"Just one damn thing after another..."

Theatre He really shouldn't have to do this. If you're geographically in the right place and can afford to see Benedict Cumberbatch in Hamlet, why would you spend the whole sodding thing recording it through a camera phone in a form which you probably won't then ever go and bother watching again and with the ignorance of how distracting it is for the actors. The fact that they had to stop the performance twice because of this and that they're soon to be having to install detectors is abominable and shows an utter lack of respect for the process from the audience.  Never has a post tag been more appropriate.

My Favourite Film of 1997.

Film There have been some years in which it's been almost impossible to choose a single film. It's the plague of the cineaste. Some of us can say what their favourite film ever is (you'll see) but outside of that when faced with a limitation, a genre or year, we've seen so many worthwhile, good and potentially meaningful pieces of work that it's then impossible to tie things down.

Which is essentially me saying that although I've chosen The Fifth Element, it could equally have been Contact, Chasing Amy, Scream 2, LA Confidential, Men in Black, the various Star Wars rereleases, Titanic or The Peacemaker or a dozen other films that year which weren't made in Hollywood. Wilde. Smilla's Feeling For Snow. In The Company of Men. Shooting Fish.  1997 was some year.

I've chosen Luc Besson's The Fifth Element not just because I think it's a peerless example of production design, of fun and of how single characters like Milla's Leeloo can be so intriguing that they have the ability to eclipse the less impressive, well, elements like Chris Tucker's whatever Chris Tucker is doing and not just because  Eric Serra's soundtrack is also still one of my favourite records, alien and familiar, futuristic and contemporary.

But I also wanted to acknowledge the circumstances of when I saw it, at the second National Cinema Day.

National Cinema Day first happened on June 2nd 1996 on the hundredth anniversary of commercial cinema when I was just at the tail end of my final year of university and I spent the day at the Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds watching amongst other things, Wayne Wang's Smoke, a preview of the David O Russell comedy Flirting With Disaster and (I think) the rerelease of Withnail & I amid trailers for other upcoming attractions.

Here's a promotional film which was created for it that has one of the best pieces of unexpected swearing you'll ever see.



In 1997 I was back in Liverpool town where I was born and on Sunday 15th June was at a packed Odeon on London Road for the second go around.  As ever there was the usual mix of new releases, rereleases and preview screenings and as I write this remember the order.  The Fifth Element in the cavernous screen one then Scream (for the second time around) followed by One Fine Day, the underrated Pfeiffer/Clooney comedy.

Here's what I remember about seeing The Fifth Element.  Sitting in about five different seats.  With entry reduced to £1, packed auditoriums led to multiple code of conduct violations.  Even without mobile phones then people just didn't seem interested in bothering to watch the film presumably because it had only cost them a pound to get in.  So I moved around a lot trying to find a seat where I could actually concentrate on the film.

This wasn't helped either by two kids who kept throwing popcorn at the back of my head.  They followed me twice.  I'd settle down then there they'd be again and I'd feel something getting caught on my hair or bouncing off my shoulder.  Eventually they were chased out by ushers because someone else complained.  Which sounds like me passing the buck but really I've always found it easier to move than anything else.

National Cinema Day returned the following year but on that occasion tickets were "only" half price so my understanding is that attendances were much lower so it wasn't repeated which is a shame because it was a great way to promote cinema and increase audience numbers.  It'll be interesting to see the effect the end of Orange Wednesdays, its distant discount cousin will have on same.

Of course having written all of this, I've realised that the premise of this project has to change by a year. I was going back as far as 1897, but I'd not realised that the Lumiere Bros began commercial cinema in Paris in 1896 so I'll have to add an extra year on at the other end. Not that I'm sure what my favourite film of 1896 will prove to be but there's a high probability that the list of potentials will be shorter than from the mid-90s.

"the distracting tomfoolery"

Film As you will have noted during my wrap up of last year's filmapalooza, I only sat inside an actual auditorium about five times last year and on all occasions only when I had to.

 To be fair they were all very good experiences with decent audiences who shut up during the film and mostly didn't sit anywhere near me, largely because I was on the front row so I wasn't sitting anywhere near them.

Good old Picturehouse at FACT.

If only modern cinema pricing was cheaper.

I really can't afford £9 an afternoon screening too often if I can also get as many films as I like at home for £10 a month (Netflix + Lovefilm-by-post) to watch on my decent sized screen.

