Eden Is West

What it lacks in palm trees, red carpets and yacht-borne photocalls, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London makes up for in… well, this comparison is pointless anyway because I don’t think I’m going to receive an invitation to a gala premiere at Cannes anytime soon, so a ticket to an opening night at the Ritzy in Brixton is about the best I can do for now.

The film I saw was Eden Is West. It is the story of one character – Elias – making a journey across Europe. One man undertaking an epic voyage? Like Odysseus, then? Well, kind of. More like Odysseus’ Trojan counterpart, Aeneas. The stoic hero travelled away from the hardship of the Trojan War to found a new city, Rome, and Elias is journeying away from the hardship of their current home in the East to find a new life, in the West.

Elias’ journey begins in an unidentified Eastern European country. There, he is packed with hundreds of other immigrants onto a rustbucket. Sailing (spluttering) across the Mediterranean, the ship is intercepted by Greek authorities. The crew desert their ‘cargo’, Elias jumps overboard and swims off into the night.

The next morning, he reaches a beach – a nudist beach in a luxury hotel complex. Instead of arriving on shore with nothing and having to put on clothes to blend into his surroundings, Elias actually must rid himself of his remaining possessions to fit in. The first of many playful, humorous and downright bizarre incidents, this scene reveals the mischievousness of director Costa-Gavras and sets the tone for Elias’ surreal onward journey.

For a while, it seems his travels will take him no further than the hotel. Full of different nationalities – French, Germans, Poles – the resort represents a mini-Europe. And as the film lingers there, Costa-Gavras is exploring the journeys that people have made – on holiday and in life. When the alarm is raised that illegal immigrants could be hiding in the hotel, for example, Elias avoids detection by pretending to be a handyman. A family asks him to fix their plumbing – very deliberately, this family is Polish.

Elias’ stay at the resort creates another parallel with Aeneas’ journey. The progress of the Trojan was stalled as he dwelt in the court of Dido, the Phoenician queen. Elias, too, embarks on an affair with an older lady, a divorcee from Hamburg. And, just like Aeneas, he cannot bring himself to say goodbye – deserting her in secret, at night.

Paris is Elias’ destination. The only reason, it seems, is that a French magician who performed at the hotel, with Elias as his sidekick, invited him to ‘come and find him’ if ever he was visiting the capital. So Elias decides to take up his offer.

Over the course of his journey, without money, possessions, friends or language, Eden Is West really gets going. Along the way, Elias encounters an eclectic bunch of characters – a pair of jolly German truckers, a bickering Spanish couple, hateful French factory workers. This steady influx of new characters enlivens the film and helps to make some interesting observations about the plight of an immigrant and, more importantly, how other people react to this plight.

Some help him towards his destinations; others try to prevent him from getting there. Some people mercilessly take advantage of him; others seem like they are exploitative but actually prove to be generous. Some immediately welcome him into their lives and treat him as their own; others straightaway mark him out as an outsider and treat him as someone with no rights.

And by making these observations, Eden Is West prompted me to think longer about how people I see begging in London ended up in that situation, and how people asking me for a few pence for the tube may have already been on an amazing journey.

Revolutionary Road & Mad Men

Watching Leonardo DiCaprio’s Frank Wheeler amongst the daily grey tide that flowed into and ebbed from Grand Central Station, I was reminded of another sharp-suited and skinny-tied character adrift on the same tide – (M)advertising extraordinaire Don Draper.

Our screens (both big and small) are going through a Fifties phase, and Revolutionary Road and Mad Men are the two leading examples. Both focus on troubling undercurrents flowing beneath pristine surfaces. Both feature a man with a beautiful wife and two happy children who resents his seemingly perfect existence, feels constrained by it, and is determined to break free of it.

Both men react to their situation, however, in different ways. Draper leads two separate, secret lives – one with his family in the suburbs, another with his two mistresses and his work in the city. He returns from the latter to the former only late at night – just enough time to tuck his children into bed and to sit in awkward silence with Betty, his wife.

Whereas Draper’s reaction is to close down, Wheeler’s is to open up. He just can’t stop talking. About anything. Even about his drunken fling with a nubile secretary. Which prompts April, his wife, to ask him ‘why are you telling me this?’

Frank thinks they can talk through their problems with each other will bring them together. It does, but towards a collision – an unremitting, unrecoverable collision.

Don thinks he and Betty can talk through their problems apart – he with his mistresses, and Betty with the psychiatrist to whom Don sends her. As an ad man, it is Don’s job to create, however illusorily, a sense of happiness. At home, he does exactly the same. His concealment postpones a collision and maintains the illusion of a functional relationship* – calm on the surface, discontented and rankling underneath.

The idea that ‘appearances can be deceptive’ makes the Fifties such an intriguing period. Partly because it’s interesting to delve beneath the façades (as I’ve clumsily attempted to do above). But also partly because, taken at face value, these façades are rather nice to look at.

Mad Men oozes style – from the glossy red lipstick and immaculate bouffants to the neatly-knotted ties and dazzling grey suits. The men in those suits were unabashed commercialists, driving people to spend and promising them that materials goods equated to feeling good. From their outfits, homes and cars, we see that the characters in Mad Men adhere to the principles they espouse – and from their turmoil, we see that these principles are false.

Revolutionary Road focuses less on the clothes the people of the Fifties were in, and more on the pressures they were under. To sharpen this focus, the film is infused with dreary dull colours. The costumes and set are grey, white, beige, brown – the design equivalent of saying ‘there’s nothing to see here’. Only at one point (I won’t give away exactly when) is this dullness enlivened with a bright colour – a symbol of the freshness and the fragility of life.

These intriguingly deceptive (and, in the case of Mad Men, alluringly attractive) appearances are, I think, the reason why the Fifties have been the subject of such current interest.

Just like in the post-war decade, recent years have seen opportunities grow and a belief established that success can – and should – be achieved by anyone. This preoccupation with ‘making it’ puts great value on outward gloss. That in turn leads to gloss being coated over fragile foundations.

With these foundations crumbling, everyone now seems to be questioning how ended up here in the first place. And I suppose looking at people like the Wheelers and the Drapers, who asked a similar question, might us help find an answer.

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*At least until the end of first season one – I'm a bit behind on the second. 

How Revolutionary Road Reveals The Secret Of Happiness

One by one, I’m working my way through the slew of thought-provoking, Oscar-contending films released at the start of the year. The Reader, Milk, Frost / Nixon all down. Next on the list was Sam Mandes’ adaptation of Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road.

The film reunites DiCaprio and Winslet, twelve years after their glacier-interrupted transatlantic voyage. Just as in Titanic, DiCaprio plays an impulsive adventurer who sweeps the beautiful if a little prim Winslet off her feet and into a whirlwind romance. But, this time, DiCaprio and Winslet are torn apart not when they hit an iceberg – but when they hit thirty.

Their characters Frank and April marry, have children, and move out of the city to leafy Connecticut. That’s when the relationship starts shipping water. April attempts to bail it out (last aquatic analogy, don’t worry) by suggesting that the family move to Paris. He will abandon his dull office job at Knox Business Machines and figure out what he wants to do with his life. She will support the family by working as a secretary.

