The Films I've Watched This Year #4

Film Now that these week in film reviews are becoming the regular occurrence I didn't want them to be, I'm starting to think about what I'm going to write which is why these film reviews are becoming the regular occurrence I didn't want them to be.  But the upshot of that is I'm becoming more of an active participant again, not simply grazing through things which is somewhat where I was drifting towards, now really trying to decide once again if the filmmakers achieved what they set out to do.

Lovestruck: The Musical
Mademoiselle C
Sketches of Frank Gehry
The Girl
Hank: Five Years from the Brink
Man of Steel
Calendar
Rapture-Palooza
Uncertainty
Mike Birbiglia: My Girlfriend's Boyfriend
The Wolverine
Red 2

The makers of Lovestruck: The Musical certainly did what they set out to do. It's a jukebox television musical in which a peroxide blonded Jane Seymour drinks a magic potion which makes her thirty years younger with the face of Chelsea Kane so she can sabotage her estranged daughter's wedding by seducing the fiance because said offspring is supposed to be the star of the broadway show she's producing.  It's rubbish, of course, but it does have the spectacle of Seymour singing and dancing to a cover of Lady Gaga's Let's Dance and luckily it's just during the opening credits so I've essentially seen the rest so you don't have to.  As to what possessed me to watch in the first place, you can blame the genre games posts for which I'm researching the next entry.  Oh and that it's on Netflix and I'm trying to get my money's worth.

But for all of that, it's not as rubbish as Man of Steel.  Stop raising your eyebrows.  At least Lovestruck: The Musical is honest about what it is and fulfill the viewer's low expectations.  Man of Steel manages to take one of the most iconic and celebrated characters of the past century and put him at the centre of a poorly structured, badly written, routinely directed, ill-conceived dirge that's depressing to watch largely because having made some money at the box office it's become the basis for what Warner Bros will be doing with DC's characters in the cinema for the next decade.  It is to Superman what the Leakley Bible would have been to Doctor Who had that been pressed into service as the basis for the US TV Movie with Paul McGann.

Oddly, it's a very well cast film.  Henry Cavill looks suitably heroic, Amy Adams can do the screwball comedy that's central to Lois, Larry Fishburne's a fine Perry White.  But none of them really get to do the things they're very good at because Snyder's decided that to underscore that this is a mythic character he must be backed by a ton of mythology most of which is the kind of doggerel Lucas would turn his nose up at and overburdens a character far too early in his story.  Superman can be an angsty character to be sure, the burden of power, last of his species, at its core this story is The Front Page or His Girl Friday with male journalist gifted with super powers and his partner a sharp tongue, something no previous incarnation of these characters, especially in the cartoons across the years has forgotten.

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Imagine if instead of a twenty-minute action sequence that looks like the work of someone with Thor-envy, we had instead greeted Lois and Clark in the Daily Planet doing their thing before the latter has to go off and do something super before a flashback structure kicked in layering the origins and explaining who Zod is.  Yes, it's somewhat Superman II, but at least  the core elements would be in place and the audience would have something to latch onto.  There's actually nothing wrong with taking narrative chances like making Lois aware of the secret identity or killing Jonathan Kent, such things are in the air and should be.  But you shouldn't forget, just as the makers of The Wolverine or Red 2 don't, which genre you're in and there's nothing wrong in having a few action sequences which focus on heroes being heroes and fun.

[/spoiler zone]

Three personality led documentaries this week.  Mademoiselle C follows Carine Roitfeld, the former editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris as she launches a new fashion quarterly in a fluff piece which makes The September Issue look like The World At War but does at least have the spectacle of Karl Lagerfeld pushing a baby stroller around an office.  Sketches of Frank Gehry is the late Sydney Pollack's fascinating investigation into the architect's working methods which funnily enough has a similar structure to the fashion film but has the bonus of featuring people with something interesting to say about their subject.  Gehry was a fairly middle of the road architect until his decided to take a risk in his mid-sixties and revolutionised the business.  There's a lesson for all of us in that.

Director Joe Berlinger's Hank: Five Years from the Brink is also a lesson.  Having enjoyed Charles Ferguson's The Inside Job I was weary about what looked for all the world like a reposte to that earlier film (which effectively doorstepped the bankers who perpetrated the financial collapse of 2008), the cinematic equivalent of the subject of a newspaper column writing an open letter in rebuttle.  There is an element of that, especially in the latter stages, but away from the footage of Senate hearings (which also appears here) we're presented with a very complex figure who's portrayed as being caught in a whirlwind during which he was forced to make decisions he really didn't want to in the face of (surprise, surprise) the Republicans in US government who didn't understand why he needed to take those decisions.

Hank's an interesting example of interview film.  It is a documentary but the only two newly shot interviews which appear are with Poulson and his wife, the rest of the story explained through archive news footage and intertitles.  Yet it remains solidly cinematic thanks to the editing techniques and rich musical score that grips like a thriller.  Hank isn't afraid to enunciate his personal failings, about how a personal misunderstanding led to him accepting the job of Secretary of the Treasury and how he sometimes overestimated the intelligence of some of the people he had to deal with.  He's clearly exasperated that the systems which led to the financial collapse are still in place and his attitude is that it's not about whether it's going to happen again but then.  So actually it's a horror film too.

