Just Post This

The Death Of The Old Film Critic and Rise Of The New

The old guard of films critics have been made redundant - long live the new democratic order! All opinions are valid! Suck on this Philip French!
   Yes, I speak as one of the three trillion bloggers who, like so many termites, have gnawed at the foundations of the House of Professional Criticism and now rejoice in its collapse.
   I doubt that directors care. Marty isn’t listening to me, or any other blogger. Unless one day when he’s really bored he Googles ‘Taxi Driver’, clicks through 53 pages and arrives at my opinion of his masterpiece. Perhaps 53 is a little optimistic since I doubt that IMO is that high on search engine hit parade.
   Now that the barbarians have stormed the city they bring with them the sweet perfume of popcorn, and stain the floor with spilt Coke. They jam the empty bucket-sized carton over the head of the Pauline Kael statue and floss their teeth with a reel of film containing ‘The Bicycle Thief’ – hah! David Thomson walks by and they chant football fan style ‘Who are yer?! ‘Who are yer?!’ C and K aren’t the initials of The Greatest Film Of All Time, they’re the brand of your pants and perfume.
   But hold on, do I talk of ‘them’ or ‘we’? Am I really part of the new order, or longing to belong to The Dead Critics Society? I’m neither, actually. That’s me, somewhere else, which is where I’ve always resided. I’m quite comfortable here, although it does have setbacks, and one of them is not belonging. Well, to hell with it.
   I like the fact that over the decades there have been lists of films made up by The Critics which, when combined, give us, say, 50 agreed-upon Classics. Without them I would not have discovered many great films and may have wasted a lot of time watching rubbish. Guidance is a good thing. Yes. And now Everyone is a guide, a critic. So, imagine a youngster with little viewing experience coming across an Amazon list, or a blog, extolling the virtues of ‘Pretty Woman’. Yes, he or she is off on the wrong track for starters. But, you may say, suppose they love ‘Pretty Woman?’. Well then, they get what they want and deserve. And they are lost forever. I recently came across some poor sap who actually went to see ‘Get Him To The Greek’ because it averages a 7-star rating on IMDb. He gave it one star. Can you imagine being so clueless as to use the opinions of those people as a guide?
   Don’t tell me ‘It’s all a matter of taste’. It is, but since when did you think that people packing cinemas to watch the latest blockbuster/crime/Rom Com crud were behaving wisely? Admit it, you have your own inner snob which calls them ‘wankers’ whilst the liberal, tolerant you happily allows other people to wallow in shit because you like to think you’re not a cultural fascist.
   Regarding this matter of Taste, there has to be the will to appreciate the finer things in life. Where that comes from I’ve no idea. Your parents, peers, or an inspirational teacher, perhaps (I’ve heard they exist, but never met one when I was shackled to a desk). Yet the sad fact remains, dear reader, that many will insist on believing ‘Four Weddings’ to be an All-Time Classic. The same people who buy McFly tracks, presumably. And today, if you’re not careful with the mouse, you’ll come across fan sites for Hugh Grant. It’s a dangerous world, this digital domain. You can stray into some awful places that will taint your view of humanity.
   But where does the rise of the New Democratic Order leave the Old Classics? Do they rot alongside their supporters, The Critics? Because this is about more than simply Everyone expressing their opinion here in Blogsville; it’s about the values the old guard treasured. They used such old-fashioned criteria as the standard of visual artistry, the literary merits of a script, acting, directing etc. And they could place a work in its historical, socio-political and cinematic context, of course, because they were clever, about film at least. And they knew, of course, that The People do not give a hoot about ‘The Bicycle Thief’ and Italian Realism, or the mise-en-scene, or any other fancy concepts (most haven’t grasped what ‘film noir’ is - the idiots!).
   Once those values become completely redundant, the sluice gates are opened and all that ‘art’ is washed away. That generation, the so-called baby-boomers, will be gone one day, and who will shape or influence opinion then? Who will guide the ignorant towards the heights of Great Cinema? ‘Avatar’ and ‘Titanic’ fans, probably. To some extent, they already do. It will be a sorry world then in which the remaining few with anything like discerning taste will be locked away in their little rooms, forming a weird cult which communicates in code via the internet whilst praying they don’t get caught and prosecuted for downloading stills from ‘8 1/2’. It could happen.
   Since I don’t believe in either/or scenarios I’m not advocating slavish adherence to the Old Critic’s list of Essential Cinema, god knows that would be dull and represent a sacrificing of all that makes us what we are as individuals. But, to throw it out in gleeful celebration of The Self Against Classicism seems to me to be just as bad. If your Self is anything like mine in this respect it can be a lazy bastard that likes nothing better than to be entertained without using a brain cell. That’s OK sometimes too, but the great, complex, deep and, dare I say, more profound things in culture (and life?) tend not to come so easily. Yes, a little, sometimes a lot, of effort is required.
   Primitive man didn’t face this conundrum, and if we hadn’t created what we call culture today, neither would we (never let it be said that this blog is not educational). Mind you, when you watch ‘One Million Years BC’ you see that he did have to contend with dinosaurs. Other than that he was content to fuck and forage for food. And travel, probably. That is the total extent of my anthropological knowledge right there. And yet, if we look around, like Attenborough creeping through the urban jungle, perhaps we may still see this man (and woman)...ssshhh...there...in the dark...transfixed by images on the screen...watching ‘Get Him To The Greek’...