With April’s suggestion, the dynamic in their relationship changes. The young Frank enthused about the joys of continental life. Now April has the energy and the adventure to liberate themselves from their suburban life, and he is becoming entrenched in it. Shortly after they met, April calls him ‘the most interesting person I have ever met’. By this point, he is no longer that person.

“Americans have always assumed, subconsciously, that every story will have a happy ending”. This quote, from the politician Adlai Stevenson, was pinned above Yates’ desk. For a fleeting moment, we think that the assumption will be proved correct – to begin with, Frank goes along with the plan to relocate to Paris. A happy ending is offered to us but disappears almost immediately. The bleakness descends and it is obvious that events will unravel, the relationship will disintegrate, and the ending will be anything but happy.

Frank’s initial enthusiasm about a new life in France quickly turns into growing hesitation. Perhaps because he feels a sense of innate duty to provide for his wife and children – he knows that his responsibilities as a ‘family man’ can be ignored temporarily (during his dalliances with the secretarial pool, for example) but not deserted forever.

‘Money’, however, ‘is always the reason but never the cause’, as says the son of Frank and April’s neighbourhood friends, who is supposedly afflicted with madness but is in fact the only character with the ability to see through the grey suburban fog and to be piercingly – and (too) candidly – perceptive.

So perhaps the reason for Frank’s unwillingness to start afresh is fear – fear that we can all recognise in ourselves. He is afraid to take a risk, because if he doesn’t try anything he won’t fail at anything. It’s better, he thinks, to sacrifice his own satisfaction for the good of his family and to wonder what might have been, than to gamble and to be embarrassed about what wasn’t.

What I found most interesting was that, when Frank agreed to go to Paris, something went click. His perception of the world around him changed. Knowing that he wouldn’t be there for the rest of his life, he started enjoying his time in the office – he started getting satisfaction from, and recognition for, his work. His fresh enthusiasm and newfound ability creates a paradox – the fact that he is leaving for Paris is the reason for his promotion, and the fact that he has been promoted gives him a reason for not leaving.

I think everyone experiences this paradox, to a lesser extent, when we plan a holiday. As soon as the forms are filled in at work and the flights and hotels are booked, a psychological shift occurs – and this shift affects our whole well-being.

For me, the benefits of going on holiday begin, and are in fact greatest, long before I actually depart. When I know that, in however many days time, I will be far far away from my desk, I enjoy my time there much more. I suddenly feel free of constraints and full of contentment as I work on projects – because I will soon be handing over these projects to someone else.

So perhaps happiness lies not in the places we find on away from home, but in the places we can find inside our own head.

Jeffrey Lewis TV

When I was growing up, my grandparents lived quite far away. So it was only on special occasions – birthdays, Christmases – that the three generations of my family all met up. Only once or twice a year did me and my sister, my parents and my grandparents spend time together.

This video reminded me of one of those special occasions. It bears little resemblance to a family reunion on the surface, I’ll admit. But it brings together three ‘generations’ of my favourite music – someone I liked at school, someone I discovered at university, and someone I’ve been listening to recently.

It's the first of a series made for The Guardian by Jeffrey Lewis, the New York anti-folk singer whose songs bring together small things (like moving house) and big things (like life and love) and strange things (like singing trees and creeping brains), and are filled with emptiness and hope in equal measure.

He is joined for a duet by Laura Marling, whose intricate, delicate songs about heartbreak and longing barely left my headphones (or my head) all last year.

And they cover a song called ‘Brain Damage’ by Eminem, who, for all his macho posturing and controversial lyrics, has an incredible way of telling a story – a skill that I appreciated as an angsty, befuddled 16-year old, and I still appreciate now, as an angsty, befuddled 25-year old.

Please watch it.

All That Jazz

The other night I went to a pub and there was a band playing. Nothing wrong with that, you might think. And I would agree with you. Except when the band is playing jazz. Which they were the other night.

Now, I’ve never really got into jazz. There are a couple of reasons why.

1. Words. I like words. And I like music to have words. So I tend to listen to songs. Not just songs. But mainly songs. Sometimes electronic music. Occasionally classical music. But never jazz. 

2. People. The people I know who like jazz don’t just like it. They don’t listen to it every now and then. They don’t just have a couple of records. They’re into it. They go on about it. They have an encyclopedic knowledge of it. They force you to look at their record collection as soon as you express the slightest interest in it, handing you obscure session tracks that they can’t believe you’ve heard of and that you absolutely need to listen to right now.

This enthusiasm isn’t a bad thing. Being passionate about music should be encouraged. It’s just that such die-hard fandom reinforces the idea of jazz being an exclusive club – a club that it’s impossible to join without owning the entire The Weather Report’s back-catalogue and turning your nose up at anyone who says ‘Jazz? Well, I quite like A Kind Of Blue’.

nb. I’m also aware that this idea may stem, in part, from watching The Fast Show:



And, when I was in the pub the other night, I realised that there was a 3.

This realisation came to me during the fourth seven-minute saxophone solo. Lengthy improvisation is a big part of jazz. But all too often a song seems to be superseded by these solos – it becomes a collection of individual performances rather than one cohesive piece.

I think jazz is the equivalent of this:



Skilful, yes. Admirable because of the amount of practice and determination it must take to master these skills, yes. Entertaining for about a minute, yes.

But showing-off? Devoid of any real meaning or significance? Rather pointless? Yes, yes and yes.

For me, jazz just consists of parts. These parts are intricate and pretty, but they don’t combine to form anything more than that.

Other forms of music, however, are much more effective at combining their parts to create a whole. On their own, the composite elements might appear to be simpler and less elaborate. But together, they create power and emotion and meaning. Rather like this:

Have A Nice Day

Bold geometric shapes, blocks of bright colour, large confident typography. Sometimes the most basic of elements can combine to form the most engaging of designs – like these Polish jam labels. 

Such clever designs of such everyday items reminded me of the uplifting work and the egalitarian approach of the Constructivists (whom I wrote about here).

The Constructivists believed that everybody has the ability to appreciate good design, and that good design has the power to affect everybody – to improve their lives, to lift their spirits, to make them feel positive about their country and their future.

Whoever designed these jam labels thought in the same way. They too must have believed that art belongs not just in galleries but also on the breakfast table. And they too believed that design has the potential to uplift and inspire – and to help get the day off to a good start.

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I came across the labels on the Delicious Industries blog, who in turn found them here.

Albion

After a few cold, fun days in Helsinki, I was stricken with a condition called continento-philia. This condition, I find, is normally induced by holidays abroad. It causes me to enthuse about any aspect of life in Europe and to be scathing about any aspect of life in Britain.

ie. The weather – ‘The weather in Britain is rubbish. I can’t build a snowman. And I can’t get a tan. It’s just grey and drizzly and boring’.

The people – ‘People on the continent seem so much more cultured and urbane. They wear stylish, modern clothing and spend all day sitting in cafes. I can’t understand what they’re saying, but I bet it’s something really intelligent’.

The transport – ‘Is that another No. 19 bus driving past because it’s too full? That wouldn’t happen in [European city from which I’ve just returned]. I’d be on the tram by now’.