As per the opening paragraph, I had expected to say Calendar was my favourite film of the week.  Mislabeled as being released in 2013, this 1993 art film by Atom Egoyan, like the Poulson documentary utilises just a limited numbers of types of shots to tell its story about the dissolution of a marriage.  Egoyan himself plays an egotistical photographer who's tasked with visiting Armenia and photographing churches for the eponymous calendar.  But the only parts of the country we see, apart from brief VHS recordings, are through the viewfinder of his camera as his wife, who's also acting as translator falls in and out of love with their driver and guide.  These are intercut with shots of the photographer at a table in his apartment on a series of dates with European women.

What makes the film spectacular is that with just this limited amount of shots, Egoyan's able to weave a story which is lucid and compelling.  There are mysterious elements throughout, the significance of which he slowly reveals and there's a genuine sense of being in control of form and of trusting the patience of the audience and treating us with some intelligence.  Come to think of it, Calendar is probably also an art house example of a romantic tragedy, what with its unhappy ending and its flashback structure which twists back in on itself.  It's certainly leavened a bit with comedic moments usually of the "lost in translation" kind which are often very funny as the photographer finds his inability to understand Armenian is becoming the problem and cause of his ensuring irrelevancy.

No, my favourite film of the week was Uncertainty which is just extraordinary and which you probably haven't heard of.  I certainly hadn't when I saw it in a charity shop last week, buying it on the strength of Joseph Gordon-Levitt being on the box, the quote from The New Yorker.  Well, and indeed then.  Uncertainty is a genre experiment in which the same couple, Gordon-Levitt's girlfriend played by Lynn Collins, find themselves on opposite sides of New York in parallel storylines, a family drama and a paranoia thriller running concurrently in seemingly different realities and we see how they react to each.  In other words, it's Melinda and Melinda, Run Lola Run or Sliding Doors with even wider genre extremes and sense of experimentation which makes it sounds like an intellectual exercise like Calendar and to some extent it is, but Gordon-Levitt and Collins's chemistry also keep it grounded.

It is also a film which works best without much in the way of prior knowledge so I don't want to go into too much detail.  But if you'd told me Scott McGehee and David Siegel, the directors of Bee Season (the Richard Gere explains Buddism scene still haunts me) were capable of producing this I wouldn't have believed you.  It sounds derivative, but McGehee and Siegal pointedly and directly reference all of the above mentioned films (there's a moment about catching trains for example) as well as Kieslowski in identifying each of the storylines with colours that are forever visible within the mise-en-scène.  This is complex, exciting, rich film making of the kind which seems designed to be the stuff of film criticism papers but thanks to weak distribution found itself ignored.

In other words, I'm probably predisposed to love it.  For hours afterwards I found myself saying things like "Ooh, ooh, ooh.." as I noticed some of the clever, clever directorial and writing choices.  As well as the self-awareness, as the stories intercut with one another pieces of exposition about the characters are revealed in one story become vitally important in the other.  Gordon-Levitt's character has all the narrative agency in the action section of the film, Collins in the family drama and although that looks initially like genre stereotyping, the way it's done could also be seen as genre commentary.  There's also the climax of the film which truly lives up to the title.  There are amazingly cheap copies available at Amazon and its rentable at Lovefilm.  Yes, indeed, recommended.

Dawn of the Rise of the Battle of the Conquest of the Escape Beneath ...

Nature You've probably seen this already, but it's hilarious, so here it is again. It's staff at Ueno zoo in Tokyo practising their drills for capturing escaped animals:



Presumably I'm the only one who was reminded of Mark Wallinger's performance and video piece, Sleeper (2004-2005) which appeared at the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Liverpool way back when:



Hidden from view in Tokyo, the ghost of Joseph "everyone's an artist" Bueys is making a slow hand-clap.

"they pay no attention to poetry"

Film The YouTube channel Cinema Sins might catalogue the odd mistake in blockbusters, but Moveguide, profiled by The New Yorker is a faith-based review website which catalogues actual sins as the Bible would have it. Unfortunately, like the Bible, it's a bit consistent in its approach, as noted by Jeffrey Overstreet, film critic for Christianity Today:

"While Movieguide ignores movies that don’t originate in Hollywood, Overstreet began to understand the depth of the relationship between filmmaking and religious themes as he uncovered works by Robert Bresson, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Wim Wenders. “Movieguide has no tools whatsoever to read those movies, because they pay no attention to poetry,” he said. In Baehr’s ruthless inventorying of every filmic occurrence of sin, Movieguide often renounces movies that might contain meaning for a faith-based audience. Overstreet points to “No Country for Old Men” and “Pan’s Labyrinth” as two films that illustrate Christian theology but were condemned out of hand by a Christian press preoccupied by violence and cursing. “Of course, they give glowing reviews to the ‘Narnia’ films and to the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy solely because they’re the works of Christian authors. But ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ is proof positive of everything Tolkien and Lewis and L’Engel wrote about faith in art.”"

All of which said, they bloody love Gravity.

"She's got the kind of look that defies..."

Film With Gravity soon to be released on shiny disc and hopefully receive the best picture award at the Oscars, The Guardian has an interview with Alfonso and Sandy. Eyebrows have been raised and I've seen some bemused commentary on the number of nominations and awards Bullock's received generally from people who're a bit uninformed about the production process. Perhaps they should read this piece about what an average day for the actress was like on the set:

"Bullock's working day on the shoot sounds more like a complex medical procedure than an acting gig. She describes it as a "morose headspace". She was strung or strapped inside the lightbox for up to 10 hours a day. She was usually in complete silence, save for instructions coming through an earpiece, and observed only by a camera on the end of a robotic arm. It was as if she was acting in total privacy, she says: "The only people I'd see was if someone came in to adjust the rig or fix something. Everything else was behind this black curtain on this vast black sound stage. Often I would just stay in whatever apparatus I was in because it was too long to get in and out of it. You learn to zone out. I don't know if meditation is the right word but it was that principle. I would either play music or just close my eyes and stay where I was – until the end of the day where you'd put your own head back on and go outside and have the benefit of sunshine."

