A movie that showed Hollywood it’s still possible to ‘make em like they used to’. And of course it took a pair of wiseass, cinephilic, (former)-enfant-terribles to do it and not some steady-pair-of-hands studio man. The Western is a fascinating genre in that we can see it’s life played out across the decades from birth, the establishment of ground rules with Stagecoach in 1939, the form perfected by Ford and Hawkes in the 40s and 50s, torn apart by Leone and Peckinpah in the 60s and then it’s carcass picked over solemnly by Robert Altman and various other revisionists over the years including Eastwood himself on the other side of the lens.

So whilst every now and then you get someone still trying to make that post-Western Western that’s been done to death, actually the Coens are smart enough to know the best place to go is back to the heyday. This film is played right by the rulebook of the Golden Age but with the Coens trademark acerbic wit to make it all feel just modern enough. The fact this did such solid box office must have meant at least one memo got passed round the studios saying ‘Maybe we don’t need another Eddie Murphy movie. Why don’t we try something good?’.

9. Black Swan

This is the first Aronofsky film I’ve actually enjoyed. It being a mash-up of two faves of mine, Repulsion and The Red Shoes sure helps. Felt like a hint of Suspiria was lurking in the DNA too. Plus there’s the basic joy of seeing Mila Kunis go down on Natalie Portman. I mean, if you can’t appreciate that on at least some level, then really why the fuck do you go to the movies? I also loved going to a completely packed-out cinema to see a movie about BALLET.

I still get the feeling that Aronofsky doesn’t make movies as clever as he thinks they are, this feels like middle-brow pop-art being elevated to high art status merely by dint of the excrement surrounding it at the multiplex. And did we need another movie where EVERY female character was batshit nuts and the lone male character was super awesome and in control and all knowing and hey lets fuck? Um, this was meant to be a positive critique of the film. Well, let’s just say I did like it but with major caveats.

8. We Need to Talk About Kevin

See, I used to be real down on British directors with their uber-real, kitchen-sink drama stuff. Felt so uncinematic and small-minded to me. But the ‘new’ generation of directors like Lynne Ramsay, Andrea Arnold and Steve McQueen have changed all that for me. Maybe it has something to with them not being the typical white, middle-class men that came before. But they’ve turned the notion of the ‘serious British arty drama’ round so that now it’s actually a FACEMELTINGEXPLOITATIONHORRORFEST!

McQueen made the arthouse equivalent of torture-porn with the prolonged body horror of Hunger. Charting the volatile teen lead of Fish Tank as she approaches boiling point, Arnold peddled the most exploitative and primitive cinematic emotion – dread. (And threw in the kind of jaw dropping underage sex scene that had it been directed by a man he would surely have been called out on?) And now Ramsay’s Kevin picture goes even further from the arthouse in to the grindhouse. Sure it’s chronology is all chopped up and there’s no, like, story as such but this is basically The Omen meets The Bad Seed, clashed with the cringe-humour of The Office.

It makes sense really that in the post-modern, War on Terror tainted, secular West that horror films can no longer come from a supernatural place. We’re too worldly cynical for that anymore, the ones that still try it feel oh so quaint. So instead of The Omen’s son of satan, we have in Kevin the son of an urbane, career woman with a latte in her one hand and a Pentax in the other. Pure evil right? But it’s refreshing to see a movie that casts doubt over whether motherhood is inherently good and beyond question. And whilst Kevin is sometimes played too arch (I almost expected him to turn to the camera and wink after certain lines, like the gag about the lychee), there are some glorious visual/aural moments such as the flashbacks to the unexplained tomato orgy. And the billowing curtain. Kevin also made for the best trailer of the year, it’s so good that I felt the film was a bit of a letdown but damn what a trailer.

