(Diary entry: The Wire Season 5: Episode 6 - The Dickensian Aspect).
Ostensibly an episode which elects “homelessness” as its prismic glass through which to refract the multifarious story arcs and thematic concerns, in fact it operates as a perfect mosaic piece denoting the finely sketched habitats of each protagonist and their institutions – their own psychogeographic homes. This cold, darkly ironic subversion of expectations is typical of the Wire.
Taking the “traditional” notion of Dickens’s writing of being largely representative of poverty, misery and social deprivation in Victorian London, a writer at the Baltimore Sun is encouraged by his cynical superiors to capitalise on the public’s morbid and voyeuristic hunger for stories of social horror within Baltimore’s homeless community. (This is conducted under the spectre of a fictitious serial killer, in reality an invention of the Baltimore homicide unit, who is “killing off” vagrants).
Of course one level they are right, Baltimore’s East and West sides subsist in dilapidated squalor. High and low rise blocks, entropic and decaying, lie disused and patched over with nail-gunned, rotting chip-board. Drug runners on every corner hide their packages in the cracks of the substandard concrete, the very fabric of the city itself. This is an urban wasteland, wild and savage, marginalized by capital investments which have been dispensed elsewhere. The harsh, sociopathic mentality of its inhabitants is entirely indicative of their barren immediate environment. All very Dicksensian, of course, but with perhaps a few more drugs.
However elsewhere in this episode the viewer can connote another, oft neglected Dickensian tract, that almost “travelogue” ability to deftly paint the different social strata, the institutions and their respective milieux. Take the Baltimore Murder Police for example: usually obese, male and uncomfortably dressed, the detectives are consistently framed as the bulk of the televisual image. They are not just hemmed and crammed in by their clothes (which threaten to spill out at every available opportunity), but also by the frame which chops off the top of their heads or only manages to squeeze in half the body of Bunk, for example. Moreover, they find themselves in cramped quadratic open plan offices of cellular form where chairs are too small, lighting acidic and doors dysfunctional. The sound, as is often the case with the Wire, is dead air smothered by muffled phone conversations, the odd terse exchange in the background and, crucially, the perpetual atonal ring of the telephone. This habitat accurately recreates the procedural, professional and psychological strait-jacketing of the state the detectives are in.
Just as the episode begins to wind down, we are violently re-introduced to other sounds to slap us out of our sonic torpor. The vicious bang of Omar’s sawn-off unbalances the sonic equilibrium through the rest of the episode, appropriating a totally different rhythm change to which the viewer is helpless. The character Omar, of course, is the only truly homeless character in the Wire. His habitats are the shadows, nooks and alleyways of the streets he calls his own. Omar, too, we remember, is the character most prone to Dickensian aspects of speech. His weirdly anachronistic syntax is often well out of sync with his modern gangsta stylings. And it is he who continues to operate away from the architectural, institutional and psychological parameters the rest of the characters find themselves within.
Monday, 24 November 2008
Sunday, 5 October 2008
Central Do Brasil, Walter Salles, 1997
Central Do Brasil, Walter Salles, 1997
How may films, this writer wonders, use a road incident of some kind as the catalytic event with which to propel their story’s plot? A fair few perhaps, but in the case of Walter Salles’s Central Do Brasil it is an entirely justified machination. Rio’s grandiose and hectic (aren’t they all?) train station is the eponymous starting point for this fable of modern day Brazil. In fact, the station at the heart of the country’s most prosperous city is the point of departure for all the venal and arterial roads, railways and paths upon which the two protagonists set out on their enforced journey.
Dora is a goggle-eyed, middle-aged, cantankerous former school teacher who has long since had her joie de vivre purged from her soul, now making ends meet by means of a letter writing stall at the station for Rio’s reams of illiterates. Josué is a sharp-eyed 9 year old, orphaned in the afore-mentioned road incident. Spry and directly inquisitive, it is his search for his errant father into southern Brazil that becomes the film’s central path. Thus, it is something of an “apprentissage” for both Josué and Dora who both arrive at very different points mentally and physically by the film’s close.