At least it was an asset in the "adversity" department. "My situation was somewhat like the situation the character was in," she says, laughing. "There's no one around, you're frustrated, nothing works, you're in pain, you're lonely, you want someone to fix everything for you but they can't – all those things I was feeling."

Tokyo Sky.

Fashion When she was a teenager, Jennifer Sky, the model and actress whom most of us will remember for Cleopatra 2525 or Marc Evan's My Little Eye spent a summer in Tokyo attempting to bolster her career. It was, judging by her account at Buzzfeed, awful. Now she's written an autobiographical eBook recalling the period as a cautionary tale about the industry:

"When Jennifer Sky was 15, she was offered the chance to spend a summer working as a model in Japan. For a girl from rural Florida who spent hours poring over fashion magazines, it seemed like a dream come true. But soon she found herself all but abandoned in an unfamiliar city, attempting to navigate a ruthless industry on her own and waving goodbye to childhood on the boozy margins of Tokyo’s expatriate scene. In Queen of the Tokyo Ballroom, Sky recounts the summer that changed the course of her life—and left her still sorting out the consequences two decades later."

There is an excerpt on the Buzzfeed interview but the whole thing is available on UK Amazon for a very reasonable £1.86.

CGI Pat.

TV "Get ready for one of the world's most beloved characters as you've never seen him before..." Yes, in some cheap looking (though probably quite expensive) dayglo CGI rather than the always beautiful stop animation. I'd be interested to know if the latter was ever even considered. This looks rubbish and mores to the point is another example of the creative cliff which children's films have fallen over, all of that voice talent, some of which sounds like its doing some good work, in service of yet another film about a talent programme (cf, one of the Shreks) and with what actually sounds like the Karaoke Sauron himself, basically advertising for his portfolio.  One of the lectures I attended at university talked about how properties such as this go through a process of "normalisation" which tends to remove any sense of individuality.  Well, here's that process in all its glory.

Delpy's Road.

Film Julie Delpy's next directed film is a period drama which sounds really exciting:

"The film is based on a story by Delpy and Stephen Hamel. Hamel is producing through his Company Films banner along with “Her” producer Vincent Landay.

"The film is set the early days of silent films and the automobile industry and follows a family of Vaudeville performers embarking on a cross-country road trip from New York to Los Angeles while making a motion picture."

The exciting part is that lately we haven't had a decent period road movie as such because of the sheer cost of setting and resetting that many locations which is odd when you consider how much of a road movie, depending on the route taken, is in an open wilderness where the only elements you necessarily need are costumes and a vehicle.

Model eats designer bag on New York City subway.

Science Fiction: New Death.

Art Well, then.

"A major contemporary science fiction exhibition will be at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool between 27 March – 22 June 2014."

"Artists including James Bridle, Jon Rafman, Ryan Trecartin, Mark Leckey, Karen Mirza & Brad Butler and Larissa Sansour will present works which explore how technology is creating new ways of living (and dying), of fashioning identities and the growth of cult-like communities; making our everyday lives feel increasingly like science fiction."

"China Miéville award-winning British science fiction author (Perdido Street Station, The City & the City) has produced a new series of short texts which will be visualised in the galleries. These texts have inspired the narrative of the exhibition which is presented as a deconstructed movie set, with the curator as director, artists as actors, Miéville as scriptwriter and acclaimed artist collective The Kazimier as set designers."

Three Seashells.

Film Typeset of the Future collates and identifies the various fonts which appear in science fiction films and begins its trawl with 2001: A Space Odyssey (via kottke). The writer is also handily transcribing chunks of text glimpsed as the people of the future or as is the case with that film, the past, go about their business including bathroom arrangements. Here is what to do if you need to go to the toilet in 2001. In zero gravity:

"This toilet is of the standard zero-gravity type. Depending on requirements, system A and/or system B can be used, details of which are clearly marked in the toilet compartment. When operating system A, depress lever and a plastic dalkron eliminator will be dispensed through the slot immediately underneath. When you have fastened the adhesive lip, attach connection marked by the large “X” outlet hose. Twist the silver coloured ring one inch below the connection point until you feel it lock."

That's just the first step. The "adhesive lip" sounds uncomfortable to say the least.

Incidentally, elsewhere, someone has explained how the three seashells must work in Demolition Man (probably not safe for work - contains graphic line drawings).

"We're going back to that style."

TV Doctor Who director Ben Wheatley's given a hilariously early interview on Capaldi and the next series of Doctor Who. Oh the discussions which will fill the void until the Autumn with this comment:

"Oh yeah, Doctor Who is pretty dark, I think. Generally it's dark, it's always been dark. Even in the more modern ones. If you look at the Tom Baker stuff, it's especially dark. When he leaves Leela — who's a very beloved assistant — he just laughs after it. There's none of the [breaking down and crying]. He just laughs, and "on to the next one," you know. It's a bonkers show. It's a monster. To have a unity that runs eight years [of the new series]… it's pretty crazy. They've done everything, they've tried all sorts of stuff. It seems to me the episodes that we're doing now seem more like classic Who. We're going back to that style. But you'll have to wait and see."