Either way I didn't have to deal with the horrors that a correspondent at Little White Lies had to contend with:

"... when some gentleman in the row in front started tooling around on his mobile during the opening chimp sequence, we felt more than usually justified in politely asking him to terminate the distracting tomfoolery.

He turned around in clear possession of thoughts to share. I readied myself for abuse.

"Part of the cinema's service is that you can text the bar for a drink."

They then go on to describe how throughout a rare screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey, every now and then a screen would light up and within minutes an usher would wander in to deliver drinks.

As the below the liners suggest, name and shame, name and indeed shame.

Awful, awful, awful.  Is this prevalent?  Does this happen a lot?

Quite a contrast to the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin which also serves food but has a zero tolerance for phone use. Must we watch this again?

No wonder they're called Everyman Cinemas.

Film The Metquarter will soon have a three (four) (for events) screen cinema built in, brought to us by Everyman Cinemas, the operators of the Screen on the Green, the new venue at Selfridges amongst others. New cinema, more cinemas are always good, or tend to always be a good thing and I was right with it (even though it's not showing anything that different to FACT or the Odeon) until the final quote in the Liverpool Confidential article:

Everyman says its mission is to create “a truly unique and memorable cinema experience that exceeds expectations and reaches the highest standards possible in quality, comfort and entertainment … where you can you enjoy a cinematic experience, swap your soft drink for a nice glass of red wine and a slice of freshly made pizza and where the cinema feels almost like a home from home”.

Yes, sorry, but fuck that.  One of the reasons I've stopped going to the cinema as much is because of assholes treating the place as "a home from home".  If I want "a home" I'll stay "at home".  Plus given the cinemas will have capacity of 325 seats, the screens won't be that much bigger than the one I'm watching the athletics on now.  Though I will certainly give it a go and report back, especially if they have an PR freebies....

People With Enough Disposable Income To Ignore The Event They Paid For [PWEDITITETPF].

Music The Gothamist has an excellent rant which explains the 50% of the reason why I don't attend concerts any more which isn't about mobile phones:

"At Tuesday night's otherwise exquisite Andrew Bird performance in Central Park, I had to repeatedly ask people around me to please stop talking. Yes, at a performance by Andrew Bird, an indie recording artist known for his soulful whistling. You'd think the uniformly twee audience at an Andrew Bird show would be a reverent, bespectacled vacuum, but it turns out that people of all stripes are willing to wait on a very long line for the privilege of vapidly chatting over achingly sublime music. A young man next to me, who spent the entire concert gabbing with his friend about unrelated bullshit, added to the mix by occasionally CRUNCHING an empty plastic water bottle in time with the music. While continuing to talk. I asked him to stop, and he looked at me with incredulity, as if I was senile old man. Back in my day, we drank water from fountains."

Truth be told I tried attending the classical music portion of the Liverpool International Music Festival last year and ended up walking away for all these reasons. Stood next to the stage I spent my time watching and listening to people with smart phones and giant fucking camera lenses taking pictures of the event, clicking and beeping away during the music and if you were sat in the crowd you couldn't hear the music over the incessant chatter of people talking about they'd done that day, would be doing the next day or eating their way through the fast food being sold on site.  Just because it's a free event doesn't give people the right to be disrespectful, does it?  I really can't afford to pay for a similar experience any more.

Portrait Mode.

"Basically, I rule."

Theatre The audience at last Thursday night's presentation of A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway starring Denzel "Denzel" Washington and Sophie "Liz 10" Okonedo were in for a surprise:

"A white tent had been erected outside the theatre, and audience members were whisked through metal detectors and wanded. Inside, recordings of Hansberry played on a loop, and the Langston Hughes poem from which the play takes its title was illuminated on a scrim: “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?” By 8:12 P.M., there were eight conspicuously empty seats off the center-right aisle, four in Row D and four in Row E. (I was in Row F, on the other side.) A woman announced over the speaker: “Ladies and gentlemen, out of respect for the actors please take your seats so the show can begin.” The lights went down, and the door to the street swung open. A stream of people, including the President, the First Lady (in black), and Valerie Jarrett, snaked through to the back of the house and then down the aisle. Ignoring the announcer’s pleas, the audience leaped to its feet—this usually happens at the end of the show—and camera flashes twinkled in the darkened theatre. The Obamas shook some hands and took their seats."