7. All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace

I like to throw a curveball into my top ten and this year it’s this: Adam Curtis’s 3 part TV documentary series for the BBC attempting to show how computers (or perhaps rather ‘computers-as-model-for-understanding-our-world’) have not liberated our species or created a utopia through more effective management of information but have in many ways taken us down the wrong path. But don’t think this is gonna preach about the evils of Facebook and ‘personal computer’ alienation, this is far more esoteric in it’s targets. Curtis spins a discursive web of arcane information using mostly pre-existing footage to tell us about bizarre characters like Buckminster Fuller who invented the geodesic dome so favoured by hippy communes, and geneticist George R. Price who came across the equation for the ‘selfish gene’ in humans, which in turn led him to mathematically explain things like murder and genocide and ultimately the in-existence of god, information which haunted him so much he went crazy and killed himself.

I largely agree with a lot of the points Curtis raises here but I also feel that even if I didn’t I would still love this series. It’s so well cut, the music so strikingly used, the flow of information so deliciously overwhelming, he manages to transcend the all-too-often drab limits of what normally constitutes a ‘Documentary’.

Watch all three parts here.

6. Kill List

This is further evidence of the arthouse-to-grindhouse switcheroo that’s going on as seen in ‘Kevin’. But admittedly this Brit flick’s definitely rooted more in the genre side of things first and foremost. It does start as kitchen sinky, bittersweet, family drama but then pulls some interesting maneuvers where it turns into a geezer-gangster pic before settling into rural horror. You could say this is horror, of varying types, from the start.

I took a group of friends to see this on my birthday. It was a packed, small cinema and the atmosphere was potent for the duration. Audible gasps and visible squirms throughout. As the end credits came up, my mate on the left turned to me and sardonically whispered ‘Happy Birthday’. We got up and all just seemed to stop and gather outside the screening room in a circle, looking at each other awkwardly. Post-drinks did little to lessen the impact. Accusations of me traumatizing certain members of the party with this film were followed by messages about nightmares days after. So thats two thumbs up from me. (Also, it contains the most terrifying use of on-screen text since The Shining.)

5. Submarine

You know it’s a good film when you can’t exactly say why it works but you’re sure it does. On paper, it really shouldn’t. This is well worn territory – a coming-of-age dramedy about a misfit schoolboy trying to lose his virginity and be taken seriously as a ‘man’, told with deadpan humour and flashes of whimsy and of course an ironic voiceover narration. Yes, that describes Rushmore pretty well (amongst others) and many have derided this film as a Wes Anderson knockoff. The influence is certainly there but first time director Richard Ayoade (beloved by some already for acting roles in Garth Merenghi and The IT Crowd) brings buckets of his own style and imbues the film with a unique mixture of British grottiness and nouvelle-vague flourishes.

To see similar material done coldly without any heart just look at ‘Youth in Revolt’. That really is Wes-Anderson-Lite. ‘Submarine’ however is a work of genuine charm. It lags a little in the second half but the winning performances by the two lead newcomers hold it together. The soundtrack of original songs by the Arctic Monkeys frontman were pretty damn great and the film was shot in and around my neighbourhood to boot! What’s not to love?!

4. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Or Mission Impossible UK: Beige Warriors. Funnily enough, I saw Tinker at a tiny arthouse the night after seeing Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol on an IMAX screen at the multiplex and though they are very different beasts, the two films share some common ground. (For the record I enjoyed both.) They both deal with the world of the secret services and begin with spies from the West on a mission in Budapest who meet similar fates.

The use of Budapest is very telling. Tinker is a period piece set in the 60s at the height of the Cold War, so it makes perfect sense opening somewhere like that. MI:GP is set today, many years after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Why the fuck are Tom Cruise’s peeps in Hungary?! And better yet the next action set piece takes place in the Kremlin! Sure, theres some hokum nuclear plot to explain it but what’s really going on is pure wish fulfillment. Im sure the secret services across the West (and Hollywood by extension) WISH they could go back to the ‘simpler times’ of the Cold War, the pre-War on Terror world, when the ‘good guys’ knew exactly who the ‘bad guys’ were and they were locked together in a game of chess tempered with some degree of mutual respect. Tom Cruise’s fantasy world of MI says ‘yeah, screw history, we’re just gonna act like we still rock and know exactly who’s ass to kick’. Of course, ‘twas ever thus’ and some older characters in Tinker express a yearning for those glory days of WW2 when the lines between us and them were even clearer than during the cold war.