My italics. Whatever could he mean? All plot, plot, plot with character development becoming as subtle as Jo Grant's arc in the Pertwee years where she changed, became more confident but nothing was explicit? No arcs? Longer conversations?  Shot on multi-camera set-ups in the studio with obvious shifts to "film" utilising a different setting on the digital cameras?  Or just in terms of tone?  Was The Night of the Doctor a test of some sort as to a different direction for the show?  Oh the discussions, the discussions.

tsundoku

Books Lucy Greaves, translator, writes in The Guardian about untranslatable words. By the end of the first paragraph I'd already taken a life changing decision:

"Not long ago I was given the task of presenting an untranslatable word at an event at the Free Word Centre, where I am translator in residence. This interest in untranslatable words, which ties into one of the centre's new lines of inquiry, The Power of Translation, began last year with a blog that compiled untranslatable words from different languages (freewordcentre.com). There were some fantastic words that would arguably make welcome additions to English: who among us hasn't experienced tsundoku, for example, the Japanese word for "the act of leaving a book unread after buying it, typically piling it up together with other such unread books"."

Yes, that's me. A lot. My rooms are piled-high with books filled with potential if I every had the time to actually read them. But of course I'd have the time if I watched less films and wasn't online as much. Except I like watching films, and you'd miss me, and I really should stop being, well hung up, about these things.  I read a lot.  I really should stop feeling guilty about the lot being digital and non-fiction and I should have look through what's actually there and have a clear out.

The Films I've Watched This Year #3

Film This is the 10,000th post on the blog, though that statement should be taken with a giant pinch of ish because there are bound to be unfinished draft posts and the odd duplicate thanks to absorbing other defunct blogs into its body here and there. But yes, as far as Blogger's concerned, 10,000. Anyway, on with the show.  Apologies if there are any spoilers for films that were released over ten years ago:

Death Race 2000
Mitt
A Boy and His Dog
Big Ass Spider
Ikarie XB-1
Pitch Black
AI: Artificial Intelligence
The World's End
The Numbers Station
Oz: The Great and Powerful
Enchanted April (1935)

This was the last week of #futurewatch ending rather fittingly I thought with AI, which I've not seen after crying solidly for twenty minutes in the cinema and then part of the way home from Manchester on the week of cinema release and during which I once again cried like a baby, though not me as a baby because my thing was simply going quiet for long periods and creeping out of my parents.  Spielberg apparently says that despite him being accused of being an arch sentimentalist by creating an emotionally manipulative ending all of that was actually the part of the film's DNA which is all Stanley Kubrick. Presumably the answer's in his boxes somewhere.  Had Kubrick himself been alive to see the project through, it would have been an even more persuasive companion piece to 2001, the fates of the protagonists surprisingly similar from a certain point of view.

Ikarie XB-1 is a prime piece of Czechoslovak science fiction which thanks to a hacked, over-dubbed US b-release influenced Star Trek and oddly enough 2001.  Adapted from a novel by Stanislaw "Solaris" Lem The set-up's now achingly familiar, a group of humans falling in and out of love and losing their temper with each other in a spacecraft breaking the light barrier to reach Alpha Centauri in a great spirit of adventure, but with a Communist ideology following through their hearts and minds rather than the Capitalist motivations of the corrupt West.  All good fun and with some exciting set pieces, it's also a disappointing reminder of how some genres have subsequently been ceded to a Hollywood.  With the affordability of digital technology hopefully that will change.  I'd love to see a French film set on a giant space craft heading in to the stars.  Directed by Michael Haneke or Cedric Klapisch with Jamel as the Captain.

A Boy and His Dog and The World's End both suffer from similar issues.  The former is a mid-70s dusty adaptation of a Harlan Ellison novel in which Don Johnson plays a scavenger in a post-apocalyptic wasteland aided and abetted by a laconic telepathic dog called Blood.  The latter is (obviously) the final installment in the Pegg-Frost-Wright Cornetto trilogy about a fateful pub crawl.  The problem with both is that one perfectly enjoyable film is suddenly swamped when another, arguably less interesting storyline invades and in neither case does it look the like the filmmakers either noticed what they had or were willing to throw what they were doing in the bin and simply decide to go where that first half of the script was taking them.

In the former, the central relationship between Johnson and his dog is funny and fresh give or take some astonishingly dated gender politics and we enjoy their company, but they're broken up halfway through when Johnson decides to investigate the world underneath the wilderness and is plunged into a sub-Gilliamesque Norman Rockwell parody featuring Jason Robards dressed as a clown.  In the latter, the backstory of the characters, the conflicts and the chemistry between the five friends is strong enough to produce what could have been a very enjoyable, structurally sound ninety minute reunion piece, but apparent genre requirements lead to the whole thing going off in another rambling direction which is also brilliant in its own way but nothing we haven't seen before.  Put simply, Paul's better.  Eep.

