other words, you shouldn’t be yourself, but the self you think is most likely to attract someone. Its simple really.

Ready for Love is an American reality matchmaking competition television series on NBC. The series premiered on April 9, 2013, at 9/8c and airs every Tuesday at 9–11 pm ET/PT. The series is hosted by Giuliana and Bill Rancic.

You have been warned

Don Draper is back! This time its 1967, the hair is longer and there’s more facial hair. I thought that Peggy Olsen had got a new boyfriend but it was the same guy, just hiding behind the weight of colossal sideburns and a beard.

Don Draper read Dante’s Inferno whilst on holiday in Hawaii with his wife Megan. That was the scene of the most interesting vignette, when Draper was best man at a GI’s beach wedding. The show was composed of several somewhat elliptical scenes, in which characters’ experience were condensed into glowing, tightly edited compositions. The sight of elegant Betty Draper in a doss house was alarming, but it showed a development in her once shallow and rather brittle character.

Sycophantic Pete Campbell was such a powerful presence last season, he continues to provoke Don Draper as best he can, using his oily charm on business leaders against Don’s maverick ideas (a surreal ad which showed a man’s clothes reminded them of James Mason leaving his clothes on the beach and drowning at the end of A Star Is Born).

I’m not sure how long Mad Men can keep all this stylized artifice up. When Mad Men began, it was 1962, the time of JFK, Marylin Monroe and Jackie Keneddy. The show’s rat pack glamour seemed in keeping with the era, but i’m not sure how well it works in 1967. Mad Men will have to become more Easy Rider than Frank Sinatra. It will be fascinating to see what happens.

Alice GB/SWITZERLAND/WEST GERMANY 1988

Most films about Lewis Carrol’s classic are frankly dull, i.e. Tim Burton’s recent interpretation.

This film gets closer to other films in capturing the curious atmosphere of the original story, by using live actors and animation, it has surrealist overtones and the puppets by director Svankmajer are like the sock puppets you made at school.

Bad Boy Bubby Australia/Italy 1993

A retarded 35-year old who has never been allowed out of his home, murders his parents and experiences the wider world. Many found this film repugnant, but it offers a satirical perspective on everyday life and communication, as the man replays back everything said and done to him.

Cannibal Holocaust Ruggero Deodato

The original video nasty. It was number one on the list of banned titles by the director of prosecutions. It has a surprisingly sophisticated structure: a professor of anthroplolgy goes into the rain-forest of Brazil after a previous documentary crew went missing. He finds their footage which shows them subjecting the ‘savages’ to the most appalling treatment, raping their women, setting their homes on fire and senselessly killing snakes and other animals. The film has a genuinely authentic feel and the found footage looks disturbingly real.   

El Topo – Mexico 1971 – Alejandro Jodorowsky

Impossible to do this list without at least one film by Jodorowsky, it is perverse and unpleasantly violent. An evil gunslinger rides through the old west and has various encounters, after which he sets himself on fire. There is some lesbian stuff too, see below

 

If you are great, El Topo is a great picture, if you are limited, El Topo is limited.

Even Dwarfs Started Small, 1970, Werner Herzog

Dwarfs in a prison start a revolt. see also Terror In Tinytown and Lost Highway for more dwarfs

Funny Games, 1997, Michael Haneke

Haneke’s film is disturbing precisely because it highlights our fascination with watching violence on screen and our enjoyment of watching people suffer. There is no other point to this film, it exists as a corrective to the Hollywood gloss of Tarantino and Michael Bay.

Gummo/Julien donkey boy (Harmony Korrinne)

Idiot savant and author of Kids made these films before Springbreakers. Gummo features bored teenagers having sex with retarded people and skinning cats, whilst Julien Donkeyboy has a schizophrenic youth (Ewen Bremmer) sharing his home with his equally dysfunctional uncle and his sister.

 

I Spit On Your Grave

a low-budget shocker, and another film banned on video in this county. when most films depict rape, they shy away from revealing the true enormity of the crime, worse, they eroticize it (Thelma and Louise, The Accused). This film features the most powerful rape until Irreversible or Baise Moi. It was remade a few years ago.

Tetsuo II: Bodyhammer, Japan 1991

A clerk, punishing punks who have killed his son, mutates into a metallic man with built in weaponry, this film will blow your mind.

 

the incredible shrinking man

I cannot get over just how weird this film is. So there’s a couple on Honeymoon, and all of a sudden they get sprayed by somne radioactive material. A few weeks later he notices his clothes seem to big for him. His collars are loose. He goes to the doctor and his told that nothing is the matter. He keeps shrinking, and after a second visit it is confirmed that he is indeed getting smaller. soon he can swing his legs whilst sitting oin a chair. His wife no longer finds him interesting. Eventually he is small enough to live inside a dollshouse. By the time the film ends, he is so small that no one can see or hear him. It is the most powerful realisation of our fears that we will be ignored and unappreciated, even by those closet to us.

Ahead of tomorrow’s release of Spring Breakers, a recap of some of the best films in the genre.

When Ferris Bueller spent a day off school in John Hughes eighties classic Ferris Bueller’s day off, the worst behaviour on display was the crashing of one of the parent’s sports cars. Ferris and his friends spent the day in Chicago and were content with a lunch in an expenisve restaurant and a visit to an art gallery to look at impressionist paintings, hardly riotous behaviour.

 

 

In many ways, Hughes’ films are romantic gloss, rarely bothering to go deep into the psyche of adolescent minds. Such superficiality reached its peak in other Hughes films Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles. The Breakfast Club aimed to encapsulate the nerd, the jock, the princess, all the familiar characters you would expect to meet in an American High School, or a film set in one in the eighties. Hughes’s film was so successful, in no small part due to its music, and Judd Nelson’s triumphant raised arm at the end of the film. It was one of the first films to almost ignore the parents, but the note that Anthony Michael Hall writes at the end seems to hold them entirely responsible for their (mis)behaviour.

Fast forward to 1996. Larry Clark’s debut film Kids opens to a firestorm of controversy and outrage in America. The film is authored by Harmony Korrine, and takes place in and around Manhattan on a single day. A few things to consider about the film: it has almost no plot. There are few sympathetic characters, we follow amoral HIV-positive Telly, seducer of virgins as he roams the streets, meeting his friends in Central Park, going to a party. About the only character who could have appeared in a Hughes film, Jennie, is HIV positive and tries to prevent other girls from meeting the same fate. Quite apart from its unabashed language, the film broke taboos in its showing of teenage sex, with a cast of very realistic-seeming teenagers. In many ways the film goes back to a cycle of fifties films, of which Rebel Without a Cause is the most  famous, serving as an expose of the dangers of teenage lives.

Nowhere (Greg Araki) 1997

The flipside to Larry Clark’s wallowing in squalor, nowhere is artificial, brightly lit and full of soon to be stars (Ryan Phillipe, Mena Suvari, Rose McGowan, Heather Graham) taking drugs and engaging in pan-sexual activities. In many ways the film is impossible to take seriously, the way these teens speak is a parody of Valley girl-ese, and at the end of the film the main character turns into a giant bug. These teenagers are privileged and moneyed, even if they are going nowhere they are determined to have a good time going there. Such characters could have appeared in the eighties novels of Bret Easton Ellis, although no explicit link between Araki’s films and Ellis’s books has ever been made.

Rules of Attraction (Roger Avary)

After Less Than zero and American Psycho, this was adapted as a film. It dropped the eighties setting but kept the characters and the most memorable parts of the book, which I have read several times. Interesting fact: the sped-up footage of Victor travelling in Europe was at one stage  going to be released as a film, or at the very least a DVD special feature, but so far has not been made available.

Not Another teen Movie

After American Pie (essentially Porkies for the nineties) came a tide of very poorly made campus comedies, often starring Jason Biggs and Mena Suvari. There were four American Pie films, and the inevitable spoof, Not Another Teen Movie.

Springbreakers (Harmony Korrine)

finally, another film from Harmony Korrine. Springbreakers takes the stars of High school Musical (Vanessa Hudgens) and Wizards of Waverly Place (Selena Gomez) and puts them in Florida where they get drunk and then go on a robbing spree. Early reviews have been mostly strong. The film is a departure from movies where unfashionable young men attempt to have sex (Superbad, The Inbetweeners), and shows a good amount of female flesh in the process.

The Bling-Ring

I have to mention this, though not really a teen movie. Somewhere made me cry, I love what Sophia Coppola did with Elle Fanning and Stephen Dorff as father spending time re-connecting with his daughter, the film was lyrical, lovely and tender all at once. The Bling Ring looks at fame obsessed young women who trawl the internet to find the addresses of celebrities whose homes they rob. It comes out in June.

The Bling Ring – photo from IMDB

 

From the way celebs are written about in the media, you’d imagine that most famous people had committed crimes that would put them in the same category as dictators of small african countries or Russian oligarchs, yet most celebrities are no more guilty than the rest of us, yet are endlessly reminded of their transgressions by a relentless and remorseless media that salivates like a bloodhound chasing after a fox. Below are some of the most unfairly vilified celebritries of recent times. according to me.

Lindsay Lohan

 

Yes, she was in Mean Girls, and Freaky Friday. And then beautifully grown-up, confidently acting with Meryl Streep in A Praire Home Companion, yet all anyone cares about are her latest arrests or court appearances. If this was happening to any other 26 year old, it would be nowhere near the news.

 

Justin Bieber

The rumours surrounding this guy are just insane. That he fathered a child with a German fan. Or taking his pet monkey on a plane. He may have beaten a papparazzo. these things don’t make him a monster, just the signs of someone reacting in a very human way to intense fame and adulation. Bullshit aside, Bieber makes good music, just listen to his collaboration with Nicki Minaj on Beauty and the Beat. Speaking of which…..

Nicki Minaj

I put Minaj alongside other beautiful and talented singers Madonna and Lady Gaga, whom the media are always putting down when they appear to get out of hand. Most of the time, its misogyny pure and simple. These women are doing nothing that countless male singers have done their whole careers, ie, having a good time doing what they love and being richly rewarded.

Sasha Grey

Beautiful, smart, a good actress. A triple threat, or, would be, if it weren’t for the fact that Grey eked out a career in 100 + porn movies. No way are they going to let someone this sexual anywhere near the big time,…

I could go on, Sienna Miller, Taylor Swift, Amy Winehouse. On the one hand, we venerate celebrities, putting them on a pedestal. Then we expect them to behave as though they are just like us, as normal people. then we are disappointed when they are like us and take drugs, lie cheat and steal. Frankly, these guys just can’t win.

 

So there’s me, Fred, and two Norwegian girls that we met on holiday. The girls are a lot younger than us, maybe 19. we’re touring the South of France together.

So what are you doing around here, I ask Christina (blonde)

‘studying for exams’ she tells me.

That sounds interesting, I tell her.

it’s not really. She answers flatly.

and are you studying too? Fred asks the other one, brunette, serious.

Sarah concurs.

‘So, drinks, what shall we have….’

I’ll have a beer, (Christina) I’ll have one too. It ends up being three beers, nothing for Fred, he doesn’t drink.  When you’ve been travelling for as long as I have you get used to all kinds of crazy scenarios. Fred writes screenplays, then convinces older women to give him the money to make them into movies. Fred’s latest is about a mutant shark that takes over the South of Los Angeles. Fred touts the story as a parable on consumerism or something. It sounds terrible but what do I know?