As you can tell, when I suffer from continento-philia I get very annoying, very quickly. So I needed a powerful tonic – a dose of something unmistakeably British that would end my Blighty-bashing and remind me of all that is good about this Fair Land.

Albion, Terence Conran’s new English ‘caff’ / deli in Hoxton, seemed like a good place to go for treatment.

As soon as I walked through the shop, past plates stacked high with gingerbread men and baskets laden with rosy apples, and sat down at the table, I could feel myself getting better.

The space was light and airy – comfy red benches lined the walls, behind long wooden tables simply adorned with ketchup (Heinz) and brown sauce (HP).

The waiters, dressed in elegant utilitarian smocks, were attentive (but not overly) and friendly (but not ingratiatingly).

And, if ever there was an occasion to describe food as ‘scrumptious’, then this was it. Pork crackling was crunchy and chewy and sticky. Cauliflower cheese oozed out of the bowl and onto the spoon, weighed down by cheesy strands. Fish and chips moved much more swiftly from plate to mouth – the fish succulent and pearly white, coated in a bubbly batter; the chips perfectly sized (neither too chunky nor too thin).

It wasn’t just the food that caused my dormant patriotism to stir once more. The smallest details left me with a warm, nostalgic glow – the bill came on a flow blue Wedgewood plate, and the teapot was kept warm by a stripy cosy.

The whole place reminded me of the England of Just William, of Jennings and Darbishire, and of the Famous Five.

A place where all you needed in your pocket to get by was a ball of string and a conker. Where your uncle visited you at boarding school and took you out for a slap-up meal. Where an average Saturday consisted of going on a bike-ride round some hedgerowed lanes, exploring some caves, getting chased by a cantankerous landowner and ending up at a pal’s house for Victoria sponge and ginger beer.

This England is a place that I have certainly never experienced – because I was born in 1983, and grew up in Scotland and Wales. It’s a place that has probably never existed. But that doesn't matter. What does matter is that this place got me thinking ‘well, maybe Britain isn’t all that bad after all… maybe next time I’m booking a holiday I’ll forgo a Scandinavia city and opt for a Cotswolds village instead’.

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You can read more about Albion here and here. And you can see other things that I like about Britain here and here.

Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism

I went to see Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism at the Tate Modern the other day. It’s a nicely put together exhibition. Enough pieces but not too many, and the two artists’ stylistic progression flows clearly from room to room.

I was given an unwitting introduction to the show by Child 44, a book that I read a couple of weeks ago. Rob Tom Smith’s taut thriller is a murder mystery, set in Communist Russia – a state in where murder officially didn’t exist.

It was also a state where, deep in the bowels of the Lubyanka prison, loyalty was enforced by brutality. Where punishment was meted out before questions were asked. Where the slightest suspicion or the shakiest rumour of anti-Soviet activity resulted in torture and death. Where everyone, never mind intellectuals or artists, was viewed with mistrust.

And the art of this period – during Stalin’s reign – reflected this fear, this need for overt displays of loyalty to the state. Monumental statues, flattering portraits, celebratory friezes.

But the Constructivists belonged to a different period. Tsarist rule had come to an end, Lenin had led the revolution, Russia was starting afresh. For this new dawn, Rodchenko and Popova created a new style – a style that looked towards the future with optimism and boldness.

Slogans are enlivened with sharp linear designs, audacious perspectives, and photography taken from unusual angles. The Constructivists’ art is challenging, but it is also rooted in everyday life. It is useful, it is purposeful – and it speaks to the people without patronising them.

To reach the masses, Rodchenko and Popova refused to restrict themselves to one specialism but rather worked across a number of fields – posters, clothes, furniture, film idents, theatre sets and costumes.

Their approach struck a chord with me. Experimenting with various disciplines and techniques. Applying what they learnt when working on a billboard and applying it to designing a teacup. Ignoring superficial differences and instead seeing connections.

For me, the things I like – the things I attempt to write about here – only make sense when linked together. Music, film, art, adverts, books… not isolated elements, but connected forms. All containing words, sights and sounds. Which feed into and off each other. And create one shape.

The Constructivists acknowledged the existence of this interconnected shape. By seeing it, they could reach millions of people with their work.

And I think we should all see it, too. By spotting connection between things, we can understand them more, enjoy them more – and, most importantly, discover other things just like them.

Frost / Nixon

I shouldn’t really be admitting what I'm about to write, considering this blog is supposed to be about culture.

I don’t go to the theatre much. I don’t really know why. I’m sure I’m missing out. Maybe I just have too many preconceptions about what it will be like (not so much what the play itself will be like, but what the experience will be like). It will be too expensive, I think. If it’s any good the tickets will sell out, I think. So I don’t go.

And because I don’t go, I don’t realise that these preconceptions are entirely false – that, even when booked at the last minute, tickets are neither extortionately expensive nor completely unattainable.

One of the last plays I saw, and the last play I saw that made me think theatre was really special and I should really start abandoning my prejudices and going more (although evidently not enough to make me actually do it), was Frost / Nixon.

So I was quite excited when I heard that the play was being made into a film, with the two lead actors who appeared in the stage production, Michael Sheen / Frank Langella (although evidently not enough to make me go and see it as soon as it was released in January).

But go and see it I did at the weekend. And I really enjoyed it. 

Not quite as much as the play. The whole ‘story’ is centred on the interview between the confident and blustering talk show host David Frost and the resigned and disgraced President Nixon – two men sitting opposite each other, talking.

Since Frost / Nixon the play was, by its nature, simpler, it was easier for it to strip away all the other aspects of the story, all the extraneous details and distractions – and focus instead on the electrifying intensity of the interview, the tense tactics of this meeting of two minds.

For all it adds sets and colour and locations and pace, Frost / Nixon the film does its best to retain the intensity and tension of the centrepiece interview – and by and large it succeeds. Due mainly to the strength of the performances of Sheen / Langella.

Sheen’s Frost is, as you might expect, louder and brasher on screen than on stage. He captures the daring and audaciousness of a man who put everything on the line for a shot at fame and acclaim – an English St. George who boldly crossed the Atlantic to slay Nixon’s dragon.

Much has been said about Sheen’s finely studied performances of real-life characters (David Frost follows Kenneth Williams, and precedes Brian Clough) blurring the line between acting and impersonating. 

Of course, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that Sheen’s performances are emotionally convincing. Which they undoubtedly are.

But I think the actor vs. impressionist distinction is an interesting one, especially since Sean Penn won an Oscar for his immaculately judged portrayal of Harvey Milk.

And I think this distinction really depends on the sort of person who is being portrayed. Milk and his story weren’t well-known (to me at least). He was a serious individual. His voice and his mannerisms were distinctive, but they didn’t define who he was. As a result, Penn’s performance was that of an actor. And it was recognised and awarded as such.

Frost, however, is familiar and recognisable (to me at least). His louche reputation makes it hard to take him seriously. His languid delivery is his trademark. He is his voice. (Similarly, it would be hard for anyone to manage a convincing performance as Loyd Grossman).

For that reason, Sheen occasionally strayed into the territory of an impression – not a reflection of his abilities as an actor (of which there is no doubt), but rather a consequence of Frost’s qualities as a person.