But the film is not just a nostalgia trip in terms of the battle being fought by the characters, the whole film has been lovingly sculpted to invoke a type of film from the past; the slowly paced, delicately crafted, less-is-more, pay-close-attention, poetically constructed, serious adult drama. Basically the very opposite of films like MI:GP. The very first shot hits you with the difference: film grain – so anachronistic in this era of HD IMAX 3D eye fuckery. But the whole film is drenched in grain. And the lighting is Gordon Willis by way of Francis Bacon. It makes perfect sense though, this is a story out of it’s time so the style should be of another time too. I dare say it manages to improve upon a lot of the films it’s riffing on too, the artists at work here are THAT good, especially the director. The ending clearly sets up the potential of more movies in the Smiley series of books; this could turn in to the first franchise of serious artistic merit since The Godfather.

3. Drive

Nicholas Winding-Refn won the Best Director award at Cannes for this film and most deservedly so. Because the script is full of cliches, generic characters and ho hum plotting and even though I think all that was done on purpose by the screenwriter as a post-modern genre exercise, it’s the director who takes this overly familiar, pulpy material and spins pure gold out of it. This film is the distilled essence of American genre film-making refracted through the prism of a European arthouse director and resulting in one of the most beautiful, oddball movies to come out of Hollywood in quite some time.

Driver himself, Ryan Gosling, deserves a lot of credit for the brilliance of the film. It’s one of the best under-played performances I can think of. Very little dialogue. He moves slowly, carefully. And then when the violence does eventually erupt it’s all the more affective. It’s not really a very violent film but when things do hit the fan, its hard to avoid getting any on your shirt.

I feel this is the kind of film I’ll return to from time to time, not for the story or even the characters really but the world that is invoked. The dashes of neon in the black of night. The lonely LA streets. The electro synth pop soundtrack. The silver jacket. The pink font. And my favourite moment in a movie this year – in slow motion, when Driver looks in on the gangsters party at the restaurant as ‘Oh My Love’ plays in the background.

1. The Tree of Life and Melancholia

I’ve got to put Melancholia and Tree of LIfe in joint first place. One, because they both had such an affect on me and two, because they seem almost designed as companion-piece films. They are the yin and yang of philosophical world-views and as a lover of contrast, I can’t choose between the two.

Terence Malick’s Tree of Life could well be the most structurally radical and philosophically engaged film since 2001: A Space Odyssey. That such a film stars Brad Pitt, won top prize at Cannes and was shown in multiplexes is somewhat miraculous. When I saw it a number of people walked out of the cinema, it was amusing to see at which point they were driven out – the extended birth of the universe sequence, the dinosaurs, Sean Penn etc. But alot of those that stayed til the end clapped – when was the last time you saw people clap in a cinema?!

As a devout atheist, some might question why I’m so into a film that many take to clearly be the work of a born-again Christian. But while the idea of God is central to the film, as in 2001, like that film Tree of Life avoids any direct representation of such an entity and leaves the specifics of what such an entity might consist of entirely in the mind of the viewer. Instead the film invokes a sense of interconnectedness in our universe. We are shown our existence to be a real tree of life, with roots going back not just to our siblings and parents and hometowns but right back to pre-human creatures like dinosaurs and even before that. The film jumps about in time trying to show the continuum we all exist in, it’s sketchy construction intimating that life itself is an ongoing venture, still being written, branching out, that no story is ever complete. Though the rumoured 6 hour version of this film might attempt that. The film is basically optimistic; even if there is chaos/darkness in life, there is some sense of things being part of a greater framework.