"Rage, rage against the dying of the light"

Film Mark K'mode has a new book coming soon and today's Observer has an extract which given its free flowing slightly random nature is either lots of extracts pulled together or the introduction. Either way it's a pretty good survey of where his brain is at in terms of his day job but, despite the many hiring, firings and expirings in the film criticism arena that there's still hope and a need for the serious, expert approach. Here's the usual random paragraph so that this post isn't simply a couple of sentences:

"The idea that the internet as a whole is some kind of unattributed bandit country only has currency in those areas where people have reason to be embarrassed about their true identities – sending abusive messages, engaging in online theft, stalking, or tweeting puff reviews. Most online journalists worth their salt despise anonymity as much as their print counterparts, if not more so, because it undermines the very medium in which they are trying to make a name for themselves. And the fact that bloggers en masse seem increasingly to be rejecting such anonymity in favour of honesty and accountability offers the clearest indication yet that the "traditional values of proper film criticism" are alive and well on the web. Whatever the medium, the key questions remain the same: who is saying this? Why are they saying it? And what do they have to lose by saying it? And if the answer to those questions is "don't know"; "don't care"; and "nothing", then proceed with extreme caution."

Somewhere along the line I stopped posting film reviews here. Partly it's because of currency - not going to the actual cinema much means that I tend to be quite behind everyone else, amazed with myself that I managed to see Iron Man 3 spoiler free the other night thank goodness.  But mostly it's a loss of nerve, the feeling of not having an original thought to contribute.

 With Doctor Who and Shakespeare I feel like I'm on safer ground; what I tend to do is different to professional reviewers to some extent, I think, without trying to overthink anything, treating the former with some seriousness, the latter less so, not that there are any conscious choices about this.  Like any piece of writing, the reviews tend to find their own shape.  Sometimes.

I'll return to this when I have the time, but one trend (in film criticism) I've noticed recently, though it's presumably been happening for decades is now critics, in rushing to comprehensively trash a film have somehow missed the point about what it's trying to do.  Of course such things are value judgements but it's one of the reasons I have become quite wary about even reading reviews before seeing films.

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is fun cross-genre exercise, which sets a bloodthirsty action film and all of its rules within a fairy tale world.  It's not perfect and looks like its been (ironically) hacked about a lot in post production, but it's a rare example of a film in which the protagonists are siblings rather than romantic leads in the traditional sense and for once who actually like each other.

Go with it and like the Resident Evil series, or the Underworlds, or the Fast & Furious films, it's loads of fun.  All of the actors seem like they had a tremendous time making the thing and the aesthetic, with its obviously studio bound outdoors scenes recalls 80s fantasies like Krull, Labyrinth or The Princess Bride.  It's not quite as witty as those, but it's not trying to be.  The swearing is part of the genre experiment.

Yet to read the reviews, like this Bradshaw take down, or even Kermode's you'd think that it was one of the worst films ever made largely because both of them are applying elevated expectations to what's essentially a b-movie which unlike say the low-rent Adam Sandler comedies which fail because they're not funny, is action packed, is exciting and titillating in just the right way.

One of the weirder critical anomalies is how often the "historical inaccuracies" are mentioned, the as Time Out lists "Gatling gun, a double-barrelled crossbow, a stun gun and a cure for diabetes" even though the thing's quite clear set within a narrow focused area of a fantasy world which also includes trolls and witches and has its own physical rules.

Now, it is possible to do this sort of thing badly.  Jonah Hex is an example.  Or Cowboys vs Aliens.  Both of those are cliched and boring in the wrong way and it is a fine line.  It's also worth pointing out I tend to be quite forgiving of genre films.  I'm also quite fond of Wrath of the Titans, Prince of Persia and John Carter (of Mars) all of which were equally garroted by the critics.

"Would you please stop that?"

Music Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman walked out his own concert on Monday evening after noticing someone recording the thing on their iPhone.

"Krystian Zimerman, from Poland, was distracted by the concertgoer while in the middle of playing Karol Szymanowksi's Variations on a Polish Theme in B Minor at the Ruhr piano festival in Essen.

Still playing, he raised his gaze towards the audience member, who was sitting in a balcony seat above him, and said: "Would you please stop that?"

"But while Zimerman, 56, resumed playing the work he had clearly lost his concentration, and left the stage shortly afterwards, evidently agitated."