Salles is evidently keen on painting a picture of modern day Brazil in its truest form. Father figures are absent or reluctant to grasp the nettle of responsibility, symbols of the country’s religious fascinations abound (Josué’s own pater familias is named – in no uncertain terms – Jesus…”Does Jesus live here?” Is an oft-repeated question within the film) and yet religion seems only to be a means for the nation to shirk responsibility again in the face of the world’s indiscriminate cruelties. There is lawlessness on the streets, petty thieves are shot dead by everyday stall owners as penance and Josué almost falls victim to a black-market of body organ trading. In this way, there is no melodramatic or unnecessarily rose-tinting of Brazil’s reality for Salles, though he clearly loves his country, in all its glories and pitfalls, very deeply indeed. There is a profound humanism at work here which imbues this film with a genuinely uplifting backbeat by the end.
Salles probably sees a failure of communication as integral to the county’s wider failures, and yet beyond that he also clearly sees hope and possibility. You could do far worse than treat Central Do Brasil as documentarial evidence of the beauty and variety within the country. Sparse, barren landscapes and dusty red roads form the tissue in the south between the bustling chaos of Rio and the newly constructed grid towns and their freshly paved roads, where Josué locates his brothers. There is definitely something akin to the feeling of the Italian neo-realists here and perhaps also to the magic realism of post WW1 glories like Marcel Carné’s Le Jour Se Leve. There is indeed a great white light ahead in the dawn for Brazil, its culture, and surely this talented, confident director.
How may films, this writer wonders, use a road incident of some kind as the catalytic event with which to propel their story’s plot? A fair few perhaps, but in the case of Walter Salles’s Central Do Brasil it is an entirely justified machination. Rio’s grandiose and hectic (aren’t they all?) train station is the eponymous starting point for this fable of modern day Brazil. In fact, the station at the heart of the country’s most prosperous city is the point of departure for all the venal and arterial roads, railways and paths upon which the two protagonists set out on their enforced journey.
Dora is a goggle-eyed, middle-aged, cantankerous former school teacher who has long since had her joie de vivre purged from her soul, now making ends meet by means of a letter writing stall at the station for Rio’s reams of illiterates. Josué is a sharp-eyed 9 year old, orphaned in the afore-mentioned road incident. Spry and directly inquisitive, it is his search for his errant father into southern Brazil that becomes the film’s central path. Thus, it is something of an “apprentissage” for both Josué and Dora who both arrive at very different points mentally and physically by the film’s close.
Salles is evidently keen on painting a picture of modern day Brazil in its truest form. Father figures are absent or reluctant to grasp the nettle of responsibility, symbols of the country’s religious fascinations abound (Josué’s own pater familias is named – in no uncertain terms – Jesus…”Does Jesus live here?” Is an oft-repeated question within the film) and yet religion seems only to be a means for the nation to shirk responsibility again in the face of the world’s indiscriminate cruelties. There is lawlessness on the streets, petty thieves are shot dead by everyday stall owners as penance and Josué almost falls victim to a black-market of body organ trading. In this way, there is no melodramatic or unnecessarily rose-tinting of Brazil’s reality for Salles, though he clearly loves his country, in all its glories and pitfalls, very deeply indeed. There is a profound humanism at work here which imbues this film with a genuinely uplifting backbeat by the end.
Salles probably sees a failure of communication as integral to the county’s wider failures, and yet beyond that he also clearly sees hope and possibility. You could do far worse than treat Central Do Brasil as documentarial evidence of the beauty and variety within the country. Sparse, barren landscapes and dusty red roads form the tissue in the south between the bustling chaos of Rio and the newly constructed grid towns and their freshly paved roads, where Josué locates his brothers. There is definitely something akin to the feeling of the Italian neo-realists here and perhaps also to the magic realism of post WW1 glories like Marcel Carné’s Le Jour Se Leve. There is indeed a great white light ahead in the dawn for Brazil, its culture, and surely this talented, confident director.
Wednesday, 1 October 2008
Tarnation
Tarnation, Jonathan Caouette, 2004
“They fuck you up your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.”
Whether the director/producer/writer/protagonist Jonathan Caouette has read this classic Larkin couplet seems somewhat improbable but the layered meaning here could easily serve as the point of departure for this gut-wrenchingly autobiographical debut, created entirely using iMovies software.
