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Never Let Me Go

In 1952, the breakthrough came. All disease and illness were cured, all disability wiped out. By the 1960s, age expectancy reached over 100 years.

This is the opener for Never Let Me Go, a love-triangular pseudo-sci-fi-drama in which mankind undergoes the dystopian treatment in an alternative history, where science and technology have made the simultaneous leap to put an end to all (physical) human suffering. This, we are shown, is achieved through harvesting body parts and vital organs, taken from mild-mannered clones, to transplant into and onto the broken bodies of the higher strata of society. By now you could be tempted to think Brave New World or possibly Gattaca, and ponder that we might already be well-acquainted with this plot.

Yellow Ostrich

Photo from Stadiums and Shrines

Alex Schaaf, the sole full-time member of Yellow Ostrich, seems like he fully understands the wants and needs of the web 2.0 ADHD-afflicted music fan. New album ‘The Mistress’ is his sixth release this year, making up eight in total since March 2009, and they’re all available for free at his Bandcamp page.

As a taster, here’s the song that snapped me out of my recent malaise and got me excitedly passing around mp3s with the other people I know who have nothing to do of a Friday evening (OR WHO AREN’T IN ICELAND):

Yellow Ostrich – WHALE by snipelondon

The Arbor

Director Clio Barnard
Country UK

Drawing on verbatim theatre – the use of the real words of interviewees rather than scripted words from a playwright’s head – The Arbor tells the story of Andrea Dunbar, who wrote three critically acclaimed plays about life on the infamous Buttershaw Estate in Bradford, before dying of a brain hemorrhage in her local pub at the age of 29. She left behind young daughters Lisa and her older sister Lorraine, who is a central character in the film. I say “character” because although the film’s director, Clio Barnard accumulated over 90 hours interviews with Lorraine and other relatives and friends of Andrea Dunbar, she chose to film professional actors lip synching to the recordings.

Barnard interweaves the scenes of the actors with footage of Dunbar from a 1980 BBC documentary, readings from the playwright’s letters and an outdoor performance of The Arbor itself on the streets and yards of Buttershaw. It all adds up to an ambitious treatment of the life of a playwright who lived fast, died young and probably could have spent more time with the kids. Yet while the starting point is the life of Andrea Dunbar, Barnard’s film eventually becomes an intimate portrayal of the family she created when she wasn’t writing, particularly Lorraine.

Having been shunted between foster care and relatives after her mother died, Lorraine’s is tale of substance abuse, teenage pregnancy, and domestic violence, all echoing the life of Dunbar. What separates the child from the parent though are the prison terms that Lorraine has served, most recently for the death of her own baby son by neglect. It’s interesting that younger sister Lisa has fond memories of Dunbar while Lorraine only wishes her mother was alive so she could tell Andrea how much she has to answer for.

The result of Barnard’s deft interweaving of media is that The Arbor becomes neither a documentary nor a feature, but a hybrid that tells a richer tale than just interviews could.

Let Me In

Director Matt Reeve
Country USA

In Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 film adaptation of John Alvide Lindqvist’s novel Let the Right One In, 12 year-old Oskar is bullied at school and neglected by his divorced mother. A strange, slightly creepy kid, he befriends the new girl in his Stockholm apartment block, Eli, who is even stranger, creepier, and requires fresh blood to exist. A refreshing, wholly original take on the classic vampire story, Let The Right One In took around eleven million dollars at the box office. Claiming, however, that film made only two million, Hammer Films executives decided to remake it, naming the kids Owen and Abby and switching their hair colours.

Why did this film need to be remade? Let Me In, the American version, is actually a lovely film. The casting is, once again, excellent. The pacing and atmosphere spooky. The blood is still red. Some things have been accentuated, others diminished, but they are very much the same movie. There’s nothing I can say, if you’ve seen the previous one, you don’t already know. The budget for special effects has been increased, but doesn’t add much to the overall quality of the story.

Still, this is not the big blockbuster fans of the original film were afraid of. When bands cover songs of other bands they usually change it to make it their own. Sometimes, however, they just play the song exactly as people know it as an easy way to fill out a set. If the reason Eli needed to become Abby was because some tanned guy in a three piece suit believed Americans will only see a movie if the characters have American accents, then this suddenly purposeless film becomes, itself, a member of the ghoulish undead. If, however, Matt Reeve’s new version was actually made because he loved the story and wanted a chance to see Chloë Grace Morentz suck vast quantities of blood… well, I guess that’s cool.

Le Quattro Volte

Director Michelangelo Frammartino
Country Italy-Germany-Switzerland

Calabria has remained essentially unchanged for centuries, perhaps millennia. In Le Quattro Volte an old goatherd follows his flock as they rummage the same route of grass and rocks they have known all their lives. Each day he gives a pint of milk to the caretaker of the local church in exchange for her sacred floorsweepings, which he dissolves in water and drinks every night as a tonic. One day he loses his dose and, unable to get more, dies.

Here the story, rather than ending, simply takes up with a new hero, a baby goat, born the day the old man expires. The kid, stumbling about confused and eventually lost by a massive tree, passes on its story to that tree and its role in the life of the village and the chief local industry of making charcoal.

Le Quattro Volte moves as slowly as clouds in Calabria. Without the focus of a camera the activities of a goat, or the process of wood smouldering to brittle carbon would seem like non-events. But by letting these non-events unfold in real time Michelangelo Frammartino subtly guides the narrative with simple camera work and editing, letting the viewer invest passing events with character, meaning, and plot. There is no dialogue, except for goats bleating “Hey! Over here! What about me! I’m hungry!” and their bells clanging a rambling soundtrack. It almost seems like a documentary without the intrusion of a narrator.