Fred drinks instant nescafe from a plastic cup.  The girls laugh at his jokes. at this bar a can of beer costs 1 euro. We have been white water rafting today.  It rains a lot here. The girls speak really clear, accented English.  We’ve been drinking all night. There isn’t much else to do. Christina has a small tattoo on her shoulder that looks like a lizard. I would like to sleep with her. and that is what goes through my mind in a hotel bar in Nice, August 2009.

I was born in 1982, the same year as Britney Spears and Prince William. I’m sure there are many more celebrities born in the same year, I’m just listing the two I can remember. People say I look a bit like Prince William, but I’m not sure.

Princess Diana died in my fifteenth year… I went up to London the day of the funeral, because I was fiercely monarchical and I knew it would be a historic occasion. Streets full of people crying everywhere, shops closed early on Saturday (!) out of respect, and a book of remembrance in Kensington that people queued for hours in the hope of signing. I’d never seen anything remotely like it, this was before anyone close to me had died, before I went to a funeral.

I witnessed the royal scandals, reading about them in the daily papers on my news round, I saw my parents divorce and see other people, so I knew even the royal family had their problems and were fallible to the same pitfalls as normal people.

A year later I was into acting in a big way, I failed my school exams and had to retake my first year of sixth form college. That was the year Frank Sinatra died. Another towering giant I would never meet in person, he was a mystical figure known to me only for his glittering concerts. I now think he was the greatest singer to have ever picked up a microphone, but I didn’t think that then.

I suppose I grew up in the eighties but I came of age in the nineties. I managed to miss most of the political fallout to Thatcher Vs the miners and the Hillsborough disaster. I was only seven when the Berlin Wall came down and the  Soviet Union dissolved. I mention all of this because I think you can’t escape from the time you were born. We are a product of our time. No doubt people who grew up during the Cuban Missile Crisis remember building bomb shelters and the fear of a communist takeover. I never lived through anything as terrifying as that, until the planes flew into the World Trade Centre and people were falling from the skies. You can’t fail to be desensitized by that, how could anyone not be? For a while after the attack, I was afraid to use elevators and I got vertigo in tall buildings.

Well, I went to study film in 2002, which for someone brought up on images instead of words seemed like the most logical thing to do. At university I had pictures of the Rat Pack on my house lounge. My idols were Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, but I also liked Peter Lawford very much too, because he made it as an Englishman in Los Angeles, at a time when that must have been really difficult. i learnt to roll my own cigarettes (much cheaper) and how to act interested in what someone was saying even when I wasn’t. And i was learning about girls, who were still a foreign species to me.

My best friend was studying medicine at the same time. i always knew he would go in for something like that. He had the organised mind, the mental abilities and the scientific knowledge, it was just something he was meant to do.

After the second year of university, I came back home to my mum’s house. I had gone travelling in Europe the previous summer, my student loan giving me a nice fund and the perfect opportunity to promenade around Europe’s historic cities. In 2004, there were no famous deaths that I can recall. The war in Iraq had come to an end. There was no serious terrorist attack that I can recall. i was doing the best I had done in my studies. I found a great house for my last year. We threw some crazy parties, filling the bathtub with beer and holding our own rock concerts in the basement. Spirits were high, and some of us were getting high, but I didn’t need pot to make me feel fine.

My friend was studying in Prague for a stage. He asked if I would come out there for a while. his girlfriend had broken up with him and he must have needed the company, or else he wouldn’t have asked. i got out there as fast as I could. i didn’t need any persuading. he had his own place that was on Wenceslas Square which was where the russian tanks rolled in, scene of many uprisings and street rebellions. Whenever I think of Prague, Kracow, or any East European city, I picture dumplings, cabbage, and people dressed in folk costumes, and the music of Dvorak and Smetana. although each country has its own established identity, they all descend from the same race, the Slavs. Hitler tried to annihilate them, and they have been invaded and fought over, but somehow they have survived.

All that heavy food. My friend was surrounded by sausage and gravy, but he never ate it if he could help it. 2004, the summertime. Greece held the Olympics in Athens. i got a plane from London to Prague. I downed several vodkas and closed my eyes. My friend was there to meet me at the airport. I didn’t really know anyone else to spend the summer with. Most of my friends were either retaking exams or stuck in boring summer jobs. So I was glad to not have to do any of that. Well, we had all kinds of fun out there. Money was not a problem and if we ever ran out, well, his parents were just a phone call away. In the day we rented movies, bought wine., I scoured the local markets for local vegetables, herbs and spices. wine was bought (a lot) and we drank all day. In the evenings it was mostly beer, that was what the locals drank and we wanted to fit in. I suggested that we travel somewhere by train. I suggested Krakow. And so we booked a train the following evening. I say we, but it was just my friend, spending an hour in the booking office talking Czech to the clerk.

We got on the train that evening. It was mid-week and there weren’t many passengers on board, so we walked through several carriages before we found our compartment. It was eleven at night but we were both too excited to sleep.  I had bought Klaus Kinski’s Kinski uncut with me. He had Bill Bryson and we decided we’d swap books to keep things interesting. Whole towns and villages passed  by, but it was pitch black so we couldn’t see anything.  We arrived at Krakow at 6am, before most places had opened, and with no hostel booked. I was used to just turning up somewhere and taking pot luck at finding a room in a backpacker’s hostel but my friend was used to something more comfortable. He ignored all the places I suggested and instead booked us into a four star hotel. This was a step up from the grimy places I was used too. I suppose when you are young you  think you don’t mind where you sleep, but now it matters more.

It was a very luxurious holiday. I don’t mind admitting that it was the best year of my life.

Now for a story from one of my favourite periods in history: perhaps no other period contains so much poltical change in such a short period of time.

For one brief, none too long era, a process of enlightenment was spreading, the nexus of politics and entertainment.

It was a glorious time: people called it Camelot, after the magical realm of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table. In the late fifties, JFK was the brave young Arthur, beside him his younger brother Bobby. Their father had been a senator in the thirties and had ruthlessly groomed his sons for life in government.

Alongside these feted men, Jacqueline Kennedy was Guinevere to Jack Kennedy’s Arthur.

When it came to entertainment, they looked no further than the recently established Rat Pack. By 1960, Sintra was King of the entertainment industry. He had already established dominance, not only as a phenomenally successful a singer, but as a well respected actor, winning his Oscar for From Here To Eternity in 1953. As if such accolades weren’t enough, Sinatra sought influence in politics too. He had been a frequent attendee at the White House, rubbing shoulders with Roosevelt in the forties. But it was JFK to whom he allied himself most closely.

The Rat Pack had a reputaion as hard drinking, carousing jesters. Maybe that was deserved, they appeared to live exactly as they wanted, appearing in movies that simply continued their antics on screen. But there is another more important element. The Rat Pack were pro civil rights. Considering how paranoid America was about race, this is highly commendable. Although they were to make fun of him in sometimes cruel onstage gaulimaufry, Sinatra and Dean Martin were always supportive of Sammy Davis Junior, even when they were performing in the racist South, where black musicians were denied entry to certain clubs on the basis of colour.  The Rat Pack  welcomed women too, and from the early days Shirley Mclaine was a hanger-on.  Marilyn Monroe, Julie Prowse and Angie Dickinson were group mascots. The Rat Pack had been originally established by Humphrey Bogart, but membership changed after his death in 1956.

Peter Lawford was JFK’s brother-in-law, and the Rat Pack campaigned for JFK at the Democratic convention in 1960. Lawford suggested that JFK stay with Frank, and he went to great lengths to accomodate him, building a helipad specially. yet after Robert Kennedy advised him to sever all ties over Frank’s alleged mafia friends (Sam Giancana), the stay was cancelled. Instead, JFK stayed at Bing Crosby’s residence. This angered Frank so much that  he never had a good word to say about Lawford, and his part in 4 for Texas was written out.

Relations soured father after Marilyn Monroe’s death, Frank believed that the Kennedy’splayed a part in her death, even suggesting they had wanted her dead. It was reported that JFK was the last person Monroe called before her death. Only a year later, JFK was assassinated.  Although relations had turned bitter, Sinatra was heartbroken when he got the news. According to Nancy Sinatra, he cried for three days in his bedroom.

1. A Star Is Born, 1954. (Remake of A Star Is Born, 1937) George Cukor took the original idea (young star is created by her creator, and becomes more successful as he becomes obsolete) and made it the saddest film in history, and a showcase for the powerhouse performance of Judy Garland, as well as providing James Mason with one of his most sensitive roles. Key scene: at the Oscars, Mason’s character slaps Garland hard across he cheek, as she collects her first Oscar award.

 

2. Imitation of Life, 1959. A monumentally effective tearjerker. Lana Turner is an actress who becomes best friends with her black maid. The film shows every aspect of human weakness, folly and greed . Key scene: the funeral of the maid: a horse-drawn carriage, Mahalia Jackson singing at the service, and her daughter throwing herself at her coffin. In the fifties Douglas Sirk made several films in which women were the key players in tragic situations, this is one of his best.

3. The Thomas Crown Affair (1999) remake of The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)

Norman Jewison’s film has a sexy chess scene and the song The Windmills of Your Mind. The remake is a lot more fun and doesn’t take itself half as seriously.

4. The Man Who Knew Too Much 

A rare example of a director remaking his own work, this is great until the end when Doris Day starts singing.

5. Scarface (1983) The Brian De Palma film goes way over the top with excessive violence. Still, many people prefer it to Ben Hecht’s original, including David Thompson.

Five remakes definitely worse than originals

Psycho (1998) – Gus Van Sant’s shot for shot remake of Psycho was unanimously slated on its release.

The Italian Job (2002)

Solaris (2004)

there are so many more examples, particularly egregious are American remakes of Japanese horror films, usually with Sarah Michelle Gellar, eg The Grudge. Also be wary of any attempts by stars to remake obscure european classics (Madonna doing Swept Away) for their own vanity projects.

Jennifer Connolly in another terrible remake. Honestly, don’t go there. 

And the most unnecessary remake? Funny Games, since Michele Haneke had already made the film perfectly the first time around, but remade it, because he thought Americans wouldn’t be interested in anything with subtitles.

The original Funny Games, it is neither about a game nor in any way funny, your stomach will shrivel to the size of a pea when watching this film.

 

There is a scene towards the end of Side Effects of such powerful sensuality that I regret not being able to describe further, for revealing too much about where the film is heading, nevertheless, it has enough twists and turns to make even the most eagle-eyed viewer question what they have seen.

Steven Soderburgh has claimed this as his last film, effectively retiring from making films. Whilst his career has been up and down, from lacklustre (Haywire) under-appreciated (The Informant) and experimental (The Girlfriend Experience), Side Effects beats them all in having a great plot and cast. It says interesting things about Pharmaceutical companies and how they get us taking their pills like so many pieces of candy, and how difficult it is to know what somebody is thinking, even as to whether or not depression exists beyond the feeling of sadness at a period of grief or crisis.

 

 

Hollywood rebel Rooney Mara

In Side Effects (how succinct that title is) Emily (Rooney Mara) is in meltdown after her husband goes to jail through insider trading, apparently suicidal, she drives her car into a brick wall (this happens three months before her imprisonment) and goes to a pysch ward. There she is treated by Jude Law’s kindly doctor Martin. He gives her SSRIs, to maintain her serotonin levels to normal. When they are inefective he puts her on Albixia, an untested drug whose website is full of dubious reviews heralding its virtues. She goes from morose to perking up big time, shopping for sexy underwear, mounting her husband like a dog in heat. ‘Whoever invented this drug is going to be very rich’ says Martin. 