Watching Sheen play Frost, another of his recent characters came to mind. Another character who was smooth, confident and (although hardly to the same extent) put style over substance – Tony Blair.

And if Sheen’s Frost reminded me of Blair, what about Langella’s Nixon – the man with whom he tussled so heatedly and contrasted so sharply?

A loner, ill at ease with people, unemotional, unable to generate empathy, intellectual, reluctant to admit that he was wrong or apologise for his actions… hmmm…

The most compelling moments of Frost / Nixon come when the ex-President is pushed by Frost to apologise for his criminal wrongdoings – an anguished look spreads over Nixon’s face as he came to terms with his actions and how he, and he alone, would have to live with their consequences for the rest of his life. He didn’t utter the words, but that was his apology.

Brown seems similarly unwilling to say sorry. Even to admit some responsibility for leading Britain into the financial mire. This article puts a good case for why he must apologise. And there’s no doubt that he should. Brown’s doing all he can to get as close as he can with President Obama – the world’s favourite politician. Adopting the Obama’s refreshingly open and candid tone – the President was happy to admit that he ‘screwed up’ – would bring the two politicians together in people’s minds.

But Brown won’t. He’s not like Obama, or Blair. He’s much more like Nixon. A man who doesn’t accept that soothing words can make a difference. Who doesn’t want to tell people what they want to hear, even if it makes them feel better. Who thinks that actions, not words, created his predicament, and only actions, not words, can change it.

Which, given that Brown’s predicament affects every one of us, may not be such a bad thing.

Kate Winslet at the Oscars

I’m glad that Kate Winslet won too. The Reader was a powerful and thought-provoking film, for lots of reasons. But it wouldn’t have been nearly as powerful and thought-provoking without her performance.

Compared to her gasping at the Golden Globes, her oration at the Oscars displayed great composure and restraint.

Kate Winslet wasn’t the first British actor to get a little emotional at an awards ceremony. Or to emotionally profess their love for the American people who bestowed the honour upon them (Julian Fellowes famously exalted ‘the most generous nation on earth’ when he won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Gosford Park). Or to publicly criticise their unemotional, cynical fellow Britons for not joining in her delight.

Being fairly unemotional, reasonably cynical, mostly British and definitely male, I found it hard to watch Kate Winslet’s Golden Globe speech.

Not because I found such public outpouring of emotion and obsequiousness to America un-British. 

Quite the opposite. I found it profoundly British – and deeply recognisable.

Getting tongue-tied when unexpectedly called upon to speak in public? Forgetting people’s names when caught off-guard? Trying to please those around you with excessive praise? I do all of these things. Most British people do all of these things. They are truly British traits. 

So maybe that's why Kate's Golden Globe gushings are so hard to watch - deep down, us British know that we would react in exactly the same way.  

Sean Penn at the Oscars

So, it was the Oscars last Sunday. And here I am writing about them, quick-off-the-mark as ever. I’d made some predictions before the ceremony. They were largely wrong. Wrong not because of a lack of judgement, I’d like to think. Wrong because my predications only included films I had actually seen. And I hadn’t seen Slumdog Millionaire.

I’m glad that Sean Penn won Best Actor. His performance as Harvey Milk was fantastic. Milk was, of course, a minority - he devoted his life to fighting for the rights of that minority. You could say that being in a minority defined him.

Yet I defy anyone who watched the film, regardless of whether they were part of that minority, not to identify with Milk – not to sympathise with him, not to admire him, not to want to join his fight. It’s impossible. And it’s testament to Penn’s finely-judged and expertly-delivered performance.

But as Penn received his well-deserved Oscar inside the Chinese Theatre, protestors outside it were claiming that, as punishment for his gay cowboy role, Heath Ledger was ‘burning in hell’.

Moments such as this sum up the baffling dichotomies within the United States. The celebrities who revered as much as any religious figure, the recession-bucking diamonds, the championing of ‘liberal’ issues… the religious zealots, the placards scrawled in hate, the celebration of the death of a young actor (in front of the relatives of that actor – such tastelessness could only be surpassed by the delightful Phelps family).

But while this dichotomy exists in the US, and while protestors there scream bile-filled obscenities and government stands in the way of equality, this much is clear – we need more people like Harvey Milk, and we need more performances like Sean Penn’s to draw attention to them.

Musicals & The Magic Flute

I like singing. Listening to, not doing. On records. At gigs. In concerts.

And I like talking. Again, more listening to than doing. Again, in all the usual places – film, plays, occasionally an audio book, even more occasionally amongst social company.

But singing and dialogue together? In one place? In one film? Yeah?

No.

I haven’t seen Mammia Mia!, or any of the latest batch of musicals that are officially ‘proper films’ and are ‘ok to like’.

But I know that I would react to these films in the same way that I did when I watched Moulin Rouge. With exasperation, which simmers away to become frustration, which then boils over into mild anger.

I don’t understand how actors suddenly BURSTING INTO SONG! can be anything but infuriating. These are actors. They talk. They talk (some members of the Mammia Mia! cast excluded) well. So keep talking.

Because as soon as these actors start singing, it’s impossible to think about the context, the film, the character, the plot, the emotions, the credibility, the anything.

All it is possible to think about ‘Oh my goodness. Ewan McGregor / Colin Firth / Pierce Brosnan / another annoying British actor is singing. They’re even more annoying than usual. Look at their faces. They’re doing that strange sing-y and smile-y thing’.

When I went to see The Magic Flute last Saturday, I was slightly more prepared for the cast bursting into song – what with it being an opera and all. What I wasn’t expecting was them breaking out of it – into talking.

In The Magic Flute, the arias and duets choruses and were interspersed with dialogues and monologues. This mingling of spoken and sung word imbued the production with lightness and openness. Just as a heavy, creamy dish is followed by a sorbet to clean the palate, so the crisp dialogue refreshingly broke up by the ‘serious’ (sounding) singing.  

Such a production requires its cast to be able to act, as well as sing. And, thankfully, act they could – delivering their lines with as much ease and charm as their verses. Papageno, the bird catcher and impish sidekick, was a particular highlight – bounding about the stage playfully and expressively, the centre of attention even when his mouth was padlocked shut.

And every detail of Nicholas Hytner’s production was cleverly and lightly presented – from the Queen of the Night’s assistants, flitting around with their blue bouffants and plumed staffs like menacing butterflies, to the intricate set, with columns gliding across the stage to reveal glowing hieroglyphics, setting suns and shining moons.

So maybe singing and talking do go together, after all.

Still not going to watch Mamma Mia!, though.

American Psycho

I re-watched American Psycho the other night. 

In light of recent events, Bret Easton Ellis’ tale of the corrupting, consuming and twisting power of greed has never been more relevant. The Wall Street of Yuppie-prince Patrick Bateman did look rather dated, with lunch reservations being made on beige phone-bricks and mullets curling over the collars of double-breasted pinstripes. But the conditions that created his Wall Street, the bonus / status obsession, are still present there today – or were, until recently (goodness knows what Patrick Bateman would have done with his chainsaw if he had been made redundant).