Sight & Sound Poll 1992

1) Citizen Kane Orson Welles, 1941 (43 votes) US

2) The Rules of the Game Jean Renoir, 1939 (32) FR

3) Tokyo Story Yasujiro Ozu, 1953 (22) JP

4) Vertigo Alfred Hitchcock, 1958 (18) US

5) The Searchers John Ford, 1956 (17) US

6) L'Atalante Jean Vigo, 1934 (15) FR

7) The Passion of Joan of Arc Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928 (15) FR

8) Pather Panchali Satyajit Ray, 1955 (15) IN

9) Battleship Potemkin Sergei Eisenstein, 1925 (15) USSR

10) 2001: A Space Odyssey Stanley Kubrick, 1968 (14) UK

80s Collages

    Some work I did in the 80s...reflecting my obsession with American imperialism, amongst other things, such as existentialism, which we all thought about between marching against The Bomb and listening to Jazz, you know...oh, it was the 50s all over again... 

A Pretentious Hipster Writes...

I wouldn’t read a blog by a pretentious hipster if I was you...

*****

So I’m standing at the bus stop in the rain and Malcolm McDowell muscles in on Gene Kelly – you can see how it would happen – Alex being a hooligan and Don a happy-go-lucky, all-singing, all-dancing guy who thinks nothing of displaying his joy by soaking himself in a downpour. Naturally, it was his version of the song that I started singing as I twirled my brolly, but after a couple of renditions of the chorus Alex took over, and I saw him going about his very nasty business with the poor woman whose home he and his droogs had invaded. Within a few seconds the devil-may-care exuberance of a Hollywood musical had been booted to one side by Kubrick’s bleak vision of Britain’s future. It didn’t sour my mood, but made me marvel at how a song can be subverted...

***** 

The Song Of The Day has been Mel Torme’s rendition of Joe South’s superb ‘Games People Play’. Mel recorded it in ’69, a year after it was originally released, for his album, ‘A Time For Us’. Yes, there’s Mel on the cover sporting the suave middle-aged-hipster look (cravat). It strikes me as a little ironic, that title, since 1969 was hardly a time for veteran crooners, but what the hell, the spin he puts on this tune is just great, as is the arrangement, which effortlessly blends jazzy brass with that funky sound the kids were all digging.

(Note: if I’m any kind of ‘hipster’ I'm more of a middle-aged one of the old school...and yes, I do wear cravats)



Blonde Bombshell Easy Latin LP Cover Of The Month

In these serious times when everyone here in the UK is worried about ‘the cuts’, the government in general, and whether their job is safe, I thought it necessary to seek out and supply an image, at least, of music that is spiritually uplifting as well as being politically astute...then I thought, hold on, I’ve not shown the world one of my fantastic charity shop finds, so here it is...