But the drug has some unfortunate side effects, including murder. Emily is on trial, whilst Martin finds himself with a civil case of his own. I won’t say any more about the plot. Jude Law is brilliant as the doctor, able to proscribe beta blockers for his wife but not able to give himself the treatment he needs. Rooney Mara is sensational, reacting instead of acting, always doing something interesting. She is at the moment the most intelligent actress in American cinema, a rebel who plays by her own rules. And Catherine Zeta Jones is powerful stuff too, a ‘don’t fuck with me’ consultant with problems of her own.

Admittedly the film does have a powerful side effect on the viewer: you won’t be able to get it out of your mind.

Photo-realism is very hard to achieve these days, as nearly everyone is used to having their picture taken, but it used to be different. Look at these photos below: they are as real a depiction of the suffering and deprivation of the American depression as one is ever likely to see. They are also some of the most powerful photos ever taken.

Below: Farmers who have bought machinery cooperatively 1939

BELOW: Immigrant Mother – 1938

For many, this photo entirely captures the great Depression. Lange took the photo of the mother of seven children after she had sold their tent to buy food. It is almost unbearably poignant, a reminder of the terrible suffering undergone by ordinary people.

Young migratory mother, originally from Texas

 

 

George Amico

 

Picnic at Hanging Rock could be given credit as being the first work of Australian cinema. It showed for the first time the process of leaving the English Empire, and the mysterious enigma of the Australian past, the Aboriginal dreamtime and the vast wilderness of the outback.

What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream

Thus the film begins, taking its inspiration from Edgar Allen Poe. We are given the first impression that things are not as they appear as the ghostly pan pipe theme music kicks in.

As the titles remind us, on the 14th of February 1900, a party of schoolgirls visited the rocks in Victoria. Three were never seen again. In actual fact the film is a work of fiction, adapted from Joan Lindsay. This is the first sign of the film’s conflation of truth and fiction. Yet, the film inhabits a very real location, one that is instantly familiar, of a girl’s boarding school built by English settlers in Australia in the nineteenth century.

Their visit to the hanging rock is a treat, a reward for good behavior. That the visit takes place on Valentines Day makes it that bit more notable. The opening sequence introduces us to the girls, focusing on the students who will disappear on the rock later on – so that we can get as close to them as possible. Decorous scenes of the girls going about their daily routine are depicted glowingly by the film’s ravishing cinematography. Miranda (Anne Lambert) washes her face inflower-infused water and looks at her reflection in the mirror, as Irma reads her a rapturous love poem.

Chubby Edith sits by herself counting cards which she presumably sends to the other girls. More poetry is read in dulcet voices, and the girls are seen lacing themselves into tight corsets, to show how they are literally bound by Victorian morality.

Accompanying the girls on their trip are teachers from the school, a young French teacher and the much older Miss McCraw. Once the girls arrive at the rock the film really takes a headfirst jump into the unknown. The rocks appear to have faces carved into them. The four girls form a breakaway group to investigate the rock closer, leaving the rest of the party on ground level. ‘Look at them down there,’ observes Irma, ‘they look like ants.’ At the top, the girls remove their shoes and stockings, and they begin a strange, hypnotic dance.

Only Irma stays behind, evidently she hasn’t the courage to go inside. And that is the last we see of them, as the remainder of the film is taken up by an attempt to find them and find out what happened in the rock. Three days later one girl is found at the entrance. She is bruised and her clothing is ripped, however a medical examination reveals that she is quite ‘intact’. 

That is the only mention made of sexual behaviour, yet the film is very much a coming of age story. In many ways the girls that enter the rock are leaving childhood behind, facing the rich and strange sexuality of female adulthood.

That the girls all wear white (and how impractical that must be in the outback) is no accident either, since it stands for purity and virginity. By the end of the film, we see a beautifully slow sequence of the girls picnincking, reading Shakespeare, looking at pictures  by Botticelli, all done with no sync sound but using the slow movement of Beethoven’s Emperor piano concerto as an accompaniment. We watch, mesmerized, as Australia’s colonial society melts in the midday sun.

Recently it occurred to me that there are few films that are made about black boxers. When We Were Kings doesn’t really count because it is a documentary.

One film that tells the story of the world’s greatest prizefighter, until Ali, is The Great white Hope.

Jack Johnson (1878-1946) was the unbdisputed champion, but he was dismissed by many white exponents of the sport who searched for a white candidate to beat Johnson. Johnson  ,met James J. Jeffries in 1910. The Fight of the Century, as it was called,was won by Johnson in the 14th round.  

The aftermath led to race riots, and whites were angry they had been unable to find a ‘great white hope’ to defeat him.

Johnson was as confident in life as in the ring, ignoring attitides to what constituted propriety between races. All three of his wives were caucasion.

In many ways he was the first sports celebrity, being paid to endorse products and patent medicines, as well as an enthusiastic amateur race driver.

The film The Great White Hope is based on his life. James Earl Jones plays Johnson, and Jane Alexander his love interest. 

Vanity Fair, February 2013

From Elle December 2012

Those who saw last year’s The Help may be wondering if it showed the full picture of the racism of the Southern states before equal rights for blacks. One incident stands out as being  the most unimaginably extreme example of the racist attitudes towards blacks in the fifties.

A young man named Emmet Till was travelling from Chicago to visit his cousin. It was a long drive and when he got there he went  to a local store and bought some bubblegum. At this point Till joined some local boys and approached the white female shopkeeper and may have propositioned her (he suggested he had had sex with white women before). Sensing the situation could get out of hand, the boys told him to leave the town immediately.

It seems that someone told the men at the store where Hill lived. That night Bryant’s husband Roy and his half brother arrived at Till’s house, dragged him out of his bed, and drove him to a barn.Till’s body was badly beaten, his left eye gouged out, they shot him in the head and the next morning his body was found in the Tallahachie river. 

Hill’s body face was so smashed in, that it was hard to identify him, and inspite of the terrible injuries his mother insisted that he have an open casket, so that the world could see what happened. Pictures of Hill’s pummelled face went around the world. 

As for the men who murdered Hill, there was a trial but they were acquitted after three months. Only a few months after the horrendous crime, Rosa Parks refused to sit at the back of an Alabama bus, a sign that things were slowly starting to get better.

You have to hand it to the Academy of Motion Pictures. When it comes to self-aggrandisement they are world leaders.

Among the options available for best picture in what was the most varied list in years, they went for a film that was about a film, albeit one that was only a front for a covert security operation. It seems that even when the options include 3-D fantasy (The Life of Pi), screwball rom-com (brilliant Silver Linings Playbook), a musical, even a western (Django Unchained) and a Spielberg biopic (Lincoln), the Academy’s will always prefer films about themselves. The really disappointing part is that the Oscars now seem to follow all the preceeding award ceremonies (Argo won best film at the Baftas earlier this month).

Generally it was hard to find much fault with the rest of their decisions, especially with so many films to choose from. Christoph Waltz took best-supporting actor for his second Tarantino film, in which his character was the moral center in a film of sickening violence and cynicism, the film was also given Best Original Screenplay.

Just as they had at the Baftas, Anne Hathaway and Daniel Day Lewis won for Les Mis and Lincoln respectively. Amour took Best Foreign film, but that was all. Jennifer Lawrence made good, winning Best Actress for SLP. I have no fault with the Academy’s vote, except that the film was really an ensemble piece in which she was merely a part, but her performance deserves all the plaudits, and really acknowledges a genuine talent. On the film, it proves that the Oscars rarely goes for comedies, even when they are as brilliantly written and photographed as Silver Linings Playbook

The Academy’s were hosted by Seth Mcfarlane, who means very little to me. There was also a completly redundant tribute to the Bond films, which to my knowledge have never been big Oscar winners. Adele sang, as did Shirley Bassey. There was a musical theme to the evening, with performances from Dreamgirls, Chicago and Les Miserables. No problem there , even if the singing was sometimes harsh and discordant.

Charlize Theron (not an actress I can warm to) showed off a very short new haircut. Reese Witherspoon looked properly sexy in a nice blue dress. Somebody was pregnant, this was on the Red Carpet. The speeches were kept under two minutes, sometimes being drowned out by music, the Jaws theme at one point. Catherine Zeta Jones looked like she had come as an Oscar, wearing a gold dress down to the floor. I’ll leave the clothes analysis to the fashionistas. Jennifer Lawrence pleased everyone in Dior, see picture below:

 

   

Actor Charles McGraw (1914-1980) has one of the most bizarre and unusual deaths of any actor I have come across, slipping and falling through a glass shower door.

The accident occurred at his home in Studio City, California. He was 66. McGraw became famous after starring in the noir film ‘The Narrow Margin‘ – playing a detective escorting a woman testifying against her mafia husband. His vocal tones were described as sounding like someone being strangled.

McGraw went on to take small roles in A films; Spartacus, The Birds and The Defiant Ones.

His last film was Twilight’s Last Gleaming.

Pistorious is currently on bail, charged with murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.

What actually happened?

Here is what we know: shots were fired at his home, at 3am, Steenkamp was dead when the ambulance arrived after Pistorious had unsuccessfully tried to revive her.

He made a call saying he had shot his girlfriend.

witnesses have said they heard arguing between a man and woman that evening. His account is that he had been spending a quiet night in, to be woken up by a loud noise. At this point, events seem to support Pistorious, supposing his statements are correct. He hadn’t checked to see if his girlfriend was sleeping beside him. She was in the bathroom when he fired the shots that killed her. If he thought there was a burglar, why not call the police? And why would a burglar lock themselves into a bathroom, rather than attempt to escape? as far I can tell, Oscar had enough time to get up, attach his prosthetics, but not enough time to establish that there was no burglar, just his girlfriend in the bathroom? Quite why he needed to shoot first remains to be known.

Testimony from the prosecution seems to be flawed, and it now looks as though they will have to call a new witness after the police officer has been revealed to be guilty of violent crimes himself. Whatever the consequences, a young woman is tragically dead, which seems to be the most upsetting aspect of this case. 

Right, its confession time. I didn’t have sex in college. Or at university. I’m not proud of the fact. After all that was a big part of me going there in the first place. I hate to think of all the sex I missed by not being at the right parties or hanging with the right crowd. Its nuts when I think about it. all that free time and spare cash hanging around. I did go to parties though, and I was a regular at the student bar. Hardly a social wallflower. And it wasn’t like I didn’t approach women. 

funnily enough when the time came that I actually did get the opportunity to have sex with someone I ignored the signals, we slept in the same bed but didn’t actually do anything, we just got undressed and put the lights out. I’m kicking myself now though. Sorry this isn’t going anywhere. The girl was called Sophie, we actually hung out with each other quite a bit. I was completely stuck on someone else who couldn’t care less about me. Sorry Sophie for not going further with you. It really wasn’t anything you did. I just wish my younger self could have been more proactive.