The most surprising watch of the week was The Number's Station which based on the Netflix synopsis, poster and selected stills and the fact that it's post-2012 latter day aging Cusack looks like it's going to be a low-rent sub-24 Die Hard knock-off.  Actually, it's rather dark piece about a US government hitman trying to regain his focus having had a touch of the morals who finds himself defending the very broadcast unit which sends out the orders to his colleagues.  The central hour is a two-hander between him and the civilian cryptographer played by Malin Åkerman (Silk Spectre II in the Watchmen) who encodes the orders trapped in the station attempting to work out how they got into this mess, with Cusack knowing his duty is to shoot her but unable to pull the trigger.  Engrossing stuff, with Liam Cunningham as his boss.

The thing I drew most from Mitt, thanks to the director Greg Whiteley's choice of footage is that Romney's an ass tight political strategist who understands the process, understood his own place in the process but who in putting that understanding into practice stumbled due to his own inadequacies as a candidate.  In both election campaigns he predicted the outcome on a state-by-state level, realised when he'd given an excellent or poor performance in debates and that his campaign was effectively over after the 47% video and just seemed like someone who was in the wrong job but felt compelled to carry on regardless due to his family's history.  The interviews with his sons about the strain of a political campaign are perhaps most telling, especially in relation to the difference between the public face and the private pain.

After the sheer lunacy of last year's #whowatchorbust and #awardswatch, I fell a bit behind with contemporary movies and the general discourse so #futurewatch has essentially been replaced with #2013watch beginning with Oz: The Great and Powerful which against that discourse I utterly adored even if initially James Franco seems to be doing for Johnny Depp what Depp himself did for Keith Richards in the Pirates films.  Watching in 2D, the sections which are clearly supposed to wow us in 3D are all to plain, but what wowed me was Michelle Williams's perfectly observed recreation of original Glinda Billie Burke's body language especially the wand work and Mila Kunis's full on Margaret Hamilton impersonation.  Neither will ultimately ever be out of work as character actresses, will they?

Our Beautiful Game.

"Our Beautiful Game" National Football Museum from Centre Screen Productions on Vimeo.

Film "Our Beautiful Game" was created to feature on a massive 180 degree screen at the National Football Museum in Manchester which is now housed in the old Urbis building. As the producer Lucy Faye Dawson explains on her website, it was "shot at 4K resolution on the RedCam, the film is projected at a huge scale in the museum's dedicated cinema and together with Bent Ear's full 7.1 surround audio mix, it works to completely immerse the audience in the world of football."

Like Cinemarama which was equally designed to be projected in a circular space, watching this on a flat screen on offers a partial indication of what the experience must be like though unlike Cinerama it has less of the bendy line syndrome due to the original photography compensating for the curvature of the screen, though the slight crooked nature of some of the goal posts shows it hasn't been eliminated completely.

The ratio works well for the subject matter.  Those goal posts fit just within the centre of the shot while allowing for the sides of the image to still show foreground play and background landscape, of allowing action scenes to include both a goal and the crowds reaction unhampered in the same shot. The shots of the two kids in what looks like Everton Park are gorgeous.  Perhaps all Cinerama needed was time and better technology.

Mostly it's poignant and nostalgic and even manages to resonate with someone like me whose interest in football ended with Everton's loss to Manchester United in the 1985 FA Cup final with its subsequent hours of tears and heartache and tweenage vows of never again.  Football was mostly killed for me that day.  I was eleven.  This rather makes me wonder what I've been missing.  Too late now, though.

"And here we are once again at the sixteenth annual New Year Rockin Eve coming to you live from the..."

That Day As January shifts into February and we all begin to get the measure of 2014, here's a short documentary about one of the icons of the turning of the year, One Times Square in New York and because I'm me, there was indeed a moment while watching this when I did say, out loud, "Oh so that's why it's called Times Square ..."

Ken and Alex.

Theatre Ah, the BBC. Still producing for radio the projects which we wish were on television:

"Kenneth Branagh and Alex Kingston to star in new BBC Radio 3 drama of Antony And Cleopatra for Shakespeare’s Birthday: Sunday 20 April

"Actors Kenneth Branagh and Alex Kingston will be cast as Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra in a special production directed by BBC Radio drama’s Alison Hindell for BBC Radio 3 to mark the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth.

"Commenting on the announcement, Kenneth Branagh said: "I'm so happy to be teamed again with Alison Hindell, whose brilliant production of Life And Fate was one of the great pleasures of my work in radio. I'm also excited to be reunited with Alex Kingston after our hugely rewarding partnership in Macbeth on stage. To play another pair of Shakespeare's great couples, and for a personally beloved medium, is a privilege."

In the process of finding the original press release for this (I originally saw it at The Stage), I found the original release announcing Sally Wainwright's Last Tango in Halifax which I now discover was originally also called Antony and Cleopatra. I bet there was a meeting at some point when someone said "Won't people think it's the Shakespeare?" and so it was changed.

JFK's Final Days.

JFKs Final Days from Amon Carter Museum on Vimeo.

History Produced by The Sixth Floor Museum at the Dealey Plaza, this documentary shorts cuts together film and video footage from a range of sources to create a visual collage of the Kennedy's final few days, detailing the various events attended and speeches in chronological order.  The effect mimics the editing style of Oliver Stone's mid-career films, the cross cutting between colour and black and white and film stocks, but this, despite the rather forbidding voiceover, is more involving because this is about what would otherwise have been incidental moments in a President's life given greater import by subsequent events.

It was created to coincide with an exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Hotel Texas: An Art Exhibition for the President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy, which brought together a collection of paintings which had been gathered and hung in the Kennedy's hotel room during their stay in Dallas which included a Russell, a Picasso and a Van Gogh. Presumably because this was the most secure hotel room in the city at the time it was felt they'd be quite safe. The exhibition's landing page includes clearer images of the paintings in situ as well as the paintings themselves along with audio testimony from witnesses.