The dialectic contruct of fear and love underpins exactly the reaction encountered by the viewer which is a mix of repellence and fascination. Caouette in his unflinching portrayal of his own definitively dysfunctional family, uses reels of footage (apparently shot from the age of 11 onwards), answer phone messages, recorded phone conversations and a bank of still images spliced together to create, in effect, a map of his own psychogeography.. The images, sounds, snippets and songs cut together to reflect the subliminal meanderings and bridges of the human mind and the image-scapes it perpetually crosses. With these meanderings ordered in a linear fashion of ever increasing age, by the end what we have is a unprecedentedly intimate portrait of this artist as a young man.
“ She is behind my eyes” he says of his tortured-soul of a mother, mentally poisoned and fractured beyond repair so cruelly after undergoing electric shock therapy so early on in her life, administered to her by her own parents under horrifically poor advice. Or so they say anyway. Unschooled and unformerly trained, the filmmaking is knife-wound raw, and all the more head-spinningly effective for it. Gus Van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell have come on board as executive producers, presumably to insure that the film reaches the wide audience it deserves. As with everything else, Caouette’s cinematic influences are too laid bare – Lynch, Van Sant himself, punk-rock film and music and Italo-horror are just some of the seeds planted firmly in his field of vision.
Ultimately though, this is an emotional whirlpool of a film, clouting you in the face, stabbing you in the heart and electrocuting your brain in reminding you of the power of cinema and its redemptive, cathartic qualities.
“They fuck you up your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.”
Whether the director/producer/writer/protagonist Jonathan Caouette has read this classic Larkin couplet seems somewhat improbable but the layered meaning here could easily serve as the point of departure for this gut-wrenchingly autobiographical debut, created entirely using iMovies software.
The dialectic contruct of fear and love underpins exactly the reaction encountered by the viewer which is a mix of repellence and fascination. Caouette in his unflinching portrayal of his own definitively dysfunctional family, uses reels of footage (apparently shot from the age of 11 onwards), answer phone messages, recorded phone conversations and a bank of still images spliced together to create, in effect, a map of his own psychogeography.. The images, sounds, snippets and songs cut together to reflect the subliminal meanderings and bridges of the human mind and the image-scapes it perpetually crosses. With these meanderings ordered in a linear fashion of ever increasing age, by the end what we have is a unprecedentedly intimate portrait of this artist as a young man.
“ She is behind my eyes” he says of his tortured-soul of a mother, mentally poisoned and fractured beyond repair so cruelly after undergoing electric shock therapy so early on in her life, administered to her by her own parents under horrifically poor advice. Or so they say anyway. Unschooled and unformerly trained, the filmmaking is knife-wound raw, and all the more head-spinningly effective for it. Gus Van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell have come on board as executive producers, presumably to insure that the film reaches the wide audience it deserves. As with everything else, Caouette’s cinematic influences are too laid bare – Lynch, Van Sant himself, punk-rock film and music and Italo-horror are just some of the seeds planted firmly in his field of vision.
Ultimately though, this is an emotional whirlpool of a film, clouting you in the face, stabbing you in the heart and electrocuting your brain in reminding you of the power of cinema and its redemptive, cathartic qualities.
Be Kind Rewind yo!
Be Kind Rewind
What if, right, artistic accomplishments were distilled down to their base elements, and then reconcocted? Sure, this happens regularly in music and theatre, maybe, with varying degrees of success/disaster, but can this also be applied to, say, film? The slew of cack Asian cinema remakes currently polluting our screens renders this question timely at least. And if so, who owns it, the new product that is? Can the original creators even claim “ownership” once it is in the greedy grasp of the public at large?
Well, these are a few of the boggling questions posed by in the fifth feature of the genial Michel Gondry, Be Kind Rewind. At turns soulful, touching and cackle-inducing, rawkus Jack Black (still here playing, as he will only ever do, Jack Black) and the straight-faced Mos Def cob together to save their shambolic Brooklyn video store in the face of evil capitalistic property developers and gobbledegook speaking local government officials. They do this, not by holding a fancy dress charity fun run, or even a car boot sale, but instead by producing “sweded” versions of the shop’s filmic catalogue. (Black’s character has conspired with himself to (in)conveniently wipe the entire collection of videos by magnetising himself. Naturellement).