And, of course, it’s not just the economic meltdown that make American Psycho seem especially relevant – but Christian Bale’s own meltdown on the set of Terminator Salvation.

Bale is quite an intense man. About as intense as staring up at the sun, eating a mouthful of chilies. In the desert. At high noon.

This intensity is what makes Bale’s portrayal of Patrick Bateman so chilling and so convincing – a character who can switch from being utterly charming, to expounding the merits of Genesis, to dancing a little jig, to dismembering someone with an axe, in one scene.

Sometimes, this intensity boils over – like when a Director of Photography walks into Bale’s eye-line and distracts him from the most important scene in the movie.

At which point, it’s up to the director to assert control, and calm the actor down and ensures he channels his intensity into the role. But when you’ve got a director, in McG, who seems unrespected and out of his depth, an actor, in Bale, who is going through ‘a difficult time emotionally’, and a film, in Terminator Salvation, which is being hyped and pressured by all sides, then this intensity will only be channeled to one place… the internet.

The Fence Collective at Bethnal Green Working Men's Club

I like links. Nothing starts a post like a deft, graceful link. Sometimes, however deep I look, however far I crane, the links just aren’t there. But other times, I can’t see the words for the links. Like now, when I’m writing about the Fence Collective gig at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club I went to on Wednesday.

Link 1: A Working Men’s Club seems a fitting venue for King Creosote and his Fence cohorts, who have eschewed the A-road to ‘big things’ taken by some of their peers (ie. KT Tunstall) and instead opted to take the narrow country lane to nowhere in particular, slowly but surely working away to build their own reputation, release their own records and organise their own extensive tours.

Link 2: Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club oozes DIY chic – the bins of beer bottles cooling behind a make-shift bar, the silver streamers jauntily hanging on either side of the stage, and giant flashing (but unfortunately non-functioning) heart behind it. So what

better venue for the Fence Collective and their shabby, DIY approach to music- making.

Link 3: With Valentine’s Day a few days away, it seemed an appropriate time to go and listen to King Creosote’s heartache-strewn songs at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club. And, with a giant light-bulb heart hanging behind the stage, it seemed like an

appropriate place too.

But I don’t think any of these links work. Trying (and failing) to be too clever. Too tricksy. Not right for the Fence Collective’s simple, honest folk – songs that, like the waves crashing on the beach and the lighthouses flashing on the coastline they describe, have a natural, flowing, rhythm…

(Link)

… and that, also like waves rolling in, constantly evolve and change their shape and are never the same twice. King Creosote’s band and his songs ebb and flow with each performance – on this occasion, it was a simple acoustic affair, with a few guitars, a few drums and a bass.

And it was a family affair too – Pip Dylan, KC’s brother, opened the night and accompanied on the acoustic throughout, and Gordon Anderson, KC’s older brother and head Alien, joined in for the final few songs.

But it was King Creosote’s evening – first with his sharp-witted (and sober – newly resolved to give up drink for the year) observations and one-liners during Pip’s and HMS Ginafore’s supporting sets, and then, in his own headline performance, with his lilting voice, his simple guitar and his achingly beautiful songs – swelling, rising and soaring like a…

(Link)

Spring tide.

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Thanks to Surprise Truck for the photos. 

The Oscars

With the Oscars coming up on Sunday, I was going to write about who I think they should go to. So I cast my eye over the nominations.

But then I realised that I had hardly seen any of the films on the list.

Hmmm.

If there’s one thing more pointless and self-aggrandising than people like me writing about who should win awards for films, it’s people like me writing about who should win awards for films they have never seen.

So I decided to write about Milk instead – a film that is nominated for a few Oscars, and a film that I watched on last week.

But then I thought:

‘This is the Oscars. This is big. I can’t just close my eyes, put my hands over my ears and stick my head (and hands – because they’re covering my ears) in the sand. I can’t pretend to ignore the little-shiny-gold-men. All those dreams, resting on those well-defined shoulders. This blog is supposed to be about films. Come on. Pull yourself together.’

OK. I know what I’ll do. I’ll go through the nominations, cross off the ones I’ve missed (not seen = no comment), and then decide – out of the remaining films – my favourites.

Right. Here are my choices for the 81st Academy Awards, as nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and as seen by Me.

Best Actor

Nominees: Sean Penn (Milk)
Winner: Sean Penn (Milk)

Penn’s portrayal as Harvey Milk, America’s first open gay elected official, is just remarkable. Gus van Sant holds the gaze of the camera on Penn throughout the film (barely does he leave the screen in the whole two hours), and not once does his performance go off the boil. Milk progresses from clean-cut, impulsive but frustrated businessman in New York, to hippy entrepreneur in San Francisco, and then to clean-cut, respectable and respected city supervisor. Throughout, Penn captures his mannerisms and expressions perfectly – camp without being affected, serious, passionate and fun.

Best Supporting Actor

Nominees: Josh Brolin (Milk)
Winner: Josh Brolin (Milk)

I was surprised to discover the story of Dan White, whom Brolin plays in Milk – the ex-fireman, family man, local politician (and, as van Sant’s film suggests, closet homosexual) turned Twinkie-munching, junk-food-addled assassin. But I was even more surprised to see Brolin nominated for this role. He certainly captures White’s stiltedness, his uneasiness in his own skin, and his frustration with (borne out of a lack of understanding of) the world around him. But it is Brolin’s performance as another politician who displays these three traits – in W. – that really deserves an Oscar.

Best Actress

Nominees: Kate Winslet (The Reader)
Winner: Kate Winslet (The Reader)

The Reader is a thought-provoking film. It made me question whether individuals can be responsible for their actions, if their actions are part of much larger context, and whether it is possible to empathise with someone who has committed atrocities, if the reasons for committing atrocities are understandable (albeit, of course, unreasonable – see my post below for full ramblings). But it is really Winslet’s performance that provokes these thoughts and raises these questions – a understated performance of a character whose vulnerability drew me in and whose remorselessness repulsed me.

Best Supporting Actress

This Oscar has not been awarded due to lack of seeing of films in which actresses supported prominently.

Best Foreign Language Film

Nominees: The Baader Meinhof Complex
Winner: The Baader Meinhof Complex

Like Milk, The Baader Meinhof Complex tells it to you straight. The historical subject matter of both films is so dramatic and unexpected, and the characters so strong and compelling, that they require no embellishment. The Baader Meinhof Complex handles the narratives and the characters brilliantly – the story of the Red Army Faktion well-told, the paradoxes at the heart of this group well-examined, and main players in it well-acted (particularly by Johanna Wokalek).