Easy Latin albums aren’t exactly rare in charity shops but I’ve yet to find one with a cover that’s as raunchy as this. Not that I make it my missions to seek out raunchy LP covers, honest. I do think the bikini top being undone is rather risqué.
   Chaquito ‘has moved along the musical treadmill’, from which we can deduce that he has absolutely no aspiration to be artistically credible. Or perhaps he wasn’t too happy with Jack Baverstock’s sleevenote description of his musical standing. I can only concur with Jack, though, when he says it is ‘Not raucous, not blasting, but smoothly different (well, that’s not exactly true), exceedingly attractive (is he still talking about the music?) – and highly rhythmic’. Quite.

Model Shop - Jacques Demy (1969)

The journey through Demyville continues. It’s quite a trip, and by now I wonder why he isn’t recognised, or as well-known, as he should be. Yes, he’s much-loved amongst film buffs, but to my mind he still doesn’t get the recognition he deserves.
   So here’s Lola again, and cars seem to be important to the men in her life, or perhaps they’re just important, symbolic even, to Demy. In ‘Lola’ we see her old flame come cruising into picture, then we see little of him until the end. It’s as if he spent the whole film just driving around Nantes, stopping only to get out and look at the posters outside the dancehall where Lola works. Now, in ‘The Model Shop’, we’re taken on a ride through the back roads of LA to start with, then through many streets with George in his MG. George is driving on borrowed time because the army want his ass for service in Vietnam, and the repo man wants his beloved car because he can’t keep up the payments. Meanwhile his girlfriend is about to break into advertising as a model. She says actresses have been spotted in adverts. I wonder if this is a reference to Godard’s first sighting of Anna Karina.
   George and his girl live in a modest wooden house with an oil derrick on their doorstep, almost literally. It instantly struck me as a strange choice of environment. These symbols of wealth are usually just that in film, but here it’s as if Demy is robbing them of their power and repositioning this one as little more than an ugly noise nuisance. Demy does strange things with sound during the film. At times, as George travels from place-to-place, there is a mechanical throbbing which appears to have no source. At one point the classical music that was on the car radio returns in a burst after he has turned it off.
   George, an architect without work, or belief in the job, views LA from on high at one point, whilst Demy sees it through foreign eyes, taking us on what are now time-travelling tours the way few filmmakers have done. It’s as if he’s engaging us the way he must have been engaged with the mythical city. But there are none of the typical self-mythologising shots of lights glittering like so many Hollywood stars. Here are the shop fronts, street corners and petrol stations, which are no less fascinating.
   The soundtrack, aside from the classical music, is from Spirit, who we meet rehearsing. Many of George’s friends are succeeding in the alternative culture. Others have their own newspaper. It’s all ‘happening’ for them, whilst George can only drive, trying to raise money so that he can keep driving. Then he sees Lola, by chance, and discovers she’s a model for anyone willing to hire a camera to snap her in naughty underwear. The first time he enters the labyrinth of the model shop is reminiscent of Travis Bickle’s trip through the corridors of sin. I can’t help thinking Scorsese was influenced/inspired by this scene. And again, like Travis with Iris, George would like to rescue Lola from the demeaning situation.
   Lola is a magnet to the lost. She is also incapable of saving them. She always has another place, another person calling her. This time it’s her son, back in France.
   What can George do? Soon he may be facing ‘Charlie’ in the jungle. I wouldn’t hold up much hope of him surviving. He might end up in a trench with the thousand-yard-stare....trying, perhaps, to see Lola, thousands of miles away in France...

Everything is OK!

The title of this post sounds like it belongs to a self-help book...and it probably does...as in ‘I’m OK, You’re OK’...or ‘OK, I’m Stupid, So What?’, and the one that’s yet to be written, ‘OK, So The World’s Ending’, which someone will publish when we hear of the giant meteor heading unstoppably towards Earth. That or it will be the last best-seller ever before civilisation as we know it comes to an end due to an ecological catastrophe. OK. So what.

   Right now everything is only OK. I’m reading Charles Portis’s ‘True Grit’ as prep for the film (which I suspect will be OK), but it’s only OK, mainly because for some bizarre reason he refuses to condense any word spoken, and so supposedly raw characters like Rooster Cogburn only ever says ‘I will’ and ‘It is’ or ‘That is’. You get the idea. This refusal to create naturalistic speech started to annoy me after a while. A man like that, like most common men or women would be saying ‘I’ll’, ‘It’s’, and ‘That’s’ all the time. Perhaps that is just me being picky but I am not happy and I do not suppose I will finish the book anytime soon, and that is a fact. Huh. That’s OK, I’ve started Neil Coombs’ ‘Dark Windows’ (subtitled ‘or the death of Godard’, and because of that I could not resist it) – and since you hang on my every word regarding literature, I shall be posting a full, detailed, insightful review, or maybe I won’t...and if I don’t, that’ll be OK.