This conceit is an indication of the wild invention which defines this film. Our protagonists resort to increasingly resourceful methods and props to create these “swedes” (“from far away…Sweden!”) of which Robocop, Rush Hour 2 and the Lion King are just a few. Gondry, clearly, possesses an childlike glee for the film, in all its mutant forms and chooses his content here admirably without prejudice.
The advent of digital technology is touched upon, and really the only gripe you can have with the film is that it explores its themes a little too lightly, never really daring to really plunge in. Is it not too sure of its conviction? Otherwise this utterly charming film is as refreshing as a fresh lemonade on a balmy late summer afternoon.
What if, right, artistic accomplishments were distilled down to their base elements, and then reconcocted? Sure, this happens regularly in music and theatre, maybe, with varying degrees of success/disaster, but can this also be applied to, say, film? The slew of cack Asian cinema remakes currently polluting our screens renders this question timely at least. And if so, who owns it, the new product that is? Can the original creators even claim “ownership” once it is in the greedy grasp of the public at large?
Well, these are a few of the boggling questions posed by in the fifth feature of the genial Michel Gondry, Be Kind Rewind. At turns soulful, touching and cackle-inducing, rawkus Jack Black (still here playing, as he will only ever do, Jack Black) and the straight-faced Mos Def cob together to save their shambolic Brooklyn video store in the face of evil capitalistic property developers and gobbledegook speaking local government officials. They do this, not by holding a fancy dress charity fun run, or even a car boot sale, but instead by producing “sweded” versions of the shop’s filmic catalogue. (Black’s character has conspired with himself to (in)conveniently wipe the entire collection of videos by magnetising himself. Naturellement).
This conceit is an indication of the wild invention which defines this film. Our protagonists resort to increasingly resourceful methods and props to create these “swedes” (“from far away…Sweden!”) of which Robocop, Rush Hour 2 and the Lion King are just a few. Gondry, clearly, possesses an childlike glee for the film, in all its mutant forms and chooses his content here admirably without prejudice.
The advent of digital technology is touched upon, and really the only gripe you can have with the film is that it explores its themes a little too lightly, never really daring to really plunge in. Is it not too sure of its conviction? Otherwise this utterly charming film is as refreshing as a fresh lemonade on a balmy late summer afternoon.
Tuesday, 29 July 2008
an attempted contribution to Mayo and Kermod on 5Live
Dear Linus and Schroeder,
Following the learned Doctor's evaluation of Wall-E and his justified insistence of it's clear ancestral debt to Silent Running, ET and Short Circuit, I wondered whether he had also considered a striking thematic resemblence to another, more primordial film of just last year - There Will be Blood. Indeed, the opening salvos of both films involve minimal dialogue for a barely bearable extended period, where our lone protagonists toil blindly in the face of a cruelly indifferent world, carrying out what both believe to be their sole life purpose.
Both films offer bleak but shatteringly effective fables of the futile and corruptive nature of greed, untempered capitalism and an over-consumptive society. There Will Be Blood could indeed be seen as a (very) distant precursor to what is the eventual result of these contemptible human preoccupations in Wall-E, where Earth is no longer habitable and we have enforced our own Exodus.
Moreover, there are distinct echos of Daniel Day-Lewis's Daniel Plainview in the name of Fred Willard's Shelby Forthright in Wall-E, are there not? Forthright is the last and therefore definitive example in Wall-E of human, unsustainable, over-expeniture, completing the line that starts in Plainview's raw urges for the black gold. There are other parallels too but point made, I think.
Following the learned Doctor's evaluation of Wall-E and his justified insistence of it's clear ancestral debt to Silent Running, ET and Short Circuit, I wondered whether he had also considered a striking thematic resemblence to another, more primordial film of just last year - There Will be Blood. Indeed, the opening salvos of both films involve minimal dialogue for a barely bearable extended period, where our lone protagonists toil blindly in the face of a cruelly indifferent world, carrying out what both believe to be their sole life purpose.