Genre Games: Romantic Tragedies.

Film Let's begin. Watching The Broken Circle Breakdown the other night, I noticed fairly quickly that its editing structure mirrored 500 Days of Summer, another film about sour relationships and I also realised that over the past few years I've watched plenty of films about relationship that end badly and in thinking about writing about genre, I wondered if it was possible to group these films together. As with all of these genre games, the extent to which there’s such a thing as a “romantic tragedy” is up in the air but I’m going to attempt some definitions and hope your reaction won't be "Yes, and?"

 It’s certainly not used as a marketing tool in the same way as “romantic comedy” and on the Wikipedia page for romance films, the kinds of work which I’m about to discuss are separated between “romantic drama” or “chick flick” neither of which really captures what they’re about. Though I’m sticking with “romantic tragedy” as a description as the antonym for “romantic comedy” and tradition, other descriptions might be “the weepy” or “heartbreak films” (as per this Time Out list) but again both of those are too loose and suggest too much when really the content is quite specific.

WARNING: In writing about the "romantic tragedy" it became fairly apparent pretty quickly that by definition it's a bit of a SPOILER. Romantic comedy has a built in expectation which the audience is entirely "in" on. With "romantic tragedies" the outcome isn't always set and although I'm going to go against the film studies grain and talk about film in very general terms as much as possible, there may be the odd thing which, even by labelling it a "romantic tragedy" could be a SPOILER. It's also true that even those films with advertising which suggests that it's going to be a bit grim, the outcome still isn't as obvious as in a romantic comedy so certain things could also be inferred. In other words, BEWARE and BE CAREFUL when reading the following.  The problem with reading film criticism if you're a film fan (as though anyone else would read this stuff) is that in order to successfully analyse a film you have analyse the ending.

Syntactic?

Arguably, this is where the “romantic tragedy” is at its most obvious. In a romantic comedy a boy meets girl and after a series of obstacles, jobs, class, finance, rival suitors or their own personality differences, the screwball elements, they fall madly passionately in love and the film tends to end in a kissing scene. A “romantic tragedy” features many similar elements but those obstacles usually become utterly life changing and insurmountable across the course of the film, with even sudden deaths at the ends of these films sign posted and foreshadowed throughout.

Note that “romantic tragedies” don’t always end in death. If there are sub-genres its between the ways in which the central relationship ends negatively, between death, divorce or simple break-up. The key element is that that the film ends with the two protagonists not together, that there is no final run to an airport or apartment or New Year’s Eve ball, no grand gesture featuring dancing and singing or simply turning up.  Most of the time, one or other of the people in the relationship will simply disappear from the story and the audience is purposefully left without the joy of the reunion.

But I have noticed that it's rare for a "romantic tragedy" to begin in the style of a straight out romantic comedy, at least not one that I've seen, there are always discordant notes, and its these notes which create the variance with the other genre because the filmmakers, from the writer to the director to the studio usually want to signpost to the audience the kind of film they're watching from the off.  Unless its some kind indie experiment, they're very careful to make sure that while we're watching Friends With Benefits, Justin Timberlake isn't going to accidentally fall of his building or contract rabies.

It's the methodology of how the filmmakers paint up this sign post which is ultimately, I think, what brings all of these films together in the genre and how it would be possible, like other genre films, to know what kind of film we're watching early.  Which makes me wonder if, even if they don't use the label "romantic tragedy" and audiences don't necessarily call them that or could directly describe as they could with a romantic comedy, they find themselves subliminally following its tropes so that in a circular logic the audience understands what kind of film they're watching.  Welcome to genre theory.

Here's what I think sets a "romantic tragedy" apart from a straight romantic or relationship drama.  I think that it's because the filmmakers tell their story in a non-linear or flashback way which bounces around the happy and sad moments of the relationship.  That methodology is one of distraction or rather of to some extent giving the audience many of the elements of a romantic comedy whilst simultaneous removing its satisfactions and the way this is achieved is strongly connected to how the film is edited.

Off the top of my head, The Notebook, Blue Valentine, The Broken Circle Breakdown, Iris, 500 Days of Summer, The Vow, The English Patient, arguably Forrest Gump, possibly Titanic all have a love story with romantic comedy elements which are told in a non-linear fashion, albeit sometimes with one character who's effectively already had the unhappy ending reflecting back on the golden years.  Sometimes the films foreground this structure in story terms, notably The Time Traveller’s Wife, Looper and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

On the surface, this resorting to messing about with the temporal order would seem to be for the purposes of creating some kind of levity, of including some trailer friendly moments of romance. But within the body of the film, the effect is to put the knife in as we enjoy the elements of a romantic comedy, the meet-cute, the screwball, knowing full well that it’s all going to end badly. That’s why The Notebook is such a killer surely to make grown men weep. Which isn’t to say they don’t seek to surprise and add an extra level of tragedy, the “life sucks and just when you think it can’t suck any more, it does" element.

Closer analysis would reveal how the transitions between the stories are achieved, but from memory there always seems to be a scene where the couple is shown in a position of total bliss which is then replaced with, sometimes in the same locale,  a moment when everything's gone to shit.  That's certainly true of The Broken Circle Breakdown, The Vow and 500 Days of Summer, the male protagonist looking on towards what they've lost.  We'll talk about the gender politics later, but the other element drawn from most romantic comedies is the favouring of the male protagonist.