Best Director

Nominees: Gus Van Sant (Milk), Stephen Daldry (The Reader)

Wow… this is exciting… some actual competition… cue suspenseful pause and a split screen of Gus and Stephen…

Winner: Gus Van Sant (Milk)

With Milk, Gus van Sant has moved away from his ‘youth’ project (a quartet of beautiful, meandering films about beautiful, unsettled young men – Gerry, Elephant, Last Days and Paranoid Park), and back towards his more mainstream films of the Nineties. Milk is more ‘mainstream’ in its ambitious scope and its established cast. Its photography is, in the main, much more unassuming and straightforward (although some fantastically deft touches still remain – the body of beaten-up man, lying in a pool of blood, is seen reflected in the whistle that he carried for protection but, on this occasion, proved useless). But van Sant has not abandoned the assured, measured and understated tone that he used to such good effect in his recent ‘arthouse’ films. The power of Milk lies in the story, the actual events – so van Sant assembles a strong cast (Sean Penn is ably supported by Josh Brolin, Diego Luna, Emile Hirsh and James Franco) and, seemingly objectively, lets the story tell itself. In unfolding this narrative, van Sant ensures that the film is well-acted without being over-acted, and thoughtful without being over-thought. As he does this, his presence as a director is, in comparison to his ‘youth’ works, hardly felt – which makes his achievement even more remarkable, and his directing even more worthy of an award.

Best Film

Nominees: Milk, The Reader
Winner: Milk

I thought The Reader was very, very good – because Kate Winslet’s performance was very, very good. And although a brilliant performance was at the centre of Milk, too, van Sant’s film seemed to come together more successfully – an understated handling of a fascinating story, a cast that displayed strength in depth, a time and a place evocatively conjured, a film about a minority that is relevant to everyone.

nb.

When I actually get round to watching The Curious Case OfBenjamin Button, Revolutionary Road and Frost / Nixon, I may well have to revise my thoughts and re-allocate some of my awards. But until then, I stand by these choices. Of course, Sunday’s Oscars will be very different. They’ll be judged by people who’ve actually seen the films, for a start.

Taking It Nice. And. Slow

Now, you can probably guess that I’m on the cutting edge of all things digi and wiki and techie. I’m right on that edge. That narrow, sharp edge. It’s actually quite uncomfortable – that’s how much I’m on it. I, after all, joined Facebook as early as mid-2008.

So, it is with great excitement that I can announce… that today, I am going to write about a phenomenon called blogging. And about an even cuttinger edgier phenomenon – developed only three years ago – called Twitter.

Brace yourself. Here goes:

The need for speed. Readers have it. Blogs created it. Or they responded to it. Either way, they certainly used it to outmode the mainstream media, who traditionally operated like this:

Something happens. Someone writes a few words about it. And only when those words have been printed and distributed – likely the next day – can another person read them.

Now, blogs work more like this:

Something happens. While it is still happening, or as soon as it has finished, someone writes a few words about it. And then, as soon as a button is pressed, another person can read them.

Blogs are all about the immediate – an instant and direct expression of personal thoughts to a mass audience.*

So far, so 1999. So, ‘what’s new?’, you’re thinking. Well, I’ll tell you what’s new. Or, what was new in 2000… Twitter – the social-blogging, micro-networking site that has only recently started to make its high-pitched voice heard thanks to endorsements from technophiles Jonathan Ross, Stephen Fry, and – according to Wikipedia – Will Carling.**

Twitter is like Facebook without the Walls, Photos, Pokes, Groups, Invitations, Messages… without anything except the Status Updates, in fact. It limits its posts to 140 characters – less space, more speed.

(Thinking about it, maybe that’s why Jonathan Ross is such a big fan. 140 characters is hardly enough room to launch into a tirade of abuse about granddaughters).

It’s certainly interesting, in a nosey kind of way, to read what someone like Stephen Fry is up to. But that’s because he’s an interesting person. Or rather, anything that Stephen Fry does becomes interesting. It wouldn’t be so interesting to read, constantly, what your friend (ie. someone you met once and can only remember who they are from their photo) is up to.

If Stephen Fry twittered, for example, that he ‘is walking from Kilburn to Waterloo for a meeting’, you’d think: ‘He’s walking? Of course he’s walking. Fry walks everywhere. I bet he knows all about the old place names and the history of London and stuff. He’s so clever. He’s probably listening to an audio book of Proust as he walks too’.

But if your friend twittered that he ‘is walking from Kilburn to Waterloo for a meeting’, you’d think: ‘Er, get a bus? And why are you telling me this?’.

Immediacy, it seems, is all too often synonymous with inanity – and Todd Sieling’s Slow Blogging Manifesto offers an alternative to both.

The Slow Food movement believes that meals should be lovingly prepared from fresh ingredients, allowing time for flavours to infuse and appetites to be whetted. Slow Blogging is founded on similar principles – that the speed of posting is faster than the speed of thought, and that words should be nurtured and ruminated before being shared.

And, as someone who writes at a pace of a lethargic snail that has just guzzled a Nytol tablet mistaking it for a large white garden pea (admittedly this pace is caused by laziness rather than intense rumination), I agree with Sieling’s manifesto and I hereby pledge to follow it.

Which brings me nicely to my first attempt at Slow Blogging: 

More a month since 2009 began, and more than two since most Best Of The Year Lists appeared in papers and magazines, here are my Top 10 Tunes from 2008.

Not all these songs / pieces / tracks were released last year. But, at some point over the past thirteen months, I heard them for the first time and I liked them. And, at some point over the past few weeks, I had time to think about why.

Dull Flame Of Desire (Modeselektor Remix For Girls) – Bjork

A thumping beat builds and drops to let Bjork’s and Antony Hegarty’s distinctively silky voices weave in and out of one another. The techno hook is simple, undulating, driving. But what really makes the remix work is the Berlin duo’s sampling – taking a snippet of Bjork’s lyrics, twisting it, and making it sound like nothing you’ve heard before.

Re: Stacks – Bon Iver

Justin Vernon’s retreat to a Wisconsin cabin has been much-documented, and the album that resulted from his sojourn has been much-lauded. ‘For Emma, Forever Ago’ tells of heartbreak and harsh winters. Over the course of the record, Vernon seems to gradually accept the disintegration of his relationship. The earlier songs on the record are soaked in reverb and pierced by the staccato, falsetto lyrics – his emotions are icy, his wounds not yet healed. But ‘Re: Stacks’, the final song on the album, is simple and calm – the thaw is on its way.

Calabria – Enur (feat. Natasja)

‘Calabria’s’ saxophones are relentlessly catchy and consistently versatile. They perform dancefloor alchemy – drop them in anywhere and they work… Rune’s original house version, then the Euro cheese-pop of ‘Destination Unknown’, and now this Danish reggae (?) remix. I first heard it when Spank Rock DJs Darko and Devlin were warming up for Santogold at the Scala – and this tune was the highlight of the whole evening. Demonstrating all that’s needed to get a thousand people to abandon the bar queue and hit the floor is a few dancehall claps, some light reggae patter… and those saxophones.

Glory – Essie Jain

Folk is a many-faceted thing. Or should I say a many-labelled thing. Nu-, anti-, pop-, etc. Essie Jain doesn’t seem to fit into any of these categories, so she’s been given a new one – chamber-folk. I’m not quite sure what chamber-folk is, to be honest. I’m guessing it refers to the simple, pared-down nature of Essie Jain’s music – just a guitar, or a piano, and her voice. But it’s not just her voice. Her voice is her music. Her voice is smooth, rich, delicate, soft, powerful. A voice that sensually accentuates every syllable, and envelopes you in warmth. Just the sort of voice, then, that you need when you’re standing in the pouring rain on a cold afternoon at the Green Man Festival, which is where I first saw Essie Jain. I’d like to say that, for her set, it stopped raining and a warm ray of sunshine peeked through the clouds. But it didn’t. If anything, it started raining even more. And if I’m honest, it made her sound even better.