When I was nineteen I spent a summer working at a warehouse. I was a student and away from home for the first time, and I needed money. The guy said I could start the next evening, i was to be stacking the shelves, taking deliveries and looking at the security cameras. It was a large warehouse containing all kinds of stuff, I think they shipped construction materials. I did the night shift. I got in to start at 10pm. I took a coffee with me and somehow managed to stay awake until the next morning. Most of the time it was just me. The time I want to tell you about comes after I’d been working there for a few weeks. I was really getting the hang of the job by that point. the nights had stopped bothering me. that summer the heat was stifling. If I was at home I’d have been turning around all night trying to sleep. The warehouse was cool and they had air-conditioning so it never got uncomfortable,

So i want you to picture the scene. I was in my first year at film school. I decided that was something I had to do based on some stories I’d heard and films I’d watched. You can tell I hadn’t given it much thought. I kept a notebook where I’d sketch down ideas, fragments of stories that I’d hope to one day be able to develop. You could tell though even then that they weren’t going anywhere. They were too raw, too rough. I’d have an idea I really liked, then realise quickly that i’d stolen the idea from a film i’d seen only recently. I’d tries to write about my own experiences but that got tiresome really quickly. The one thing that I didn’t want was to write about the dull mundane reality I already lived in.

About this time I was starting to discover Hitchcock. We’d already watched Psycho and the professor had linked it with some theories of psycho-analysis that were big at the time. I thought it was just a great film. The deeper meanings didn’t occur to me as i watched it, though they are somewhat more obvious now. Rear Window was another favourite. Watching James Stewart cower defensively in a wheelchair was more frightening than any horror movie I had seen, precisely because what Hitchcock showed could realistically have taken place. I don’t want you to think I was someone scared easily. Sometimes I’d get a chill on my way to work. The streets were deserted, a seemingly endless network of roads un-peopled and under-lit. That was the worst part of the job. I always carried a backpack and I fancied that if I was attacked I could swing it, taking a shot at any assailant. The bag was usually weighed down with solid hard textbooks that could hurt someone if positioned correctly. That never happened. Sometimes a tramp might ask for a money or a smoke, and i’d usually help the guy. I was a smoker then. Once I came to work I relaxed. I had a security pass to let me in the building. If it didn’t bring it to work I would ring the bell and the security guard came down from his office to let me in. Being impatient I made sure I always carried it with me. I spent most of the time tracking orders in the delivery room. If it was quiet, which it usually was, I’d watch TV. With any luck, they’d be a film on that I hadn’t seen. That night I remember they were showing Hitchcock’s Strangers On A Train. I’d seen it before, but couldn’t resist watching it again. I started to watch and before long I was engrossed. its not often that you can watch a film and become totally absorbed and forget everything around you. I mean you normally get bored or distracted. i got to the scene where Farley Granger strangles the girlfriend at the fairground, a particularly graphic scene at the time. Something was bugging me. I looked around the room. There were the usual piles of supplies, tools and building equipment. I didn’t want to watch the rest of the film. I got up and grabbed my jacket. Actually I wanted to turn the film off. But I couldn’t: for some reason I thought I needed to keep the sound on. I felt as though I was not alone in the room. Looking at the delivery book I saw that there were none expected that evening. I walked out of the room and shut the door. I thought I heard footsteps. You’ve had the same experience I know, when you’re convinced that someone’s there. The thing to do was to find the guard and tell him I thought something was up. I could have taken the lift but that was too claustrophobic at this point. If it was a brake-in, my orders were to press the alarm that went straight to the police station. They would arrive in minutes. It made me feel a little reassured, but not much. I could hear the noises getting gradually louder. If this had been a film I would have called out something or asked if anyone was there, but that seemed particularly pointless. I wanted to get out of the building there and then. But I also wanted to see what was going on, the way we can’t stop watching frightening films. 

I kept walking down the corridor to the security guard’s office, past piles of bin liners, old takeaway boxes and shoes. My face in the mirror showed me covered in sweat, panicked and terrified. I got out then. I didn’t even tell the guard. The nexy day they didn’t want me to come back, not that I wanted to. I admit it seems funny now, watching a not particularly scary film and being convinced that I was not alone. It wasn’t so funny at the time, I can tell you.

During the forties there were clear intimations of it in Rope (1948), Victory and The Maltese Falcon. The fifties brought I Vitelloni, Strangers On a Train, Suddenly Last Summer, Serious Charge, and the decade was rounded off with two productions of the life of Oscar Wilde. Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and Spartacus were probably the last two Hollywood movies to have homosexual  inferences deliberately removed from the original. The character of Brick, played by Paul Newman in the film is unable to make Love to Elizabeth Taylor, but the film ignores the playwright Tennesee Williams’ reasons for this, i.e latent homosexuality, and replaces it with a drinking problem.

In 1962 the subject was bought right out into the open with Victim. In it servant Dirk Bogarde blackmails his master whom he knows to be gay. A Taste of Honey featured a sympathetic homosexual, ie, not a criminal, pyschopath or murderer; and Advise and Consent and The Best Man concerned allegations against American politicians. On the other hand Lawrence of Arabia was so shy in showing any signs of  its hero’s sexual make-up that it was difficult to know what estimate was being made (T.E. Lawrence was known to have had many gay relationships), but for good measure Peter O’Toole (what a  great name for a porn-star) was raped in Lord Jim.

By now universal romantic comedies were starting to make fun of the subject: in That Touch of Mink Gig Young’s psychiatrist thought he was in love with Cary Grant, and in A Very Special Favour Rock Hudson deliberately acted effeminately so that Leslie Caron would feel inclined to ‘rescue’ him.

Now the floodgates were opened: in short succession we had A View from the Bridge, with its male kiss; The Servant with its odd relationship between master and Servant (Dirk Bogarde again); The Leather Boys (what a title); Stranger In The House; The Fearless Vampire Killers (the bloodsucking vampire is gay) the miscast and unhappy Staircase, The Detective, which made New York appear to be a very gay city; The Gay deceivers, in which two men avoid the draft by pretending to be queer: Reflections In a Golden Eye; Midnight Cowboy; The Boys In The Band, the first sympathetic homosexual comedy; The Boston Strangler and Funeral In Berlin; If, Young Woodley, Tea and Sympathy, Riot, The Sergeant and Villain which revealed camp goings-on in school, prison and gangland. Girl Stroke Boy revealed the plight of parents unable to tell whether theirson is engaged to a boy or a girl.

In Myra Beckenbridge (adapted from Gore Vidal’s novel) homosexuality was lost in a welter of more spectacular perversions.

Historical figures Richard the Lionheart and Tchaicovsky had their sexual pecadilloes explored in The Lion In Winter and the Music Lovers respectively. Billy Wilder jokingly investigated The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. There has always been a homoerotic undercurrent to Holmes and Watson hasn’t there?

 

TV got in on the subject with That Certain Summer in 1973. There wasn’t much further to go as gays had their own porno films. 1978 brought the last curiousity: a Different Story, the love affair between a gay man and a lesbian.

A new era 

Harvey Fierstein’s semi-autobiographical The Torchsong Trilogy had less impact on the screen than on the stage. Fierstein did the voice of Carl on The Simpsons episode Samson and Delilah. ..Trilogy went hand in hand with a new camp sensibility that appeared in La Cage au Folles and its sequels, as well as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, some of Andy Warhol’s films, like Lonesome Cowboys, and the work of John Waters.

Aids

The mood changed in the eighties with AIDS becoming more prevalent and killing many young performers. British director Derek Jarman reacted by making a contemporary film of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II.

Younger directors

Working outside the mainstream in the early nineties were Greg Araki and Todd Haynes, who proclaimed a new ‘queer cinema’. Tom Kalin’s Swoon (puts the homo back in hiomicide claimed the publicity) looked at the Leopold Loeb murders from a homosexual viewpoint; Todd Haynes’s Poison looked at social and sexual deviance with the equanamity of Jean Genet. The Living End had two homosexuals taking revenge on a straight world; Mark Rappaport looked at Rock Hudson’s performances from a gay perspective.

Two examples of new queer cinema

Gus Van Sant enjoyed success with My Private Idaho, about a narcoleptic hustler, it starred River Pheonix and Keanu Reeves.

Director Isaac Julien’s Young Soul Rebels had a black and white male as its protagonists, unthinkable in mainstream cinema.

Philadelphia won an Oscar for Tom Hanks but upset many AIDS activists.

In 1997 Stephen Fry reminded us of past persecutions with Wilde, a role many would consider him born to play.

Dream casting: Stephen Fry as Oscar Wilde

Meanwhile in the same year Rupert Everett concentrated on present pleasures as Julia Roberts’ gay companion in My Best Friend’s Wedding; Everett’s revelations that he was a rent boy made it difficult for his long term prospects as a film actor.

Most recently same sex love was depicted, albeit very cautiously, in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain 2005. 

When all is considered, this is not a subject mainstream cinema has been keen on investigating. The most groundbreaking productions have been for tv, witness Queer As Folk and Tipping the Velvet.

Sadly, there is still a perception that its more acceptable for a straight actor to play a gay role than vice versa. Indeed, I can think of no known gay actor to have been offered a role as a straight man, but hopefully that will change soon.

 

 

Detectives John M. Laymen, top, and Emmett Jones examine the body of actress Carole Landis in a bathroom (one of four) at her home at 1465 Capri Drive, July 5, 1948.

There is something not quite right about this picture. Landis died in July, so why is there is a fur coat doing on the chair? also what about the full size hairdryer and the array of medicine bottles on the dresser?

It all looks like an elaborately staged set from Citizen Cane, filmed by cinematographer James Toback.

Landis died of an intentional drug overdose and is said to have committed suicide after Rex Harrison refused to leave his wife for her. She started acting in A Star Is Born (1937) and appeared in several b movies including  I wake up Screaming and One Million B.C.

Her life was used in the book the Valley of the Dolls for the character Julia North, Jacqueline Susan is said to have had an affair with Landis. Landis legacy has been an actress who never truly became the star she deserved to be, however the sensational nature of her death mean she will always have a level of notoriety.

Sit down, have a seat. Take of those wet clothes. You look like you could use a rest. It’s been cold hasn’t it?

I’m surprised that you found us, we’re so tucked away. Yes, its a big place, its 100 acres beyond those trees. Well, how about a drink? I’ve got some whisky tucked away somewhere.

That’s better isn’t it?

You look hungry, here, I’ll find you some food. That bread was made yesterday, so its a little stale. I’d throw it away but it seems like such a waste. Its just me most days. A whole loaf is too much for me too eat.

Well now, what do you think of the place? We didn’t change much since we took over. The furniture is all the same since the last people moved out. I had the floorboards taken up last year, you’d be amazed at what we found, old bits of wood, newspapers and magazines from 100 years ago. Well, I thought it was interesting.

That’s ok, you don’t have to finish all of it. No, we don’t have a TV. There’s a radio somewhere. You can go upstairs if your feeling tired. I’ll show you where the room is. It hasn’t been used since they left. Well, I hope you get plenty of rest. I’ll be going up myself soon. I’m very glad you came. It gets lonely out here, it  certainly does.

I have been paying close attention to the recent Tom Cruise situation covered by a recent Vanity Fair article. Cruise is one of several A-listers to have joined the ‘religion’. Among the well-known celebrities to have joined are: John Travolta, Juliette Lewis, Beck, Nancy Cartwright and Jason Lee.

The church had always encouraged celebrities to join, claiming it can help them be more successful, it has not been shy in taking vast sums of money in exchan,
for this service. More interesting is the list of those who have left. It includes William Burroughs, Charles Manson and film-maker Paul Haggis. Notably Haggis quit the organisation in response to the San Diego branch’s public support of California Proposition 8 and other factors, including Scientology’s “indefensible actions, and inactions” and lies. There have been numerous whistleblowers and critics of the network. All oppose its naked desire for money. In a new book about to be published called ‘Going Clear’, Lawrence taps into the imprisonment felt by members of the church. Why, when they are not bound by actual chains, do they not walk off and leave. The answer lies in a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, where prisoners become attached to their captors. Members of scientology who turned their backs on the religion were told they owed thousands of dollars, impossible for them to ever be able to pay back. They owned no credit card or bank account.And any living relatives they might call upon were disowned long after they committed themselves.