Both films offer bleak but shatteringly effective fables of the futile and corruptive nature of greed, untempered capitalism and an over-consumptive society. There Will Be Blood could indeed be seen as a (very) distant precursor to what is the eventual result of these contemptible human preoccupations in Wall-E, where Earth is no longer habitable and we have enforced our own Exodus.
Moreover, there are distinct echos of Daniel Day-Lewis's Daniel Plainview in the name of Fred Willard's Shelby Forthright in Wall-E, are there not? Forthright is the last and therefore definitive example in Wall-E of human, unsustainable, over-expeniture, completing the line that starts in Plainview's raw urges for the black gold. There are other parallels too but point made, I think.
Thursday, 17 July 2008
In Search of a Midnight Kiss
Hipsters. LA. Downtown. Smog. Lovelifes lurching from the vacuous to the fatuous. Sound engaging? Well, baby, think twice. You would be hard pressed to find a stronger piece of corroborating evidence to Werner Herzog's assertion that in this day and age any would-be film maker has no excuse but to get out there and make their film than this minor cinematic miracle.
Such is the wondrous aperture afforded by digital technologies, young ingenues can now construct virtuoso narrative eye-smack with a few deft clicks on an online editing suite, having collated their image bank on their Nikon digi-76. Or whatever. One thinks of the autodidact Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation, formulated entirely using iMovie software on his Mac. Now enter stage right Alex Holdridge with his first feature, In Search of Midnight Kiss, filmed on digi-cam in a hazy swirl of monochrome., taking in the art-deco delights of downtown LA.
Taking its cues from Godard's avenues de Paris in the street-smart A Bout De Souffle and the loquacious meanderings of Richard Linklater's diptych of Before Sunset and Before Sunrise, set in Paris (again) and Vienna respectively (the co-Texan Holdridge enjoys Linklater's guiding hand as a producer here), Holdridge's film is a whip-snapping, lippy, love-lorn wounded animal of movie that manages to reach that romantic comedy promised land of being genuinely touching and piss-funny. There is one minor false-step into melodrama moronicness towards the close but it is more than forgiveable given the lightness of touch and the cracking swearing earlier on. Not to mention one of the most screamingly (masturbatory) funny opening scenes for ages.
Such is the wondrous aperture afforded by digital technologies, young ingenues can now construct virtuoso narrative eye-smack with a few deft clicks on an online editing suite, having collated their image bank on their Nikon digi-76. Or whatever. One thinks of the autodidact Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation, formulated entirely using iMovie software on his Mac. Now enter stage right Alex Holdridge with his first feature, In Search of Midnight Kiss, filmed on digi-cam in a hazy swirl of monochrome., taking in the art-deco delights of downtown LA.
Taking its cues from Godard's avenues de Paris in the street-smart A Bout De Souffle and the loquacious meanderings of Richard Linklater's diptych of Before Sunset and Before Sunrise, set in Paris (again) and Vienna respectively (the co-Texan Holdridge enjoys Linklater's guiding hand as a producer here), Holdridge's film is a whip-snapping, lippy, love-lorn wounded animal of movie that manages to reach that romantic comedy promised land of being genuinely touching and piss-funny. There is one minor false-step into melodrama moronicness towards the close but it is more than forgiveable given the lightness of touch and the cracking swearing earlier on. Not to mention one of the most screamingly (masturbatory) funny opening scenes for ages.
Tuesday, 24 June 2008
The Wire with FerretWatch
You know, the Wire is a little like FerretWatch in that little by little, devilish detail by devilish detail, levels are built, layers that overlap, interlock, fuse,and merge and these layers begin to form a whole and as that shape extends, morphs and assumes its own direction, the composite parts pull together and then pull part like waves in a rough sea, irrigating and pummelling, polymerising and fracturing so that as the tower builds upwards gasping for more air, the wretched resultant godhead, ornate in complexity, soars tall above the universe, creating a new one in entirety.
I'm sure David Simons and Ed Burns would wholeheartedly agree.
Speaking of which, FerretWatch happened across an appearance by Mr Simons at the BFI down by the crashing waves of the murky Thames last week. A phlemagtic Mr Simons was present to talk over his fierce, startling and intricate behemoth of a TV show to the unusually ungarrulous Charlie Brooker.