Ready For The Floor – Hot Chip

Sometimes, it feels like Hot Chip channel so many influences into their own music that the influences become the music. They’re never shy about citing these forbears in their interviews and mixtapes… from Prince to Bruce Springsteen, from BMore hip-hop to minimal techno. And as an avid interview-reader and mixtape-listener, I think I’ve listened to more tunes that Hot Chip have recommended than to tunes that Hot Chip have actually made. ‘Ready From The Floor’ is a reminder that Hot Chip not only have an encyclopaedic knowledge of popular music, they also have a remarkable knack of creating perfectly catchy and cleverly simple pop songs – songs that are full of references (and not just musical – ‘Ready For The Floor’ quotes Batman), but have an identity all their own.

City – Keegan Dewitt

Keegan Dewitt’s music has an understated power and a casual precision – perfectly pitched for the mumblecore movies that it soundtracks. At times, this DIY genre can be a little too casual – its homespun style a little too inward-looking. But at others, the audio and the visual combine to produce a scene so beautiful, so evocative yet so hard to grasp, that they become more than a sum of their parts, more than a collection of notes and pictures. From the dancing scene in Aaron Katz’s film 'Quiet City', I forget that this a movie made by friends with camcorders and music made by one person with their laptop, and I just saw a moment – a moment that belongs to the characters, to a time and a place, and to me.

Shine – Laura Marling

It might be rare for someone who’s eighteen to experience the same amount of heartbreak that Laura Marling has. But what’s much, much rarer is for someone her age to write such accomplished songs about it. ‘Shine’ is Laura Marling at her most wistful (looking back at a past love from afar), at her most polished (not once, in a song about such well-worn themes, do the lyrics seem worn-out), and at her most enigmatic (the delicate, trembling delivery seemingly at odds with the confidence that shone through when she triumphantly opened her set at the Scala with this song).

Kids (Soulwax Nite Version) – MGMT

Deep in the darkest flattest Ghent, the Dewaele brothers hide themselves away in a tiny apartment, surrounded by vintage synths, samplers and other Seventies sonic strangeties. Into this beat-cave are fed the latest pop releases. And out come full-bodied, red-blooded, beepy, banging remixes – like this version of MGMT’s catchy but rather insubstantial tune, which takes the psychedelic vocals and perky keyboard line and engulfs them in electronic griminess.

White Blank Page – Mumford & Sons

Out of the mud came forth sweetness. I first laid ears on M&S in the Folkey Dolky Tent at last year’s sludge-swamped Green Man. Our spirits, already low after three days of constant rain, had just been crushed by a cider-doused set from lout-rockers The Peth. But they were raised as soon as Mumford & Sons began playing their soaring, bluegrassy folk. And after half an hour of banjo-led hoe-downs and choruses swelling with accordions and fiddles, culminating in a rousing version of ‘White Blank Page’, they were ceiling-high.

Wearing My Rolex (The Shoes 2.0 Mix) – Wiley

Perhaps taking their inspiration from Seventies’ Canadian folk-rockers The Band,
a lot of French bands don’t seem to be wasting much creative muscle in coming up with a name. Their thought processes appears to be: ‘A band name? Well, we are teenagers. So how about The Teenagers’ Or ‘What shall we call our band?’ [look down at the ground pensively] ‘The Shoes?’ Maybe it’s not such a bad thing, because it left The Shoes with every ounce of their strength to turn ‘Wearing My Rolex’ into the tune of the summer.

_________

* Of course, you realise by now that I have absolutely nothing interesting, insightful or clever to say about blogs and digital things and electronic stuff (not that I have interesting, insightful or clever to say about anything else). I’m just taking a rather long, rambling, boring run-up to this post… so please bear with me.

** I checked and it is the same Will Carling. He appears to use Twitter to engage in ‘hearty banter’ with fans and to sate his desire to end every sentence in an exclamation mark.

Miroslaw Balke at The White Cube

My Second World War-themed weekend unwittingly continued when I left the screening of Valkyrie and went to the White Cube in Mason’s Yard.

There, the Polish artist Miroslaw Balke has recreated two structures from the Treblinka concentration camp, a camp that was only operating for a year and but was the site of nearly a million deaths.

Continuing the theme from my mini-essay (well, maybe not so mini) below, the two structures allow the viewer to see the concentration camp from two different points of view.

On the ground floor, Balke has constructed a huge, rusty, steel framework, to the design of the menagerie / zoo in which officers at the camp housed foxes (below) and doves (above). A bucket sits on the ground within the skeletal frame, filled with bubbling red wine – the red suggesting, perhaps, the foxes that inhabited the cage, and the bloodshed overseen by the officers. The sweet, warm smell of the wine wafts through the gallery – the decadence of the camp’s officers contrasts sharply with the unbearable hardship of the rest of its inhabitants.

Downstairs in the basement, the perspective is switched – to that of the inhabitants. Balke has created, using plywood and scaffolding, a narrow corridor raised above the floor. This corridor replicates (as far as it can, in a gallery space) the walkway at Treblinka between the room in which prisoners were undressed to the chamber in which they were executed.

Walking along the corridor, sandwiched between plywood and the wall, creates a feeling of disorientation, of being forced to walk in one direction (there’s hardly enough room to turn around), and of anxiety about lay what round each corner. For those who walked the real walkway at Treblinka, the horror that awaited them is unimaginable.

Valkyrie & The Reader

The Hollywood Nazi is a familiar figure – cold, ruthless, inhuman. The skull insignia on their caps are just as chilling as the performance of the actors who wear them. The filmmakers’ logic seems to be this: as the Nazis’ actions were so unfathomable, so incomprehensible, how we can comprehend their characters?

There are several films – and good films – that depict the Second World War from the German perspective, like Downfall. But they are vastly unnumbered, in Hollywood at least, by films that portray the Second World War from the point of view of the Allies, and the Holocaust from the point of view of the victims. In the years after the War ended, this perspective was understandable enough. But, 60 years on, it is still the dominant way of handling the conflict – as recent films like The Boy With The Striped Pyjamas show.

The past month has seen the release of two Hollywood (or non-German, at least) films that switch this perspective. Valkyrie is centred on Claus von Stauffenberg’s ‘20th July’ plot to assassinate Hitler. And The Reader, an adaption of the Bernhard Schlink’s novel Der Vorleser, tells the story of an illiterate concentration camp guard.

Valkyrie’s plot is much simpler, and so the switch of perspective is much less problematic. The films distinguishes clearly between good Germans, Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators, and bad ones, Hitler and Himmler et al. And, just to avoid any confusion, this distinction is underlined by accents. Hitler and Himmler have crisp, sharp German accents, but the goodies (with the exception of Tom Cruise’s Stauffenberg) are a merry band of English eccentrics and thespians – Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, Terence Stamp and Eddie Izzard.