All of this was going on right under the nose of Tom Cruise, who according to Wright allowed Scientolgy leaders to pimp for him, among other favours. Young women were told they had been chosen for a special program and had to give up their boyfriends.

But not everyone in Hollywood has been so smitten. Steven Speilberg told Haggis that Scientologists seemed like the nicest people and Mr Haggis responded that ‘we keep all the evil ones in the closet’. This was close enough to the truth that Haggis was in hot water with the scientologist powers-that-be, but he didn’t quit.

What finally caused him to leave was its refusal to endorse gay marriage. Haggis has two gay daughters so one can see why this would be an issue he would feel strongly on. But he could have left over so many other things.

Founder Ron Hubbard died in in 1996. He was replaced by Miscavige. A close friend of Tom Cruise, he was best man at his wedding to Katie Holmes. Miscavige has been accused of denigrating his staff, physically assaulting them, and generally causing them emotional torment.

Sometimes the reports on Scientology are so mired in rumor it can be hard to get to the truth, the church is like a totalitarian empire, one funded by members of the Hollywood aristocracy. Tjis is exactly why Going Clear is such essential reading.

He was great wasn’t he. Watching neighbours was one of the highlights of my childhood. I can still hear the famous theme tune in my head. I used to watch it at 530 before eating my dinner. Sometimes I’d even watch it in the afternoon as well. Good times!

In Australia they treat Ian Smith as a national institution.

See his waxwork below

His dummy is more lifelike, hahha.

 

When I was six I and a good friend talked to a stranger in town. He bought us ice cream and gave us money. We knew we shouldn’t have done it and that our parents would disapprove but we did it anyway. a similar thing happened on holiday.

later we found an abandoned tire in a playground on a housing estate. It was not illegal but we knew we were up to mischief. we placed a flat piece of scaffolding on a wall and rolled the tire down a slide, the tyre went down the slide and up on the wood. It seemed to carry on forever. we went in to eat dinner after that.

One time we were playing near our house. There was an old car by the side of the road. My friend wanted to see what was inside. He had a chain of keys, on which was a skeleton key. we opened the car but there was nothing inside worth taking. So we took a baseball bat and stones and smashed the hell out of it. There was glass and pieces of the car all over the place. A man came to tell us off but we got away on our bikes before he could do anything.

These events took place before my seventh birthday. At school the teacher laid out a set of bottles with varying amounts of water in them, to make differently pitched sounds. For some reason I decided to throw a cushion at the bottles. Some of the bottles smashed and there was water everywhere, to this day I still don’t know why I did it.

I destroyed more school property a few years later. There was a big pile of clay in the art room and we took our shoes of and jumped all over it, The clay was unusable after that. we payed for it out of our pocket money.

On April Fool’s day we decided to prank one of our friends whom we knew to be an easy target. We bought a can of shaving foam and knocked on his door, when he answered we sprayed the foam right in his face. I liked him and wish we hadn’t done it.  I was about eleven at the time.

Around the same time I kept a diary in which I would log what happened at school. I would keep track of my friends and award marks out of ten for how good a friend I thought they were, I left it out and the wrong people read it.

I did some things to my sisters that I regret, like pouring a bowl of cornflakes over my older sister when she wouldn’t allow me to watch what I wanted to on TV. Or the time when I hit my younger sister hard, just before we were about to have our photograph taken at school.

I never did anything devious or underhand though and I always expressed remorse, I guess that would separate me from a total psychopath wouldn’t it?

what else?

“Alfred Hitchcock Presents” The Glass Eye (TV episode 1957) – IMDb.

In 1981 Natalie Wood was on a yacht with her husband Robert Wagner and Christopher Walken. They had all been drinking heavily. The evening ended in tragedy when Nalie Wood fell off the boat and drowned.

This has long been one of Hollywood’s most mysterious deaths. Why was she arguing with Walken? And why was he on the boat in the first place?

Now new evidence has emerged that she had bruising on her arms. An addendum on her death certificate lists unexplained bruising on her arms and face as the reason officials changed the cause of death from drowning to “drowning and undertermined factors.”

 

“The location of the bruises, the multiplicity of the bruises, lack of head trauma, or facial bruising support bruising having occurred prior to entry in the water,” the amended report states. “Since there are unanswered questions and limited additional evidence available for evaluation, it is opined by this Medical Examiner that the manner of death should be left as undetermined,” Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran wrote in the report completed in June.

Wagner wrote in his diary argued that night. Did Wood leave the boat to get away from the argument? Wagner wrote that after the argument he went to bed. He woke to find that the dinghy that was attached to the boat and his wife  were missing.

Perhaps she was attempting to tie the dinghy back to the boat and slipped into the water? Nobody knows exactly what happened.

Lets face it, there are some books we will never get around to reading. Here is a list of books I know from the screen adaptations;

Pride and Prejudice/Sense and Sensibility/Mansfield Park

I haven’t read a single Austen novel. But directors seem to love her work. Every few years there is some kind of modern redux of Emma/PAP, so maybe I should give one of her books a try?

Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

I haven’t read this. But I do know the Merchant Ivory film, with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

This one pretty much every literary prize going. But I have only watched the Nicholas Cage film.

Far From the Madding Crowd, Tess. Both by Thomas Hardy

Hardy’s books are so depressing. The film version of Tess is by Polanski and makes short work of a very heavy going book.

Daphne Du Maurier

There have been several classic films loosely based on her stories. I like Don’t Look Now, The Birds and Rebecca the most.

Graham Greene

Apart from Stephen King, no twentieth century writer has had more of their novels turned into movies. Eg: Odd Man Out , Brighton Rock, The Third Man, The Human Factor, The End of the Affair and The Quiet American.

Dennis Lehane

I have only read one of his books. But Mystic River and Shutter Island were both based on books he wrote.

Edgar Allen Poe

His stories have been used for Hammer Horror shorts (Masque of the Red Death and The Black cat, to give only two.

House of the Spirits/Smila’s Feeling for Snow

Again, I have seen films based on both of these books.

Empire of the Sun – J G Ballard

I never finished the book, there is a Spielberg film with Christian Bale as the boy.

 

 

 Rodgers and Hart
Look at yourself, if you had a sense of humor
You would laugh to beat the band
Look at yourself, do you still believe the rumor
That romance is simply grand?

Since you took it right on the chin
You have lost that bright toothpaste grin
My mental state is all a-jumble
I sit around and sadly mumble

Fools rush in, so here I am
Very glad to be unhappy
I can’t win, but here I am
More than glad to be unhappy

Unrequited love’s a bore
And I’ve got it pretty bad
But for someone you adore
It’s a pleasure to be sad

Like a straying baby lamb
With no mammy and no pappy
I’m so unhappy
But oh, so glad!

 

A recent Newsweek article revealed that most obituaries of stars to die of Aids did not mention the disease. In his entire eight-year presidency Ronald Reagan did not mention thhomsexuae condition, as though even to speak of it was to get too close. AIDS was first considered something only caught by drug users and homosexuals. By 1993, Premiere magazine estimated that there were 2,000 people in Holllywood who were HIV positive.

The most famous stars to have succumbed to the disease are:

Rock Hudson (1925-1985)

Giant-sized leading man, he lacked acting talent. His biggest films were Giant, Pillow Talk, Magnificent Obsessiion.

Anthony Perkins (1932-1992)

He played Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, he could never shake the role, finding it hard to play roles as an older man. In 1992 he died of complications related to AIDS. He was romantically linked to Tab Hunter. His wife Berry Berenson died when her hijacked into the World Trade Centre.

Rudolph Nuruyev (1938-1993)

The Russian ballet dancer ventured into films as a straight actor (Dion Quixote, Valentino). The most high profile case so far.

Halston 

fashion designer associated with disco.

Freddie Mercury

Of course we mustn’t forget him, he died in 1991. queen still perform with Paul Rogers on vocals. 

 

One summer I went swimming in the river with my best friend. We left our clothes underneath a railway bridge. They were covered with mud when we got back.

One summer I managed to find out where the girl I had a crush on lived. I went to her house and we played old computer games. I can’t remember what they were called. I didn’t see her again.

One summer one of our goats gave birth to kids. I missed it because I was at the cinema watching Batman Forever. When I came home there were three new born kids. The dog ate the placenta.

One summer I thought about what I wanted for Christmas and wrote a list. It was July.

One summer I tried Sainsbury’s Classic cola. I couldn’t see what the fuss was all about.

One summer I delivered newspapers in the afternoon. It was very hot and one old woman invited me inside for a glass of orange juice.

One summer I tried to masturbate. I sat in a room for ages but nothing happened.

One summer I went fishing with my friend. We used my father’s fishing rod and bought bait from the local store. I caught a big fish and tried my first cigarette.

One summer I learnt my lines for the part of Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet. I liked the girl who played Juliet but my friend was Romeo so they got together instead of her and me.

One summer I stayed in my room watching Nightmare on Elm Street and all the other films I wanted to watch when I was too young to see them.

One summer we went on a family holiday to Scotland, it was very cold. I wanted to go to Italy instead.

One summer I went inside my sister’s bedroom. I went through her stuff and she was angry with me.

One summer I tried sailing, but the boat wasn’t big enough. I sat on shore instead drinking rum and coke.

One summer I played Michael Jasckson albums all day. I had posters on my bedroom wall and two of his music videos.

One summer a friend’s brother went to see Madonna in concert on the Girlie Tour. I couldn’t believe that someone so famous would actually come to the UK. I thought Madonna was sexy, it was at the time when Rain was released. I had that song on cassette.

One summer I found £20 in town. Me and my friend went to the burger bar for chips and a milkshake. I can’t remember what I spent the rest of the money on.

One summer I put sachets of tomato ketchup under the wheels of my mum’s parked car. When she drove off they splattered on the ground.

One summer we got an old apple press from our grandparents. We spent days pressing them to make juice.

One summer the post office was robbed. It made the national news.

One summer I made a bow and arrow and fired it at my younger sister.

One summer I went to school for extra lessons. I had to repeat my History paper because I had glandular fever when it was set.

Although these films were released at a distance of 10 years, and are stylistically radically different, they both in fact go some way towards an in depth study of the American man. In my opinion, they are the closest we have to getting a real look at how men act and think, these two films have gone further than any other film in doing this.

American Psycho had a long history of controversy before it was adapted as a film. Already the target of feminists and Christian groups, there was shock and surprise when it looked as though Leonardo Di Caprio was to star in Oliver stone’s film of the book. That never happened. Instead, Christian Bale was bought in to play the role of wall Street trader Patrick Bateman. Perhaps the role was too controversial for any mainstream actor to risk, although I can picture Tom Cruise as having possibly the right combination of vacuity and good looks to have been able to have done a good job. In the book Bateman is seen as a completely self absorbed person, unable to relate to any body except in terms of how he can exploit them.