Employing a flashback structure necessarily creates tension for the viewer because most often they're not made aware of how the relationship ended from the off, the filmmakers withhold expositional information, the hierarchy of knowledge in a "romantic tragedy" is mixed and fluctuating with the audience in a objective position relentlessly attempting to piece together the details of the relationship.  Our thought processes in this kind of "romantic tragedy" are forever on alert which unlike a romantic comedy can have a distancing effect.

The withholding of narrative information is an important part of romances in general, but in romantic comedies, especially high concept ones, it tends to be subjective, as one half of a relationship discovers the other half is potentially unobtainable somehow and that can also be a feature here and a source of tragedy.  But in these kinds of films, because of the flashback element, the audience is in an objective decision and their thought processes are probably more akin to someone watching detective fiction, piecing together the available evidence, reacting in-kind when information is revealed to them.

Of course the problem is that not all films about romances with unhappy or melancholy endings utilise a non-linear or flashback structure especially not the antecedents which we'll talk about below, with Love Story as the prime example.  This is true.  But in genre theory, it's not unknown for there to be exceptions either because the filmmaker is attempting to subvert genre rules on purpose or because as would be the case here, the genre rules haven't been set down by anyone yet.  Plus it's also possible that I'm simply wrong about this cycle or there's some deeper rule set which would only become obvious through closer analysis.

But what's notable is that most of the examples I can think of still use a methodology of distraction in various ways.  Melinda and Melinda and Sliding Doors compare and contrast the comic and tragic, cutting between the two just like the above examples but in a linear fashion, before ultimately deciding if one genre or the other is best.  One Day and Brokeback Mountain utilises a year step structure which allows it to withhold narrative information (though it's true that much of time it's in a subjective way) (there's also probably some analysis which could be done on how their approach differs to When Harry Met Sally).

Plus we might ask if its possible for a film to be a "romantic tragedy" if the couple still stay together at the end.  Emma Thompson's story in Love Actually (grr),  Take This Waltz and Revolutionary Road are examples of this as are many Douglas Sirk films.  My attitude is that they're probably not, that they should quite happily remain amongst the "women's films" suggested by Molly Haskell with some further consideration about whether in all of this I'm simply noticing a sub-genre of the "melodrama" and gathering together films which just happen to have a similar narrative structure.

Plus there are awkward films like The Vow in which, again spoiler warning, they have many of the elements of a "romantic tragedy" in terms of structure but the characters get back together at the end.  But one of the points that film makes (over and over and over again) is that Rachel McAdams's character's amnesia leads her to become a different person so that the person Channing Tatum falls for is gone.  There's an argument to be made, perhaps, that the first half follows the rules of the "romantic tragedy", the second half the "romantic comedy" in the way it deals with genre ala From Dusk Till Dawn, but let's not get too sucked into this.  Ahem.

Obviously all of this is suspect anyway because I'm approach it with just a few films.  If I was writing this as a dissertation I'd have to watch a whole lot more of them, looking for commonalities, doing much more to disprove the theory, especially when considering films in other genres like Ghost, Edward Scissorhands, The Fly, Bonnie and Clyde, Iris, Bright Star and Last Year at Marienbad.  I’m aware too that my world cinema choices have been thin but that’s because this is a genre which has an anti-matter element and it’s rare for international romantic comedies not to have some negative motif anyway.

Semantic.

Like romantic comedies which is also essentially structural genre it isn’t always obvious simply by looking at one of these films that the content will be tragic.  I've seen whodunnits which beginning looking like one of these films before someone dies early and the detective protagonist wanders in.  The best evidence you might gather is in locales. Modern romantic tragedies often feature at least one scene set in a hospital or doctor’s office because one of the characters is suffering from a life threatening illness or sudden accident though that tends only to be in the sub-genres that end in death and indeed there are romantic comedies which also have hospitals because one of the characters is in the medical profession or there’s some kind of comedy injury. If there’s some divorce element there might be a lawyers office.

Characters

Like romantic comedies, there aren’t many hard and fast rules on the kinds of characters which appear in these films, though there is an component of the upwardly mobile independently wealthy, of taking romantic comedy characters and destroying their lives. What is noticeable is how often, just like romantic comedies, the male protagonist has the most narrative agency, with the female character only really existing or indeed dying to show the effect it has on them, with the girlfriend or wife the most likely to drop from the narrative and it's about how the male character copes with moving on.

Antecedents

Romeo and Juliet, obviously, though notice just how linear Shakespeare’s play is in comparison to filmic examples but also note how tonally when the play has been adapted into film, there tends to be a sense of needing to foreground the ending, even though the play itself, for all the exposition in the opening chorus, only really changes its tone from comedy when Romeo kills Tybalt. Before that the rivalry between the family is comic and light-hearted and there’s a sense that the story could go either way. Anthony and Cleopatra perhaps too though like Amour, it’s about the tragic end of the relationship rather than the start and so isn’t quite fit the “romantic tragedy” model which covers everything from the meeting onwards.