As a result, it was easy – and uncomplicated – for me to sympathise with the ‘good’ Nazis. Valkyrie depicts Stauffenberg as a hero. And although Stauffenberg was an ardent nationalist and vociferous Pole-hater, I don’t think the depiction of him as a hero is too historically inaccurate (at least relating to his actions in the ‘20th July’ plot).

Director Bryan Singer and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie do a good job of creating an old-fashioned thriller, full of excitement and suspense, but their job was quite easy – because the ‘20th July’ plot was so full of excitement and suspense itself.

Even the details that could only appear in suspense thriller are, it seems, true –Stauffenberg’s eyepatch (nothing says ‘enigmatic hero’ like an eyepatch), the banging on the door that interrupts our hero as he – with one hand – arms the bomb, and the daring escape back to Berlin after the device was detonated.

And Stauffenberg displayed, certainly in the film and perhaps in real life, that ultimate heroic trait. He was all too aware of the consequences of his actions – he admitted that carrying out the plot was high treason and he knew that failing in it meant death, but still he persevered.

The Second World War is all too often presented as a battle between good and evil – but within this ‘evil’, Stauffenberg’s bravery and selflessness creates a further good versus evil conflict.

So Valkyrie shows that good men can exist amongst, and struggle against, ‘evil’. But The Reader reveals that, even within the ‘good versus evil’ sub-conflict, distinctions are blurred (and not just because there is no accent signifier – all characters speak in English, with a German accent).

The Reader begins when a schoolboy, Michael Berg, befriends a tram conductress, Hanna Schmitz. A passionate affair soon follows. In their first liaisons, Michael starts doing his homework – reading aloud great works of literature to Hanna – after love-making. The order is quickly reversed, and their trysts are based around Michael’s orations (with physical passion relegated to an epilogue). It is only several years later, when Michael attends the war crimes trails as a law student and sees Hanna in the dock, does he realise that the object of his teenage affections is a. illiterate and b. a former death-camp guard.

Winslet’s performance is convincing as Schmitz – vulnerable but manipulative, at times seemingly oblivious of the crimes she has committed, at others all too aware of her cruelty but chillingly unmoved by it.

The performances around her are strong, too. David Kross is excellent as the young Berg, who is overflowing with passion when he first meets Schmitz but brimming with shock and incredulity when he sees her again at the trial. Ralph Fiennes’ older Berg, the maladjusted lawyer whose whole life has been tainted by his first and only love, is also compelling.

Schmitz’s illiteracy governs her life and defines her choices. It is the reason why she began her relationship with Berg. It is the reason why she worked in the concentration camps – she left her factory job when she was promoted, as her newly elevated role would reveal her secret. And it is the reason why she was convicted at her trial – rather than admitting she couldn’t read or write, she claimed that she was solely responsible for an incident report describing how prisoners were locked inside a burning church.

Above all, it is the reason why I felt empathetic towards her – and emotionally involved with her. It is, I think, impossible not to be moved in the final scenes, when Berg sends audiobooks to her prison cell and she, at the end of her life, finally learns to read. But then this is a woman who has ended so many others’ lives herself – and so my feeling of sympathy was replaced by one of awkwardness, and confusion.

Schmitz wasn’t inhuman or ‘evil’. Nor was she responsible for the Holocaust. But she was responsible for her actions – actions were very human responses to her immediate situation. She was driven to become a death-camp guard and to admit her sole responsibility because she was ashamed of her illiteracy. She was driven to commit atrocities – to keep the doors of the burning church locked – because she was afraid of her superiors.

Such reactions – borne out of fear or shame – all recognisable to us all. Most people would look for another job, if they were promoted to a new position with which they felt uncomfortable. Most people would do something that they might think is wrong, if the consequences for not doing so were harmful to themselves.

But, in Nazi Germany, these reactions were stripped of their everyday context. There were given instead a context of violence, of cruelty and of murder – any reaction to a situation, even motivated by embarrassment or self-preservation, could result in the deaths of hundreds of people.

Still, Schmitz could have reacted to her situation differently. She could have learnt to read and write, and stayed on at her factory job. She could have thought less about her own life and more about the life of her prisoners, and opened the church doors.

But taking this path – the ‘good’ path – would have been less human than taking the path she actually took. The ‘good’ path would require her to react out of selflessness, not fear, and bravery, not shame. But selflessness and bravery are not the traits of the majority of humans – they are the traits of a minority, a heroic minority, like Stauffenberg.

So, Valkyrie and The Reader left me in a strange position. Stauffenberg did something ‘good’, in the ‘good versus evil’ framework, but it was something that wasn’t human – something that is hard to identify with. Schmitz did something that definitely wasn’t ‘good’, but it was something that happened because of a human reaction – something that is recognisable yet still repellent. So, of Stauffenberg and Schmitz, the person with whom we identify the most is not the ‘good’ one – hence my strange, and uncomfortable, position.

Hello 2009 & Goodbye Dubs

Let’s not bother with the pleasantries. I won’t say 'Happy New Year’ or 'Hello, I'm back!' or anything like that - because it would imply that someone actually reads this blog and has been waiting, patiently, frustratedly or warily, for me to break my month-long silence. 

So let's just make a start. Here is an annotated review of W., which appeared in the Observer as part of their End Of Year Reader’s Review. The full piece appears below, a few posts down. But, to be honest, the annotated version makes all of the points with none of the waffling:

America has a new President since the film was released, of course. And Tuesday's scenes in Crawford show that watching W. with Texan, rather than European eyes, would make it a different film - the President whose words and actions were derided and whose departure was celebrated all over the world was still given a hero’s welcome back at the ranch.

James Yorkston at St. Giles In The Fields

It’s not often that you arrive at a gig with ears ringing, and leave with them soothed.

After having a quick pint and being deafened by metal at a Goth pub over the road, I arrived at St. Giles In The Fields Church to catch Malcolm Middleton finishing his set with a sublime (and appropriate, considering the surroundings) acoustic version of ‘The Devil And The Angel’.

I have seen James Yorkston several times before – at a similar venue (the Union Chapel), and at different sorts of ones (the Luminaire and the Green Man Festival). The Luminaire was too cramped and grimy for his songs about sweeping landscapes and mists rolling in off the sea. The Green Man Festival was too large and anonymous – the intimacy of the emotive, heartfelt ballads gets lost in the crowds. A church, however, seems the perfect venue – intimate enough to hear every nuance and note, large enough for his sound to swell and soar, and ancient enough to complement his timeless themes of love and nature.

So the venue was spot on, and Yorkston himself was in fine form. His gentle, friendly demeanor was suited to the church and held our attention between songs – his much-improved finger-picking and resonant voice captured us during them.

The highlight of his performance came when he was joined on stage by Pictish Trail, returning the favour for supporting him the night before (see post below), and Rozi Plain for a beautiful version of ‘Fox Regrets Hare’ – the harmonies elevating the simple nursery-rhyme tune to a lilting epic.

Yorkston played almost all of ‘When The Haar Rolls In’, his most recent record. And on this cold, wintry (although not misty) night, the songs were all we needed to keep warm. Some mulled wine would have helped. But then it was a church. So all we had were the songs. And they kept us warm. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that it was a good and I enjoyed it. Bye.