Mr Brooker, who was heard upon his arrival to declare his nervousness and demand some alcoholic lubricants to loosen his whipcracker of a tongue, presided over an interview with Mr Simons and introduced a premiere of the first episode of season 5. Which is, fyi, a beaut.
It opens with such grace and comic poise that it feels like the writers, so at ease within their fictional and vocational spheres, are casually unwinding and easing themselves back into the fray where the viewer is, detail by detail, slowly let into the farce unravelling. A photocopier, a lie detector, a MaccyDs, Jay and needless to say, the Bunk are all involved.
Simons spoke in disarmingly passionate and erudite fashion on the parlous state of American and British journalism, the abandonment of the working classes, the destruction that untempered capitalism causes and the evolution of the institution in preference to the rights of the individual.
He's also a very funny fucker.
Noted in attendence - Aiden Gillen (Tommy Carcetti in the show, you'll know him from Queer as Folk), Alexei Sayle (nope, me neither - big fan though apparently), Lauren Laverne (no doubt getting the Culture Show's angle) and a massive dude with a Wire T-shirt who grabbed the mike for the first question.
All the pieces matter.
I'm sure David Simons and Ed Burns would wholeheartedly agree.
Speaking of which, FerretWatch happened across an appearance by Mr Simons at the BFI down by the crashing waves of the murky Thames last week. A phlemagtic Mr Simons was present to talk over his fierce, startling and intricate behemoth of a TV show to the unusually ungarrulous Charlie Brooker.
Mr Brooker, who was heard upon his arrival to declare his nervousness and demand some alcoholic lubricants to loosen his whipcracker of a tongue, presided over an interview with Mr Simons and introduced a premiere of the first episode of season 5. Which is, fyi, a beaut.
It opens with such grace and comic poise that it feels like the writers, so at ease within their fictional and vocational spheres, are casually unwinding and easing themselves back into the fray where the viewer is, detail by detail, slowly let into the farce unravelling. A photocopier, a lie detector, a MaccyDs, Jay and needless to say, the Bunk are all involved.
Simons spoke in disarmingly passionate and erudite fashion on the parlous state of American and British journalism, the abandonment of the working classes, the destruction that untempered capitalism causes and the evolution of the institution in preference to the rights of the individual.
He's also a very funny fucker.
Noted in attendence - Aiden Gillen (Tommy Carcetti in the show, you'll know him from Queer as Folk), Alexei Sayle (nope, me neither - big fan though apparently), Lauren Laverne (no doubt getting the Culture Show's angle) and a massive dude with a Wire T-shirt who grabbed the mike for the first question.
All the pieces matter.
the Modern Ferret
My friend Tom's mum once gave me a copy of this magazine when I went round for scones.
What a read!
Bonne lecture
www.modernferret.com
What a read!
Bonne lecture
www.modernferret.com
a point of departure
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking blah you can't tell me anything blah about ferrets blah that I don't already know. Blah.
Hell, you're thinking if this is a peep hole into the subterranean labyrinthine wonderverse of the ferret, then there had better be some intrigue, some tension, some MELODRAMA.
At least some jousting.
After all, son, you might be some new hopper on the Watch block, but, man, have you seen SpringWatch. That's like the 7th Seal, Jurassic Park and Stellet Licht all in one fowl (that's right suck it in) swoop. It's unsurpassable in what it represents.
Well, yeah, I concur. FerretWatch is just a point of departure meine Freunden.
The bottom line is that there is everything you want in here.
You just have to find it.
Hell, you're thinking if this is a peep hole into the subterranean labyrinthine wonderverse of the ferret, then there had better be some intrigue, some tension, some MELODRAMA.
At least some jousting.
After all, son, you might be some new hopper on the Watch block, but, man, have you seen SpringWatch. That's like the 7th Seal, Jurassic Park and Stellet Licht all in one fowl (that's right suck it in) swoop. It's unsurpassable in what it represents.
Well, yeah, I concur. FerretWatch is just a point of departure meine Freunden.
The bottom line is that there is everything you want in here.
You just have to find it.
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