So if Tree of Life is suggesting that there is a teleological point to our existence, that it all leads somewhere (even if it is to the most dubious sequence in the film), then Melancholia is at the other end of the spectrum, suggesting that it’s all quite pointless. Malick showed the world being formed, Lars Von Trier shows it being destroyed, quite beautifully at the very start of the film. He then goes back a few days to focus on a pair of sisters, one chaotic and the other ordered. Over the course of the film we see the chaotic character played by Kirsten Dunst, go into a meltdown of depression on her wedding day trying to deal with all the social pressures upon her as well as the nagging doubts of whether anything is really worth it. The orderly sister played by Charlotte Gainsbourg is well equipped to do deal with all manner of social and familial mishap, putting on a brave face. But when the wedding day has passed and the planet Melancholia seems dangerously close to hitting Earth, the tables turn and we see that Dunst is calm under such pressure whereas Gainsbourg becomes irrational and begins to crack.

The message seems to be that most people, the ‘normal’ people who play life by the arbitrary rules society lays out, might be able to handle a wedding but are ill prepared for the void of nihilism that awaits us all and one day will surely take our entire existence as a species. The ‘outsiders’, creatives, depressives, like Von Trier’s on-screen surrogate Dunst, can live more truthful lives and accept annihilation more stoically, as they know afterall ‘humans are evil’. This dichotomy also finds a mirror in Tree of Life, where the world view there is split between the way of nature and the way of grace, as embodied by the brutal father and the loving mother in the film. I think the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle of all this. The world might be pointless but let’s have a little grace while we’re here.

If one were to judge a place by the standard of milkshake, New York ranks very high – the Charlie Brown shake available at Sacred Chow consists of bananas, peanut butter, chocolate and coconut milk. Delicious. (Thanks to Dave Shichman of Driven AM for taking me there!) And tis better to judge it by shakes than by clubs for despite being one of the best cities in the world, New York has a distinct lack of club venues suitable for dance music. And the spot I was supposed to play in had to be switched for another at the last minute due to licensing problems. But thankfully the word got out and we had a full house for the show at Drom, which was a lot of hot fun in the end.

Obligatory NY taxi shot.

At hotels, I could kinda understand..

At the Thompson Hotel, Lower East Side, La Dolce Vita plays on a constant loop in the elevator. It’s a great place to stay, right in the heart of the good stuff. Ya got ALife, Reed Space, New Era, Live Fast etc all within walking distance. Plus a vegan Italian eatery right next door (thats a plus in my book). One thing to bear in mind about the Thompson though – their room service menu is strictly sushi, a bold move and one which might not suit every traveler.

The view from my room at the Thompson Hotel. There's a naked dude in one of those windows.

Team Facelift. Spot the mannequin.

The colourful office space of my pal DB.

The best candy store.

]]> http://www.highlycontrasting.com/2011/04/24/hc-north-american-tour-2011-new-york-0204/feed/ 0 http://www.highlycontrasting.com/2010/02/23/notes-from-the-underground/ http://www.highlycontrasting.com/2010/02/23/notes-from-the-underground/#comments Tue, 23 Feb 2010 02:26:25 +0000 High Contrast http://www.highlycontrasting.com/?p=428

The days go on with regularity until suddenly there is a change. Time to thaw out the Contrast after a winter of disco-tense. Two months off from djing. No journal entries. Barely a twitter.

What have I been up to? Giving my ears a rest. And my twin loves of course. The new album is taking shape, many new tracks on the go. You can hear slices soon when I get back on the djing circuit in March. And I’m on the 5th draft of my film script. M. Night Shyamalan said it wasn’t until the 5th draft of The Sixth Sense that he *SPOILER* realised that Bruce Willis’ character was a ghost *SPOILER END*. I can now understand that. It’s like I’ve only just realised what I’ve been trying to say with it during the last two years of work.

The plan is to balance my time and energy between music and film more than ever before. The duality of man.