He blames the amount of clips of things there are on YouTube.  But it's not just the results.  As some of the commenters note, what is destroying music and the enjoyment of going to see live music is "the entitled little shits out there who think they can film whatever and whoever they want."

 One of the reasons I've sworn off concerts is because you do end up spending most of the night dodging camera screens rather than listening to the music.

 If somewhere like the Globe Theatre is capable of policing this -- YouTube isn't awash with "unofficial" recordings of plays -- other venues should be able to as well if they cared to.

Vigilante Copy Editor.

Art In this mini-documentary, Jay Dockendorf of the New York Times reports:

"In the sculpture park at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, one of the nation’s oldest art schools, a clandestine struggle is under way — over grammar. In recent months, a vandal (or team of vandals) has used permanent markers to correct grammar and punctuation mistakes on the informational placards near the sculptures."

Watch out for the moment when it's revealed how these typos happened in the first place...

C. Auguste Dupin on some members of the press.

Journalism As you'll see tomorrow, hopefully, this week, this hermitage week, I have been mostly reading some selected works of Edgar Allan Poe. As part of the mission, I've discovered that he just about invented detective fiction with the character of C. Auguste Dupin.

In his second "adventure" The Mystery of Marie Roget (if you can call giving a long deductive lecture in a room an "adventure") Dupin coincidentally offers this marvellous take down of the press (included as a more specific refutation of news reports and columns about a murder), which still seems true a hundred and seventy years later:

"We should bear in mind that, in general, it is the object of our newspapers rather to create a sensation -- to make a point -- than to further the cause of truth. The latter end is only pursued when it seems coincident with the former. The print which merely falls in with ordinary opinion (however well founded this opinion may be) earns for itself no credit with the mob. The mass of the people regard as profound only him who suggests pungent contradictions of the general idea. In ratiocination, not less than in literature, it is the epigram which is the most immediately and the most universally appreciated. In both, it is of the lowest order of merit."

Not to mention, now I suppose, some corners of broadcast news media.    The rest of the story is available here.

Quentin Letts in the wild.

Theatre After covering the Milibands, the second half of Victoria Coren's column in today's Observer offers a biting observational of Quentin Letts at work, attending the press preview for The Book of Mormon:

"Letts clearly never expected to like it; even as he took his seat, he looked like a man who'd just run over his own dog. Every time I laughed or clapped with the rest of the audience, I could see him in my peripheral vision, making another gloomy note on his pad."

Are reviewers tastes dictated by their employer or do they naturally gravitate towards the best fit for their opinions?

Clive Martin on not seeing Run for you Wife.

Film The reality of watching Danny Dyer's new film, Run for you Wife:

"After about 20 minutes of waiting in this cinema, it was clear that something was wrong. The crowd began to squirm agitatedly in their seats. The old people, emboldened by their coffee, were tutting and clicking like crickets in the background of a Danny Dyer film set in the Med. Somebody even said, "Oh, for goodness' sake," at some point, so you could tell the mood was starting to turn. Myself and the budding Eberts and Siskels started glaring at the projector with indignation, as if to say, "I had a great comparison between Dyer and James Cagney to use and you idiots are ruining it."

Or not. The film hadn't even started yet. Or ever ... anyway, inevitably ...



[via]

"not a whit of sympathy"

Music The Arts Desk's Alexandra Coghlan attended the BBC Proms the other night but was only ultimately able to review half a concert because she had to leave in the middle. Now she's revealed why, the intolerant attitude of her fellow audience members:

"I was attending the concert with a university-age girl – her first visit to the Proms. A chronic asthmatic, she had coughed a little during the first half, but infrequently, and had stifled it to the very best of her ability. After the first piece a man turned round and told her off (not a whit of sympathy, concern or even basic politeness to his complaint). We apologised, and moved to some empty seats further away. When the interval arrived three middle-aged men accosted us in the foyer."

The resulting incident is shocking, that people would act like that.  Even if she'd been using a mobile phone or just talking, that would have been no excuse for this behaviour.  Just move.  I'd be amazed if this poor girl would ever want to go back now.  Shocking.

"like I’m a dancing hologram"

Dance More audience interaction, this time with a fire dancer who tours some of the worst night clubs in the country:

"But flaming solitude doesn’t last. It’s never more than ten minutes before someone stumbles over with their arms outstretched. Do they think the flames are made of beer? Now I begin another show, called ‘Don’t Give Clients a Concussion.’