Generally in film studies when defining a genre it’s customary to look for earlier films which seem like but don’t quite fit what’s under discussion. The Great Train Robbery looks like a western, for example. With the “romantic tragedy” we’re in the realm of Brief Encounter, An Affair To Remember, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Love Story and City Lights and it’s interesting to note how “linear” those films are too in general though Brief Encounter has the clearest influence on the list above in terms of developing towards a somewhat flashback structure. But we’re (or rather I'm) stuck with the inherent problem of trying to define a genre based on too small numbers of examples.  See above.  When I originally began writing I tried to work in Love Story too by suggesting it was simply a different type of "romantic tragedy" which was linear but simply cut out all the jokes.  Shrugs.  Moves on.

Casting

Interestingly, like westerns, these films do attract certain actors. Rachel McAdams in particular has cornered the market between The Notebook, The Time Traveller’s Wife and The Vow, which almost make up a kind of thematic trilogy of sorts. Ryan Gosling too, with The Notebook defining things and Blue Valentine, and you could make a weirdish argument for including Lars and the Real Girl.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Scarlett Johansson, Michelle Williams, Ann Hathaway and the Gyllenhaals are all proponents.  But it’s also true they’ve made just as many romantic comedies but they’re rarely open for award nominations whereas these films, because they’re dramas, are more likely to attract such nominations perhaps because they’re considered to be more profound in some way though there are anomalies.

Adverting posters

The key thing with "romantic tragedy" posters is that they often feature an embrace or more importantly, with few exceptions, the characters aren't looking at us. The Notebook, Blue Valentine, The Broken Circle Breakdown, Iris, 500 Days of Summer, The Vow or The English Patient.  Unlike some (disaster films which tend to have lots of star faces and source of the disaster emblazoned on them) you couldn't define a genre this way, but it's a decent marker.  In contrast, notice how romantic comedy posters are all about looking us in the eye, teasing us into the cinema often against a white background, tragedies preferring real landscapes.  Which puts us right back into the area of the former's tendency for objective storytelling and the latter's subjectivity.

Trailers



Pianos are the order of the day or percussive instruments. Often strings, lots of strings. Sometimes a voice over, especially if there’s some kind of high concept element. The structure always tends to be same with roughly the first minute dedicated to the meet cute, with actual first meeting in the opening moments and the second minute suggesting to the viewer that the course of true love isn’t going to run smooth which oddly flattens out the narrative of the films, which do have a flashback element.



As a side note, this approach seems to be the exact opposite of trailers for romantic comedies, where the down note comes up front, usually some kind of relationship inadequacy and the meet cute and comic elements appear later on, the Sleepless in Seattle model, though of course that’s an imperfect case because the meet cute between the actors, Joe Versus The Volcano accepted, structurally doesn’t happen until You’ve Got Mail and the trailer for that compensates. Thinking on, Joe Vs The Volcano looks like a cross genre experiment within all of this.



The exceptions to this rule tend to be the high concept pieces where an explanation for what the audience might expect is for-grounded, in Sliding Doors, in The Time Traveler Wife, in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or in the rare instances where the narrative is solidly linear for various reasons like Love and Other Drugs, Remember Me or Nicholas Sparks adaptations and the meet cute often doesn’t appear into some time later into the piece, though its worth noting how often the male protagonist is still in charge of the story in these things.



Again, there are exceptions.  Blue Valentine's trailer's very sweet and the only indications you might infer about something being up are Michelle Williams's tears and the all too tight cuddling throughout.



Conclusion

I think it does, I think there is a “romantic tragedy” genre with its own rules and commonalities. Like I said at the beginning, I don’t think it’s ever going to be used as a selling tool, the word “tragedy” has too many other connotations outside of film having become the more emotive, human terms often substituted for disaster in news headlines, but in terms of the classical model and on the technical level of offering an opposite of romantic comedy it certainly works.

Little boxes, little boxes.

Art Catching up on the pre-Christmas This American Life, I heard yet again of people doing would might be my perfect job. Andy Warhol's Time Capsules was a collecting project in which the artist, from 1974 onwards, stored personal items in anonymous cardboard boxes, six hundred and twelve of them.

Generally kept secret during his lifetime, they were discovered when he died and since there's been an ongoing project to open and discover exactly what's in them.

Starlee Kine meets the staff at the Warhol Museum undertaking the task.

See also Stanley Kubrick's boxes, I expect. And since we're on the subject:

Rebel Time Lord.

TV Just when words like hiatus were being muttered and it was all feeling a bit 2009 in Doctor Who terms as the post-50th hangover begins to set in, this happened:



Seems designed to evoke the first three Doctors simultaneously (with just a smidge of Cumberbatch's Sherlock and Hammer which'll please future showrunner Mark Gatiss). To an extent it's practically what Matt Smith was wearing at the end with a different jacket. The no-tie approach but still buttoned up is an interesting choice, I suppose. Where's 1993's Lowri Turner when you need her?

Meanwhile everyone's talking in soundbites.

Capaldi says: "He's woven the future from the cloth of the past. Simple, stark, and back to basics. No frills, no scarf, no messing, just 100 per cent Rebel Time Lord."

Moffat says: "New Doctor, new era, and of course new clothes. Monsters of the universe, the vacation is over - Capaldi is suited and booted and coming to get you!"

Charlotte Moore, Controller of BBC One, says: "Peter Capaldi's Doctor is officially recorded in history today with the unveiling of his new costume. It's sharp, smart and stylish - The Twelfth Time Lord means business."

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the photo is that for all the talk about his age, Capaldi looks like he's still going to be a very physical Doctor all thrusting limbs and so forth, though I'm not sure about the running in those shoes. Whenever I have nice shoes like that they have a crease in them within minutes because I've had to run for the bus.