Told in the first person, the book only gives us Bateman’s perspective and we are left with less doubt as to whether these terrible events described in graphic detail have actually occured, In the film, we are able to see alternate viewpoints and it is in fact less clear as to whether we can trust what we see on screen. Like the film, the book ends without a clear resolution. Bateman is at a restaurant with his colleagues. In the previous scene he has just confessed to his lawyer the murders of several prostitutes, homeless people, and Paul Allen. In the next scene, this is contradicted.  He is dismissed by a business associate as having left the message on his answer phone as a prank. As for Paul Allen, he was not murdered with an axe, but was seen in London a few days ago. The film thus suggests that all the murders and violence were played out in Bateman’s mind, fantasies of power which he wished to hold over people. Now, perhaps this is a satire of the politics of Ronald Reagan and the Iran Contra Affair. But I don’t think this was Bret Easton Ellis’ original idea.

Lets take a good look at the scene where Bateman murders Paul Allen. They have met at Texarcana,  a deeply unfashionable restaurant which Bateman booked after he was unable to reserve a table at the coveted Dorsia (a fictional restaurant, although other restaurants mentioned are Nells and Odeon were popular restaurants in the day and mentioned throughout the novel). Paul Allen complains that they should have gone to Dorsia, which Bateman refutes ‘nobody goes there’. In other words, Bateman is desperately uncool and out of his league next to the more successful, therefore more attractive Paul Allen. It wasn’t made so clear in the book how uncool Bateman was, but Christian Bale plays him as a complete jerk. It is therefore easier to laugh at him rather than to fear him.

Now, how about Brandon in Shame? He isn’t anywhere near the monster that Bateman was. For a start he is nice to people, opening doors for women outside his office building, and he doesn’t kill people. Still, there is something very cold and sinister about him. The film’s masterful opening sequence intercuts slowed down scenes of him staring trance like at a female passenger on a subway train, walking naked to the bathroom in his bare apartment, shot full frontal, the film shows Fassbender at his most naked physically and emotionally. What are we to make of all this? Its very much in a European arthouse style. There is no dialogue for the first two minutes or so. stylistically we are a million miles from the stylised eighties gloss of American Pyscho. Its worth mentioning that teh director of Shame won the Turner Prize in 2008 before directing his first film Hunger, about the IRA dissident Bobby Sands.

Straight away the film lets us know that there is something deeply disturbing about Brandon. Its there on the train, when he can’t accept that the female passenger has got away from him. Still, the film shows behaviour that I would not consider extreme, and which I would say is far more common among men than people believe.

Pornography

Both Bateman and Brandon are avid users of pornography. In American Psycho Bateman rents Videos with titles like ‘Inside Lydia’s Ass’. In Shame, Brandon watches internet porn on his laptop. We are now at the stage when a character in a movie can be seen to sit calmly and watch porn and this is not something to be shocked by, since we know that this is one of the reasons why men spend so much time online. What makes Brandon’s case more interesting is his involvement in porn, his total focus and his ability to screen external distractions, or anything that spoils his enjoyment. The scene I am discussing starts in the first 15 minutes of the film. Brandon enters his apartment, opens a beer from the fridge. He puts it down beside a box of takeout Chinese food. He walks over to his turnatable and drops the stylus on a record playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Only after these preparations can he then turn to his laptop and enjoy the extremes of live internet sex and xxx chat sites. No doubt Patrick Bateman would appreciate such details, all the fashionable accoutrements of the modern single man, although Shame does not go anywhere American Psycho in its relentless product placement.

Relationships with women

Brandon is a man with an insatiable lust for women. No, he is obssessed with sleeping with women. he is inacpable of having any lasting intimacy with a woman, his longest relationship lasted for three months. He is what some women might euphemistically call a committment phobe. In fact he is totally committed to pursuing his goal, and that appears to have sex with as many women as possible. Patrick Bateman was in a relationship with Evelyn, played by Reese Witherspoon. The fact that Brandon refuses any kind of long term relationship makes him unique as a male lead, and I would say, not since Richard Gere as the American Gigolo has a main character in a movie been so against love and committment. Yet as we see, Bramdon is a man totally confident, able to attract women in bars without any pick-up lines or attempts to impress them. quite why he is so opposed to relationships with women we are not sure. The woman who gets closest to him is his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) who comes to stay for an indefinite length of time. The one woman then he cannot turn away, because Brandon has a sense of decency, and even throws away his porn-clogged laptop, but the sex addicted Brandon remains. Troublingly, Brendan’s nighttime rendezvous in the streets lead him to the kind of dives Bateman would not be seen dead in. There is nowhere too insalubrious that Brandon will not go to, he even visits a gay club and has oral sex in a toilet. Not a sign of homosexuality but the sign of man desperate for any physical contact. Whilst most of these sexual encounters he has are grimly routine, there is one rather beautiful scene towards the end where Brandon has a threesome with two escorts and attains some pleasure, thank god.

Restaurants

In both films restaurants play a big part. For Batemen, going to the right restaurants is proof that he is a better person. Such status comes from not doing anything for others or through work but merely by eating the very best food in the chicest establishments. No wonder his favourite magazine is GQ. For Brandon, they serve as way stations between meeting and having sex, which he knows will happen before he has ordered his entree. There are endless descriptions of food in american Psycho declaimed by Christian Bale in a portentous diction as though he were dictating copy for the NY Times.

Music

Bateman listens to MOR: Genesis, Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis and the News. A true hipster would have preferred Talking Heads or New Order, though his outre music taste is one of the many objectionable parts of his character. Brandon listens to classical music at home (see above) and knows about jazz, even going to hear Cissy sing a slo-moed New York New York in a wine bar, but this lovely languid divertissement is broken by Brandon’s oafish boss who to our relief is dissuaded from going on a date with her. At an upscale bar Genius of Love is playing, the song was used in the film of American Psycho. Concidence or not, these films do stand comparisons, and it would be fascinating to watch them as a double bill.

last word

Is Brandon a sex addict, or is he simply the same as all men, but less able to have commitment? Most men, would have more sexual experiences of the kind Brandon engages in but the sad thing is they will probably never have the chance.

A look back at how J Stuart Blackton invented film animation  

amongst the father’s of early cinema are the well known group comprising the Lumiere Brothers, W D Griffith, Erich Von Stroheim, Charlie Chaplin. Yet one who is not so well known yet had as great an influence on the development of cinema is Blackton, creator of the hugely successful Humourous phases of funny faces:

This is one of the first animated films after Charles Emile Reynaud’s.  In the film, Blackton draws two comic characters on a blackboard using chalk, they appear to move and engage in playful antics. Although the film uses mostly live action instead of animation it had a great influence on later animated films.

Next was “The Haunted Hotel” (1907), another Vitagraph short directed by Blackton. The “Haunted Hotel” was mostly live-action, about a tourist spending the night in an inn run by invisible spirits. Most of the effects are also live-action (wires and such), but one scene of a dinner making itself was done using stop-motion, and was presented in a tight close-up that allowed budding animators to study it for technique.

As well as these early efforts Blackton produced countless films of early cinema, including the first adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Of the 167 films listed on the imdb website, these are the most worthy of attention are: 

Raffles, The Life of Moses, The Battle Cry of Peace, Womanhood, The Glorious Adventure (in Prizmacolour), On the banks of the Wabash, The Clean Heart, The Beloved Brute, Gypsy Cavalier, Tides of Passion, Bride of the Storm and The Happy Warrior.

J Stuart Blackton: 1875 – 1941  

Every time i put the name of a Hollywood star or famous musician into Google it fills in my search with gay. It doesn’t matter how seemingly straight whoever the person in question might be. It appears that we can’t help but be fascinated by the sexuality of famous people. This week’s famous un-outed but probably gay actor is John Travolta. Lets start by having a look at some of the film’s he’s famous for making: Saturday Night Fever, a disco film about a working class Italian who competes in dance contests in nightclubs. So far so camp. Grease, the most over the top, stupid and annoying musical, with tight clothes and quiffed hair, and homoerotic dance routines with pumped up yoing men wearing leather. Admittedly Travolta played in Pulp Fiction with Samuel Jackson as a pair of hitmen, but his character didn’t dare make a move on Uma Thurman.

So what does Travolta do outside of acting? well apart from being a member of Tom Cruise’s favourite religious cult  (and Cruise himself no stranger to gay rumors) Travolta is known as being a professional pilot. This is where the allegations have been coming in thick and fast. Travolta has recently been sued by a former pilot who claims that Travolta had an affair with him. In response, lawyers working for Travolta have threatened  to sue Gottterba, claiming he had signed a confidentiality agreement that forbids disclosing information to the press.

To be fair, the alleged affair took place between 1981 and 1992, the year that Travolta married actress Kelly Preston. Since that time Gotterba has not had any contact with the actor.

There were further allegations this last year. 

In May, two masseurs — known to the public as John Doe #1 and John Doe #2 — and a cruise worker named Fabian Zanzi, sued Travolta over accusations of improper sexual behaviour. Both cases were dropped. It was made clear that in the case of John Doe #1 the incident had taken place in a location where Travolta had not been present the day it was alleged to have taken place. Most probably the allegations of Gotterba, a nobody, will be dismissed in the same fashion. Still, as long as their are workers who have an axe to grind against their former employer, the rumours will continue to flourish. and the last word on Travolta is that according to Carrie Fisher she has always known that the star is gay and should come out and say it.

 

I don’t understand why so many people get rid of their Christmas decorations on the first day of the New Year. for one thing, its depressing in January, More importantly, there are 12 days of Christmas, Twelth Night is according to Wikipedia,  the evening of the fifth of January, preceding Twelfth Day, the eve of the Epiphany, formerly the last day of the Christmas festivities and observed as a time of merrymaking”. 

That’s a good as reason as any for a lst hurrah before the return to hard work and sobriety.

In Spain they eat a cake called the King’s Ring, see picture below,

Having watched BBC four’s tribute to one of early cinema’s biggest stars made me keen to learn more about Clara Bow. Here is what I dug up:

Clara was born in poverty in the slums of Brooklyn, her father was a drunk and her mother was in and out of mental asylums. She was extremely popular in films for a while, her most noted film was ‘It’, the it of the title referring to sex appeal.  She found it hard to converge her private life with her screen roles. Her famous lovers included Gary Cooper, Victor Fleming, Gilbert Roland, and Harry Richman.

Revelations of her affairs, including an orgy with a football team, came out during a court case in 1931, when she sued her former secretary, who had embezzled and tried to blackmail her. The scandal put an end to Paramount. Her husband was cowboy turned politician Rex Bell.

In all my years of watching films and mad-for tv productions I have never witnessed quite such a wrongheaded and misguided undertaking as BBC 2’s The Girl, a supposedly accurate account of Hitchcock’s warped obsession with actress Tippi Hedren.

As Hitch buffs already know, Hedren became Hitchcock’s newest blonde muse in 1963, when Grace Kelly refused his pleas to leave her gilded palace in Monaco and come back to work with him.  (Kelly had already starred in Dial M for Murder, Rear Window and To Catch a Thief, all Hitchcock films).

At the beginning of the film, Hitchcock and his wife watch an advert on TV and think that the model would be perfect for his new film. So he arranges for her to attend casting and is instantly smitten, giving her the part of Melanie Daniels in his adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds. So far this goes along with reality but soon the story took a dangerous turn into unreality. All of a sudden Hitchcock forces himself onto the uinwitting star, trying to woo her byu reciting lewd limericks and leching over her at every available opportuinity, though whether any of this actually happened is anyone’s guess (Hedren has said in interviews that Hitchcock did sexually harrass her).