End Transmission…

I was gonna say this is the best British horror film since The Descent but making such a nationalistic categorisation is pretty hard these days. The first on screen title tells us this film is funded by the National Lottery but then we hear American accents and see Florida street signs. Edgar Wright had a similar problem in trying to write a list of his favourite British films of recent years, a lot of his first choices turned out to be more American in origin than British. But here at least we have a British writer/director using mainly British money, he’s just telling his tale with an American backdrop (actually, The Descent had that same setup too, ah go figure). Regardless of national distinctions, this is still an unusual and well made horror film. But it poses quite a challenge for the marketing team and critics as the film hinges on some major twists that make it hard to talk about the film without spoiling. I feel the trailer reveals too much for one thing and would not recommend watching it if you feel at all inclined to see this film. If you want a pithy summing up of it, think The Shining meets Primer. On a boat.

Home & A-slay

First we had Guy Pearce of Neighbours making Memento, now Melissa George, formerly of Home & Away, makes Triangle. What is it with Ozzie soap stars and one-word headfuck movies? Here she takes the lead as Jess, a single mom who takes up an offer to go on a sailing trip with five people she barely knows. In the Bermuda triangle. Never wise in a horror film. The boat capsizes in a storm and the survivors seek refuge on a huge ship that mysteriously appears. It’s deserted and Jess and the gang start wandering around the spooky corridors, eventually getting picked off one by one by an unseen assailant. Now so far, so every-third-horror-film-made-in-the-80s. However, the game gets raised here not just by some great camera work and a mostly likeable (or at least unpunchable) cast but by the timewarping, structural gymnastics that kick in. Again, hard to talk about without spoiling the fun of it all but suffice to say, you need to keep your wits about you ala Memento. There’s a bit too much running around dark corridors and screaming for my liking, I think it would have been more interesting to play up the black humour and absurdity inherent in the temporal disfunctions but it still works really well and has a few cool tricks up it’s sleeve. It manages to transcend the genre trappings and come up with something a bit different from what you’ve seen before.

After his debut Creep and then Severance, Triangle represents a quantum leap for writer/director Chris Smith. I liked those earlier films but here he’s really getting to grips with the camera and a directorial vision is starting to emerge. The title sequence and the ending in particular are very well constructed, the framing and cutting pulling together in a way I would have liked to have seen more of during the main part of the film. The whole thing was made for a pretty low budget and he makes it look a lot more expensive, it never feels like a cheapie-quickie horror flick. I’m now very much looking forward to his next movie, a blood soaked medieval adventure apparently.

Ironically, the main issue I have with the film is The Shining connection. There’s just a few too many references to it (yeah, I know, this coming from the guy who made the Racing Green video!). Let’s see – the ship is a virtual stand-in for The Overlook Hotel with art deco interiors and even a ballroom. Shit gets real in Room 237. Melancholic 20s music echoes through the corridors. Numerous shots of mirrors showing characters doubled. A character writes the same phrase over and over on sheets of paper. Messages written in blood seen through a mirror. The first named character in the film is a Jack. And a few more. The problem with all this is that no greater point seems to be made other than they must really like The Shining. When people make allusions to that film, it’s frustrating that they only take from the surface of it and rarely make the kind of wonderfully rich subtext Kubrick did. But thats why he’s Kubrick. Maybe I just pick up on all this because I’m such a Kubrick fanboy (see previous post for evidence) and most people won’t be bothered by it at all. I would still definitely recommend checking this movie out, it’s a nautical mile ahead of the remakes-of-superior-foreign-or-70s-horrors and torture-bore movies of recent years.

TRIANGLE is out on October 16th in the UK.

In a case of life imitating art, this posh shop in London has used the same line as the eerily elitist manager of the Overlook hotel, Stuart Ullman, did when telling Wendy Torrance about past guests of the hotel…

Stuart Ullman: Four presidents, movie stars… 
Wendy Torrance: Royalty? 
Stuart Ullman: All the best people.