Definitely not a film for everyone, but if you have the patience you can find yourself sinking into the timeless patterns of an ancient land and the people and animals who exist briefly upon it.

The Nine Muses

Director John Akomfrah
Country UK

The first bad sign is the endless opening credits for UK funding bodies and NAXOS CDs. The second omen was the ten minutes spent looking at snow.

Director John Akomfrah apparently wanted to create a lyrical homage to the mass immigration to Britain during the 50s and 60s from Africa, Asia, India, the Caribbean. So, naturally, he shot fully half this documentary in Alaska.

Titles appear periodically, listing the nine muses, daughters of Mnemosyne and Zeus. With the exception of Terpsichore, the muse of dance, the titles have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the film. Cut to snowy mountain thousands of miles from the subject. Here is a tree. Now, the same tree for another month. Compare and contrast. Which side has more icicles? This is a horse. Here’s some snow falling backwards. Why? Some obscure ruling of British arts funding gets you more money if you can show frozen water defying gravity.

Somebody gave Akomfrah a room full of crumbling celluloid and a lot of splicing tape. Clips, hundreds of clips, thousands of clips from the NAXOS archive. Scratchy recordings of old songs, live performances, grainy old b/w footage of people in hats wandering filthy streets, in refineries boiling steel, getting off boats and hugging… Where’s that horse got to? Still running about. Lovely. No, go back! That bit about people getting off boats! Finally, something to do with the subject of the movie! Having had their countries claimed by the British Empire millions of people uprooted their families to come here for a chance at a better life, bringing their cultures and aspirations. Most found only racism and ostracism. Richard Burton reads Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood for fifteen minutes, and Laurence Olivier reads a bunch of Shakespeare for thirty. Another tree. Many trees. Every tree in Alaska. Give each tree nine minutes. Cut to Rick Astley singing Swedish opera for eleven days. Intersperse with Rasta dude in shades lying on the ground looking bored. Yaaay! Horsie! I’m glad it’s still doing well, having fun.

All the pictures in the world do not eventually tell a story, or even give an impression. Endless layers of content result in an absence of context. It’s one thing to challenge your audience, creating a clash of wonderful images and sounds, but expecting the viewer to make the film for you is lazy. This film took two years to make in order to find enough snow. It is four hundred and fifty years long, and says nothing very eruditely. Akomfrah was available following the screening for questions. I wanted to meet him, to ask if the horse was very smooth to pet, if he had a chance to feed it an apple, but I was afraid I might slap him.

So I let the horse go. Cue shot of snow angel. Cut to bullfight. Old Irish gentleman eating cheese. A hamster.

THE END.

Tabloid

Director Errol Morris
Country USA

Unless you believe in reincarnation, this is your one chance to live a life your friends and family will recount to nervous laughter at your funeral. If you’re Joyce McKinney those tales will include kidnapping, manacling and sexually ravishing an overweight, brainwashed Mormon, hopping between continents disguised as a nun, a Mexican bandito and Cher to escape the law and papparazzi, cloning the dog that saved your life from your other dog, and generally living the life of a unicorn. What’s more, you’ll do all this before you’re fifty so you can appear in the documentary of your life.

In 1977 McKinney wet the pants of countless tabloid editors with her ongoing farce. The country was enthralled and appalled in equal measure. Tabloid, a pacey, racy, relentlessly funny documentary features McKinney in person, delighted to have another streak in the spotlight, and completely failing to realise she is the butt of every joke, as well as several of the original players of this epic absurdity, including journalists who helped stir the pot.

She is clearly more bananas than a monkey’s buffet, and I felt sorry for her, especially given the monstrous cynicism and malicious sneering of the journalists reliving their favourite headlines. On the other hand, and crucially, McKinney did all of this to herself, and here she is spinning a fresh shitstorm. She hasn’t learned a single lesson, despite claiming a 168 IQ (assuming IQs actually mean anything). However, one definition of genius is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts or beliefs in your head. Perhaps the flip side of genius is to hold no contradictory notions. When the papers realised that the Skiing Down Everest With a Carnation Up Her Nose KcKinney of ’77 and the Cloned Puppy Quintuplet McKinney of ’08 were one and the same and resumed hounding her, McKinney shrugs. “I really don’t see the connection”.

Thank goodness. It is so refreshing to have media scandals reaffirm the beauty of human stupidity rather than getting bogged down with reiterating how pointless it is to have faith in anything.

London agenda for Friday 15 October

London agenda for Friday 15 October
1. Anaïs Mitchell with Dan Michaelson and the Coastguards at the Kings Head [Londongigs]
2. Insect Guide, Lillian Gish, Blindness, Alphastate, You, Coma, Karma Deva [Londongigs]
3. Get initimate with Absolut Artists’ Salon [Le Cool]
4. Prepare for the apocalypse Radio Gagarin [Run Riot]
5. Be hedonistic at Bal Argentée [Run Riot]

The End Times: Apprentice recap, Toby Young, Angry Birds, Boris Johnson gags and jokes

The End Times: Apprentice recap, Toby Young, Angry Birds, Boris Johnson gags and jokes

1. The Apprentice week two recap [Sabotage Times]
2. The leaders of the coalition may look like aristocrats, but they think they are meritocrats. Don’t count on noblesse [The Spectator] oblige
3. The physics of Angry Birds [Wired]
4. Mayor’s Question Time: Gags, jibes and insults