In the most disturbing scene, thew director terrorised Hedren, first by flying a mechancial bird on a wire into a phonebooth and shattering her with broken glass, then, in the attic scene, by having live birds swoop and fleck at her and repeating the process a dozen times until Hedren is caked in blood. Again, I doubt very mnuch if this actually took place but the film took every opportunity going to paint the legendary director as a wheezing sex maniac, looking like cross between a circus dwarf and the elephant man. At least Sienna Miller as Hedren was given the opportunity to show how beautiful she can be, although she is in reality too slim and angular to play the inreal life shorter Tippi Hedren, who was also a much worse actress. It wasn’t enough to stop the film from being an unseemly and revisionist account of the twentieth century’s most talened director, and it got it wrong to the last by claimiming that Marnie (1964) was his last masterpiece, when that honour must surely go to Frenzy (1972).

 

 

Everyone knows Cary Grant, debonair English born actor of North By Northwest and The Philadelphia Story. He started his acting career aged 16 in Vaudeville before settlling in Hollywood. His first break was opposite Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus, He then played alongside Mae Venus in She Done Him Wrong. It was ‘The Awful Truth’ that first introduced audiences to the Cary Grant persona: a highly polished, fabulously groomed gentleman, an absolute master at flirtation. It is during this period that things get interesting for us. In the generally repressed 30s Grant shared a bachelor apartment with fellow actor Randolph Scott, an actor no less handsome and surely the masculine ideal of cinema. (see photo below)

 

They shared a house on Santa Monica. The photos below show just how close the two were:

Grant loved only two things more than women and films: physical fitness

Or a game of table tennis

looking playful

playing a competitive game of backgammon

Enjoying an intimate dinner

Even though they totalled seven marriages together they enjoyed a glorious homosocial relationship, as these candid photos reveal. frankly, they were hardly discreet in showing their affection:

They were really very modern in the way they lived. Its good to know that they managed to live out their lives even at a time when the very dangerously oppressive and intolerant.

Connie Francis has a voice that has been described as sounding like melting honey. And she released some of the most sugary and anodyne songs in the American songbook, pop-rockers like Lipstick on Your Collar and Stupid Cupid were big hits. They were released during the strange period in music between Elvis going to war (1956) and the Beatles first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. Francis sang about young love and going on v-a-c-a-t-i-o-n. By 1962 she had amassed enough hit songs to fill two sides of a Greatest Hits Record. Her albums continued to pour out, covers of songs written by Les Reed and Bert Bacharach. She recorded two excellent country albums, though they weren’t massive hits. Connie became more successful in European countries, recording albums in Spanish, Greek and German.

She even starred in a few films, as most singers were sometimes ill-advised to do. Where the Boys Are is worth a mentiion, if only to see how inoffensively American teenagers were depicted in films of this era. The film even tries to incorporate some of the surf mania that was becoming a feature of American culture at this time.

After the sixties Connie Francis’ life took an unexpectedly tragic turn.

While appearing at the Westbury Music Fair in New York, on November 8, 1974, Francis was raped at the Jericho Turnpike Howard Johnson’s Lodge and nearly suffocated to death under the weight of a heavy mattress the culprit had thrown upon her. She subsequently sued the motel chain for failing to provide adequate security and reportedly won a $2.5 million judgment, at the time one of the largest such judgments in history, leading to a reform in hotel security. Her rapist was never found.
In 1977, Francis underwent nasal surgery and completely lost her voice. She went through several more operations and even when she got her voice back, she was forced to take vocal lessons, something she had never done before.

More tragedy

In 1981 her brother George Franconero was killed by mafia hitmen. Franconero was a lawyer co-operating with authoirties against organised crime figures. Further sadness followed when her father had her admitted to a psyciatric hospital in Dallas, claiming she was a danger to herself. Connie got out four days later but her father had her commited to a mental hospital in Florida. Once more Connie got herself released. Then one night in February, while at her home in Essex Falls, N.J., she decided to end her life. Alone in the master bedroom of her sprawling pink ranch house, Connie reached for a bottle of sleeping pills and swallowed a handful of tablets. The following morning a housekeeper found her lying across the bed, unconscious but alive. “I was really in bad shape until April of this year,” admits Connie. “It’s very unusual to get the kind of second chance I got. But a third chance is almost unheard of.”

In a sense her whole life has been a series of chances won or lost. There is no doubt that she owes most of her success to her father’s controlling management of her. She won a talent contest aged 4, 15 years later her woeful Who’s sorrry Now sold a million copies.

|As of 2011 Connie Francis continues to perform, bathed in white light, the words to the hit Among My Souvenirs sounding out:

There’s nothing left for me
Of days that used to be
They’re just a memory
Among my souvenirs

her memories forgotten in her fans’ rapturous applause.

1. The cast.   

Bradley Cooper is great as the teacher recently out of mental hospital and trying to get his life back on track.

Robert De Niro can really do comedy, as he demonstrated in Meet the Parents. This is his best and most comprehensive performance since Casino.

Jacki Weaver was in Russel’s last film and makes a great foil to De Niro’s intense and hyper-kinetic book keeper.

Jennifer Lawrence. I hated Hunger Games and didn’t make it to the end of Winters Bone. But Lawrence is right on the money, Her arriival in the film’s first half hour takes it up a gear. She

plays a very emotional woman with a bad hair day and permenent scowl. 

 Her scenes with Cooper are a joy to watch. My favourite? The glorious dance scene where she shows him how to waltz to Bob Dylan’s The Girl from the North County.

3. The dancing 

I love any movie where actors you wouldn’t imagine dancing are made to strut their stuff. Jennifer Lawrence looks beautiful and sexy dancing alone or with Cooper. The last scene of the dance competition is my favourite moment of the movie, even if they’re aren’t the best dancers, their soul and passion are what matter.

4. References to other great films

In showing Cooper how to dance, Lawrence shows him a clip of Gene Kelly and Donald O Connor tapdancing in Singin’ In The Rain. This is incorporated in the final sequence. Any film that mentions Singin’ in The Rain earns points instantly,

5. The film’s trueness to life

I never felt like what I was watching couldn’t conceivably have happened to people somewhere, That doesn’t happen when I watch other films,

6. The characters

I liked all of them, Even the older and more successful brother, who by rights I should have hated, I didn’t. 

7, The black mental patient

I can’t remember his name but he was hilarious. He should be in more films.

8. The music

David O Russell uses music to heighten our emotional response, or in some cases, simply because he just loves the song. Whatever, the music is great, look at how he uses Arctic Monkeys and John Coltrane in the same scene.

9. The Script.

Woody Allen used to be the go-to man for witty, literate films about New Yorkers, Not anymore, If Silver Linings doesn’t win the best screenplay next year, something is very wrong with the world.

10. The overall mood of the film

There is something very warm about these characters. You want to spend time with them and therefore you keep watching the film because you care about what happens to them. This is why films which are character led rather than plot driven will always fascinate us more. Again, a few american directors have always known this, Russel is continuing the freewheeling narrative flow that began in the seventies with Hal Ashby comedies and John Cassavetes realist dramas.  

There doesn’t seem to be much else on show at the moment, My advice is to see this straight away. (more…)

Buster Keaton

 

my 2003 edition describes Buster keaton thus:

 

‘one of America’s great silent clowns, the unsmiling but game little fellow who always comes out on top whatever the odds.’

 

Indeed, he never smiles in his films and they are all the funnier for that. He trained in vaudeville and made in quick succession The Shepherd, One Week, The High Sign, Convict, all in 1920. Further features followed, until in 1926 he made the film for which he shall never be forgot, The General, which still holds  its place in the canon of film comedy masterpieces. In this film, Keaton’s character has two loves, the train on which he works as an engineer and his girl. Set at the time of the Civil war, Keaton is unable to enlist because he is more valuable as engine driver than a soldier. thinking Keaton a coward, his girl deserts him, only to be captured by thieves who steal the train whilst she is aboard. He must retrieve the train and the girl, going through enemy lines and returning a hero.

 

 

Buster Keaton in The General

The film’s many sight gags such as Keaton riding on the train’s crossbar and moving a plank of wood with another are a joy to behold. its a film that can be watched endlessly, so rich are the visual details.

 Sherlock Junior 1924

Sherlock Jr, was made in 1924, finds him playing a projectionist who goes through the film attempting to solve a crime. The film opens with a proverb stating that when a man tries to do two jobs neither will be completed satisfactorily. After being found guilty of a crime he didn’t commit, Keaton’s character falls asleep at his projector. then in a sequence uncannily similar to the Purple Rose of Cairo, his character splits in two, and he floats out of his seat into the the cinema screen. He joins the actors in the screen, and his alter ego is now Sherlock Jr, ‘crusher of criminality’; a master sleuth. the film within a film sequence takes up half of the running time and is a delight, Keaton doing some really daring stunts; riding a car into a lake, riding on the front of a motorbike, even after the driver has fallen off. that sequence is the epitome of his talent, a sequence that builds splendidly, using crosscutting to heighten the tension, at one stage he appears to narrowly avoid a speeding train, and goes through a tug of war at a stag party.

 

A less frenzied film, The Navigator takes place aboard a ship.  Keaton’s character is a member of the idle rich, Rollo Treadway, who could have just stepped out of an F Scott Fitzgerad novel. Unable to marry the girl he loves, he deides to go on a cruise. Ending up on the navigator, a giant battleship, he meets another girl. They find themeselves bewildered by the most simple tasks, making coffee with unfiltered seawater, unable to open a can of corned beef. a few weeks later they have made contraptions which allow them to live reasonably well. all goes swimmingly until they reach land and are spotted by cannibals, who come at them with spears. These scenes may seem uncomfortable in today’s more sensitive times, however they are what the public would have expected when the film was made. 

 

The Cameraman

Keaton’s last great film is The Cameraman (1927). Keaton plays a street photographer trying to woo a film star, he becomes a newsreel cameraman and photographs a street riot. The film was remade as Watch the Birdie for Red Skelton with Keaton providing the gags but not getting any credit.

 

There are many instances of fuck-ups and cover-ups in the days of old Hollywood, many careers derailed or never allowed to take off due to unpreventable lifestyle choices such as, take your pick: alcoholism (William Holden), homosexulaity (rock Hudson) or politics (Jane Fonda).,

a good example of one whose luck ran out is provided by one George Reeve. He played in the TV series of Superman. here is a photo: 

George Reeves in Superman pose

Guy looks great doesn’t he? Looks like nothing could go wrong for the man. Until, the day when the show loses popularirty, So what next for our guy after he puts back the Superman costume? Well not much really, You’d think that after all those years at the top the guy would have saved up some cash, or at least bought everything he needed, well if you think that then you really haven’t been paying attention.

Here is what happened: Reeves goes looking for more exciting roles. He becomes a wrestler.The public hate him. He starts an affair with Tori Mannix, wife of MGM studio exec E.J Mannix. he goes to a party and tells guests he is going upstairs for a while. At 1:45 his naked body is found. He died of a gunshot wound to the head. Though his death has been questioned, its likely that Reeves did commit suicide, and it was largely due to unhappiness regarding his failing career and the end of his affair with annix.

If this story is of interest you may want to see Hollywoodland, a biopic of Reeves featuring Ben Affleck and Diane Lane.

 

 A mini biography

A celebrated , self-destructive American actor, the brother of Ethel and Lionel Barrymore, and son of leading stage actors Maurice Barrymore and Georgiana Drew Barrymore, 

He studied first at the Slade school of Art and worked first as a cartoonist and illustrator before following the family occupation in 1900. An undisciplined actor, he quickly became bored with repeating his performances night after night.