"Drunk students try to walk in a straight line through the staging area like I’m a dancing hologram. Keep smiling, keep dancing, don’t let anyone wander into the path of fire, or worse, the heavy metal pole, which flies around at a blurring speed. Trying to save these people’s skulls, hair, clothes, and testicles from their own sozzled stumbling is the most tiring part of the job. It’s where I really earn that plane ticket."

[via]

"angry tuts"

Arts The Guardian's posted what amounts to its own code of conduct for behaviour at arts events and as ever with such things, some of the best stories are in the comments:

"I was out seeing Persepolis in GFT and the couple next to me produced a large crinkly bag of boiled sweets, each sweet individually wrapped in crinkly cellophane

"They chain ate these sweets for forty minutes completely oblivious of the angry tuts being hurled in their direction from other audience members. Eventually I asked them to please be quiet at which point the woman in front of me, who was one of the main tutters, told me to shut up."

Which is oddly enough roughly what happened to me at Cabin in the Woods the other week. A man sat the row behind had bought a back of sweets and put them in his pocket, which means I had to endure the sound of him putting his hand in his pocket, then into the bag, pulling it one, opening it, throwing it into his mouth, suck, repeat.

"how a commentary would play in a crowded theater"

Film One of my small ambitions has always been to attend Ebertfest, the film festival curated by film critic Roger Ebert. Judging my Jim Emerson's review, this year's sounds like a time especially since it included an unusual experiment in allowing the now voiceless Roger to have something of the vocal presence in the presentation of the work he used to have, the point of which seems to have been missed by one audience member:

"Speaking of "Citizen Kane," it was the final festival event, a Blu-ray disc projected onto the Virginia's huge screen, with Roger's 2001 voiceover commentary. I was skeptical about how a commentary would play in a crowded theater, but it worked like a charm. Afterwards, Roger sent a note to the stage, read by festival director Nate Kohn, apologizing to the woman in the lobby who wanted her money back because he kept talking through the whole film. (I thought it was a great joke -- but it turns out also to be true.)"

My italics.  Amazing.

"the American public"

Film WellesNet is running a series of posts gathering the memos sent to Orson Welles during the torturous (some would say criminal) post-production process on his broken masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons. They've reached the preview process and the first public showing of a rough cut of the film.

For some unknown reason they decided the perfect receivers of Orson's vision would be an audience of cinema-goers in Pomona who'd already enjoyed a screening of The Fleet's In, a Paramount musical starring Dorothy Lamour and William Holden.

By reputation that screening was a disaster, but what WellesNet reveals is that just under a third of the audience provided positive comments on their survey cards, in some cases to the point of predicting the film's on-going reputation and like the best cineastes complaining about the audience's behaviour and the length of the film:

"Yes. The picture is magnificent. The direction, acting, photography, and special effects are the best the cinema has yet offered. It is unfortunate that the American public, as represented at this theatre, are unable to appreciate fine art. it might be, perhaps, criticized for being a bit too long."

Unfortunately, the idea of the "art" film was rarely considered in Hollywood unless the topic was considered worthy enough to receive a "serious" treatment and so the execs went with the majority of that audience and the rest is history.

‘Shhh’.

Theatre John Wyver attends Noises Off and ironically has difficulty hearing the show due to the incessant talking from the audience:

"To the Old Vic to sit with Clare in two eye-wateringly expensive seats to watch an immaculate performance of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off. The back-stage comic complications, combined with the high-end prices (top whack £85 a seat – that’s eighty-five pounds!), have attracted an audience that is well-heeled, well-dressed… and well rude. I am used to people trying to talk through movies, and I have extensive experience of tapping shoulders or turning round and emitting an urgent, audible ‘Shhh’. But in the theatre?"

Now I know it's not just me.

Day One

Day 1, originally uploaded by BFI Online.

The National Film Theatre at the Southbank is being refurbished and they're uploading progress photographs to their flickr account. The seats and carpets in screens one and three are being ripped out, but the films showings continue so that visitors can see the progress while they watch films.

Part of me quite likes the idea of concrete floor, but the noise of foot tap would go down well.  I'm intolerant in cinemas at the best of times and even I experienced tutting when I had the audacity to get up and go to the toilet during the very long Once Upon A Time In The West a couple of years ago.  Which is bliss.