   A still from the ‘On The Road’ film appeared in The Guardian on Saturday. I looked at it in disbelief. Could they have got it so wrong? Look for yourself and tell me you have great hopes for the venture.

   It seems they’ve made it as a teen movie...for American teenagers today. Because it’s impossible to shoot a film about youths of the 40s without thinking it has to really be about kids today, isn’t it? Otherwise, how will they relate? More to the point, why would they bother going to see it? Kerouac’s book still has a large fan base amongst The Kids today, but not enough to justify the budget, I presume.

   The only aspect of this that interests me is how well Viggo Mortensen is going to play ‘Old Bull Lee’. Peter Weller in ‘Naked Lunch’ did a good job, capturing the essence of Burroughs without trying to impersonate him.

   How will they deal with all the drug-taking without appearing to – shock! – promote drugs? And Cassady was a notoriously wild driver. So, potentially, it could have ended up as a film extolling the joys and kicks of driving like a maniac whilst high on Benzedrine. This seems unlikely. The funniest part of what could unintentionally be a hilariously bad film could be when they encounter jazz, which is, as you know, crucial to driving the attitude and process of Kerouac’s spontaneous bop prose. If I could bare to part with the money I’d like to see these two try to be convincing in their adulation for Be-bop. As part of their research, I like to think the director filled them with Benzedrine and locked them in a room with Charlie Parker’s music blasting out for a couple of hours. I doubt that this happened.

   In OK! Magazine (where else?) Garrett Hedlund, who plays Dean Moriarty, says: ‘Improv was highly welcomed, to make scenes flow and have a rhythm. We had the freedom to fly.’ Wow. I bet they had a ball. And I’m sure this free-wheeling improvisational attitude created screen magic that will be the acting equivalent of a Charlie Parker solo. Yes, sir. If not, that’s OK.

To Be Oneself By Building Sentences

Black Mass – Lucifer / The Unexplained – Ataraxia (Mort Garson)

If these aren’t two of the greatest electronic albums ever made....you can lock me up with Davina McCall for a week. Mort Garson played silly buggers by Moogifying the soundtrack to ‘Hair’ as well as taking a mad trip down his own yellow brick road in the form of ‘The Wozard Of Id’, but for my money these are his best albums. He made ‘Black Mass’ in ’71 as Lucifer, and ‘The Unexplained’ in ’75 as Ataraxia. Both are bursting with pure electronic wonders – you can forget all that ‘Hauntology’ crap, this man had been there and done that, although I’m still not sure what ‘Hauntology’ is, exactly. But ‘Seance’, from ‘Ataraxia’, is full of proto-Modern spookiness that’s much in favour now. And ‘Wind Dance’ is simply, indescribably, way ahead, and way-out, of course. Occasionally he strays into pop-like  sounds, but they’re only like pop, pop from another dimension in the best sense, as opposed to crap Moog versions of Pop hits.  ‘Deja Vu’, from ‘Ataraxia’, is so insanely catchy, and  funky, that it should have been released as a single and made a worldwide hit on Futuristic dance floors. This is not Wendy Carlos, nor is it difficult avant-garde. It’s Mort Garson, and I urge you to go seek  if you know what’s good for your ears.

Tryptych - Demdike Stare

 

Catch up time for those who need to. And I’m not going to imply that you’re slow if you do need to. I am hardly at the quickest at being hip to essential music. Although, discussing this with an old friend who works in a record shop the other day, he did say I was ‘So trendy’ (with a chuckle) when I told him I had all these tracks apart from the bonuses. I have not been called ‘trendy’ since...1981...probably. Downloading may be an option, but this is a great opportunity to have all of last year’s releases in one very smart package.  The bonus tracks are all essential additions to the canon. Where they go next is this year’s big musical question...for me anyway...