The first black woman to be nominated for an oscar, Dandridge is the perfect example of someone whose career was held back due to race, and the unfortunate social climate she lived in. as she said herslelf, ‘If I had been white I could take over the world.”

Dandridge refused to play roles which called for her to play a slave or housekeeper. Those were the characters which most mainstream gave to black actors. see Gone With The Wind for a perfect example. In the 1950s there were no films in which a black actress could be seen to have a relationship with a white actor, a taboo that still stands to this day, even in recent films the possibility of any erotic attraction between Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington is strictly downplayed. Or look at Hitch, in which Eva Mendes stands in for the white woman in a mixed race relationship. 

Dorothy Dandridge was gloriosly, magnificently beautiful, her cafe au lait skin tone and knock-out figure put her on the front of Time magazine.

She was an actress as a child but she got her first big role in Carmen jones, the musical that transposed the opera Carmen from 19th century Spain to present day America in the black slums of Harlem, the normally regal looking actress got the opportunity to wear tight fitting tops and trousers, see the fabulous image below.

Otto Preminger, a man noted for his bullish tendencies and general air of somebody you did not want to fuck with, directed the film. He had previously violated the Hays code by including such profanities virgin and mistress in the Moon Is Blue. Preminger sued the film censorship board and the state of kansas when they attempted to effectively prevent cinemas from exhibiting the film. 

Carmen Jones was fabulous and  Dandridge was great too, the film won her a nomination for best actress, a category that included Grace Kelly (Country Girl) and Audrey Hepburn (Sabrina). She had two more films in her contract for Fox but the studio did not know how to cast her. She was in the controversial Islands in the Sun as an Indian woman (1957). Her last big role was Porgy and Bess (1959). The filmm hardly gave a positive depiction of black characters, even if she wasn’t playing servants oor slaves, Porgy was a drug addict and Bess a woman with a disreputable past, but at least it was written by George Gershwin. The film was not a success. To this day it is unavailable on DVD. Dorothy Dandridge a few more films, Tamango and Moment of Danger are two of little consequence. Her lovers icluded such luminaries as the already mentioned Otto Premingrer, Curt Jurgens and Peter Lawford, the first of her two husbands was Harold Nicholas of the Nicholas brothers. She died in poverty, having only $2.14 to her name, committing suicide from a drug overdose.

She was played by Halle Berry in TV biopic The Dorothy Dandridge (1999). 

Lupe Velez has been quoted as having said: ‘the first time you buy a house you think how pretty it is and sign the cheque. Then you look in the basement and see if the house has termites, Its the same with men.’

 

Her instincts generally served her well. She marries the star of Tarzan movies Johnny Weissmuller in 1933 until 1938. Then things go wrong, She has a relationship with Harold Maresch, and is pregnant. Unable to face the shame of having a child out of wedlock. The cause of death is an overdose of seconal. Her suicide note reads:

To Harald: May God forgive you and forgive me, too; but I prefer to take my life away and our baby’s, before I bring him with shame, or killin’ him.
Lupe.”

The question that remains unanswered is why she should have been so concerned about violating notions of decency. She was known for signs of mania and bipolar disorder. It is unlikely that she would have been unable to reconcile her disregard for convention by raising the child out of wedlock.

Lupe Velez has a star on Hollywood and Vine for her contribuitions to the American film industry.

Selected filmography:

The Gaucho, 1927. Wolf Song, 29. East is West 30, The Squaw Man 31,. Kongo 32, Hot Pepper. Paloooka 34, The Morals of Marcus (GB) 37. The Girl from Mexico, The Mexican Spitfire 39.

Like what you’ve read?

Please leave a comment! I want this blog to be the best it can be, the only way that can happen is if people leae constructive feedback saying what they liked and didn’t like. Thank you

Robert. 

 

Yukio Mishima before his failed coup

Yukio Mishima was as Japanese playwright, novelist, actor and film-maker whose life was the subject of the Paul Schrader film Mishima: A Life In four Parts,1985.

His novella The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea was filmed by Lewis John Carlino in 1976.

Mishima’s childhood was dominated by his grandmother, a woman whose occasional violent outbursts are thought to be the reason for his obsession with death.

At 12 he enrolled in the exclusive Peers school. He was made head of poetry after six years. His works were soon published.

He faked some of the effects of tubercolosis to avoid fighting in world war ii.

The lovely Capuicine (1933-1990)  was a French actress who starred in international films like The Pink Panther. Capucine was briefly married to French film actor Pierre Trabaud. She later met actor William Holden in the early 1960s. They starred in the films The Lion (1962) and The 7th Dawn (1964). Holden was married to Brenda Marshall, but the two began a two-year affair. After it ended, she and Holden remained friends until Holden’s death in 1981.^[5]Her close friend, actress Audrey Hepburn, talked her out of suicide a couple of times. On 17 March 1990, Capucine jumped from her eighth-floor apartment in Lausanne, Switzerland,^[1] where she had lived for 28 years, having reportedly suffered from illness and depression for some time.^[6]

 

Her films are: Song Without End, 60. North To Alaska, 60. A Walk on the Wild Side, 62. The Pink Panther, 63. The Seventh Dawn, 64. What’s New Pussycat? 65. The Honey Pot 67. The Queens. 67 Fraulein Doktor 68. Satyricon, 69. Red Sun, 72. Jaguar lives 78. Arabian Adventure 79. Martin Eden 79. Trail of the Pink Panther 82. Curse of the Pink Panther 83. Scandalous/Blue Blood 87.

Quote I’m weary these days. I would like to work but the enthusiasm has gone. But then, so are the opportunities. – C in 1989.

i’m not 100% confident that Ladd killed himself but his death was the result of a drink and drugs overdose so I’m including him on here as he is one of the biggest names I have written about. Here is his life:

Born in Hot Springs, Alabama, he worked in a variety of jobs, including a grip on the Warner lot, before beginning to get small roles in films and stage. handicapped by his size, he was only five feet inches, he proved to be just the kind of hero audiences wanted to see. He became a star with This Gun’s For Hire, in which he played, for the first of several times, opposite Veronica Lake,by 1947 he was among the top ten stars. He never displayed much interest in the study of acting. according to Robert Emmett Dolan, one of Ladd’s friends met him and said that he’d noticed teh star was about to star in a new picture. Ladd replied that he’d yet to read the script. ‘that must be kind of disturbing,’ said his friend. ‘Sure is,’ I don’t know what I’m going to wear.’ His career declined in 1950s due to heavy drinking, he died as the result of an overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills.

 

Leslie was a Hong Kong actor (1956-2003), born in Hong Kong, he was educated in England and studied textiles in Leeds University. His films are: A Better Tomorrow, a Better tomorrow II, Rouge, A Chinese Ghost Story, Once a Thief, days of Being wild, farewell My Concubine, The Bride With White Hair, Between Love and Glory, The Eagle Shooting Heroes, He’s a Woman, She’s A Man, A Chineses Feast, Temptress Moon, Happy Together.

His character in Happy Together was a gay, his partner played by Andy Lau was gay also, but neither actor knew he would be playing a homosexual.

In his last film Inner Senses his character was urged to commit suicide by the ghost of a jilted lover, but he survives. In real life Cheung’s ending was not so happy, he committed suicide by jumping from the 24th floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong.

GEORGE SANDERS

This super suave actor played in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent, as well as the frankly dire ‘Falcon’ series of films all made on shoestring budget, but it is his tremendously mercurial role as the supercilious agent in All About Eve for which he is best known. Sanders was immortalised in song when the Kinks wrote Celluloiud Heroes containing the line ‘If you covered him with garbage George Sanders would still have style. Indeed he remained stylish, adding a touch of class to some very unappetizing movies until his suicide in 1972.

Famous line: recalled by David Niven: ‘I will have had enough of this earth by the time I am 65. after that I shall be having my bottom wiped by nurses and being pushed around in a wheelchair, so I shall commit suicide.’

famous line: I am not one of those people who would rather act than eat., quite the reverse. My own ambition as a boy was to retire, that ambition has not changed.’

autobiography: Memoirs of a Professional Cad (1960)

His last film was Psychomania, 1972.

Charles Boyer

A gentlemanly French actor, key film is probably the melodrama Gaslight. He committed suicide after the death of his wife of 44 years.

Famous line: ‘Come with me to the Casbah’ from Algiers.

Carole Landis 

(1919-1948)

Uninhibited, long legged actress. Her star shone brightly for a few years, she was a forces sweetheart. Born in Fairchild, Wisconsin, she was  working as an actress from her mid teens, and was in films from eighteen, first attracting attention in animal skins in 1 million BC. Her best role was as herself in four Hills in a Jeep, about her tour with Martha Ray, Kay Francis and Mitzi Mayfair. Married four times, she committed suicide over a failed affair with Rex Harrison.

CHARLES BUTTERWORTH  (1896-1946)

Balding American actor who through the thirties played his own style of shy upper-class bachelor, never getting the girl and sometimes drowning his sorrows in drink. He died in a car crash.

 

 

 

 

I’m searching for phrases

To sing your praises

It’s soon after midnight

and my day has just begun

from After Midnight, Bob Dylan.

More Famous Film actor suicides

Maggie McNamara

Capable but short lived actress.

Herman Bing

Plump, explosive German who was a former assitant to F W Murnau.

Ross Alexander 

Leading man of the thirties. He was on stage from his teens. Married actresses Aleta Freel and Anne Nagel. Shot himself aged thirty.

 

 Gia Scala 

Italian leading lady who made a few films (Guns of Navarone) but died of a drugs overdose.

Clara Bladick

She usually played Aunts, her most famous role was in the Wizard of Oz.

 

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Here are the best bits from the Cover story on B.D.:

Why do you have the need to reshape things? 

Because that’s the nature of existence. Nothing stays where it is for long.

You’v described what you do as a calling.

everybody has a calling, don’t they?

some have a high calling, some have a low calling, There is a lot of distraction for people, so you might never find the real you, No kind of life is fulfilling if your soul hasn’t been redeemed,

What’s your estimation of president Obama?

you should be saking his wife what she thinks of him., She’s the only one that matters,,,,

Look, I only met him a few times, He loves music, he’s personable, What the fuck do you want me to say?

On the ‘Tempest album’: There’s plenty of death songs. you nay well know in folk songs every other song deals with death, As far as agreeing with the common consensus of what my songs mean or don’t mean, its just foolish

Clearly the language of the Bible still provides imagery in your songs.

\of course, how could it not? I believe in the Book of Revelation, There’s truth in all books, You can’t go through life without reading some kind of book.

when you sY THt those who conjecture about you don;’t really understand, does that mean you feel misunderstood?

It doesn’t mean that all!  (laughs) I mean, who’s there, like, to understand? I mean – no, no.Just the opposite, Who’s supposed to understand? My in-laws? Am I supposed to be some misunderstood artist living in the attic? You tell me. What’s there to understand? Please, can we stop now?

 

 

 

I prefer old films generally to older films, and I’d rather watch a film that I’ve seen before than risk watching an old one. The situation gets more acute as the number of old films that I want to see diminishes in number, a few Hitchcock’s some Bergman’s and some of the Italian masters Fellini and Antonioni. perhaps after watching those films somebody will have made a film I actually want to watch.

Hello welcome to my new blog. I shall be updating regularly with amusing observations and musings on film, fashion and other insignifica.