Way to go ‘ad’ people – you’ve invoked a demonic, genocidal, patriarchal force in your attempt to hock some threads to wannabe socialites. Well, actually, if the glove fits…

But thankfully it was just a garbage truck adorned with a severed mannequin’s head. This got me thinking, however, about just how scary the Child Catcher was (is!) and how most things that scared me as a kid were the supposedly family-friendly things whilst horror films and the like were enjoyable larks to me. Maybe this is due to the fact that every corner shop or newsagent I went into to buy my 10p mixture and packet of Garbage Pail Kids stickers was guaranteed to have a video rack sporting titles such as Driller Killer, The Corpse Grinders, Microwave Massacre and Pinnochio. Ah, the bliss of the unregulated! Most of the Hollywood studios were scared of home video and so didn’t release their big titles on it (The Shining (da na!) being a notable exception) which meant that the early boom of the VHS market was left to enterprising indy labels who put out whatever they could get their mitts on – usually cheap horrors and kids films. Great combo when you’re six.

Of course, my Dad didn’t let me watch most of the so-called video nasties until I was at least ten but there was plenty of normal stuff I watched as a kid that in retrospect was far more disturbing:

1. The Child Catcher – Has to be top of the list. Ian Fleming wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang but the Child Catcher was a much scarier villain than anything Bond had to face and in fact looks more like a creation of the Chapman Brothers! In this clip Benny Hill faces a Gestapo like interrogation at the hands of the CC who threatens to turn his teeth into a necklace.

2. Watership Down – Beloved rabbit snuff cartoon. Just watch the trailer which even feels like a straight up horror as it sets you up with a false sense of security and then BAM – Fields of blood. Slow motion shotgun death. Bright Eyes.

3. Safety Education Films – These well meaning but disturbing government produced films were shown in school assemblies. One particularly vivid short was informing you of the dangers of playing by electricity pylons – “Darren, there’s a ball by that pylon. Hey, someone’s had a go at this fence. That’s it, Darren… Darren?.. DARREN!”

4. The Theme Tune to Pebble Mill – I don’t know why but the theme tune to this early 80s daytime chat show would send me running out of the room screaming. I can’t find a clip of it, thank goodness, but heres one of Morrissey on the show maintaining a tight grip on his artistic integrity.

5. Willy Wonkas Acid Boat Trip – Centipede crawls across woman’s face. Chicken gets head cut off. Giant lizard. Gene Wilder has an ‘episode’.

6. Early Disney – As suggested by HayleyEve, Pink Elephants on Parade from Dumbo. I had totally forgot about this part of the film, maybe I blanked it out on purpose! The middle part of this sequence sure is freaky, something about the horror of repetition perhaps. And of course, Pinocchio, which is full of joyously disturbing scenes like this one.

Can anyone think of other unintentionally terrifying gems?

A trick played by many hotels is to make the lobby look as good as possible to lure you in and then once you’re checked in, they hit you with this…

You can’t see it here but there’s actually four rows of industrial lights on the ceiling. Now, I have a fetish for fluorescent strip lighting as much as the next guy but this really felt like some laboratory test room merely simulating living quarters. Like the coffee cups were glued down and the view out the window was just a painting.

It was kinda awesome really. Somehow they managed to make every element of the room completely clash with every other element.

And that’s an adjoining door to another room. Just as I was about to drift off to sleep at around 4am, I heard a roomful of guests arrive next door. I couldn’t help but hear their conversations which thankfully were rather amusing.

Voice 1: So, what do you wanna do? You wanna call some escorts? You want some pussy, man?

Voice 2: Nah, nah, man.

Voice 1: Come on, tell me what you want. You want some pussy in here?

Voice 2: Nah, I’m alright, man. I’ll just have another drink. They’re no good round here, I would only get some escorts if we were in Kazakhstan.

I’ve yet to see the official comparative study on the quality of international escort services but word on the street is Kazakhstan is the shiznit!

Now where's my ticket...

I had a sense of deja-vu and then remembered this shot from The Making of The Shining…