Here’s One We Made Earlier

This is a short I co-wrote, with the esteemed Colin McLaren, and directed in 2001. Won some awards and briefly lead to some employment. It was an attempt at making a film with a message while mercilessly debunking the message as much as possible. A plea for tolerance that champions the cause of clowns everywhere, while simultaneously managing to suggest that every stereotype about them is completely true.

GUM

 

Spoiler alert:

At the end of LAST TANGO IN PARIS, Marlon Brando expires on a balcony, just like Toshiro Mifune at the end of DRUNKEN ANGEL (two spoilers per sentence!) Before life departs his frame, Brando rather suavely takes the gum from his mouth and affixes it to the underside of the metal railing.

Two Bertolucci films later, in LA LUNA, the mighty Fred Gwynne (how much nicer film history would be if HE had played all Brando’s roles!) Stands likewise on a balcony and finds Brando’s gum. “Damn kids,” he mutters.

It’s maybe the only cute thing in either film, and I like to picture this gum stretching from Paris to New York, from 1972 to 1979, from Marlon Brando.

Gratuitous spoiler: Fred tells his wife he’s had a strange, disquieting dream, but shrugs it off and says he’ll tell her later. Then he leaves the house and drops dead at the wheel of his car. Pretty cool.

Footnote: I once spellchecked Bertolucci’s name on a very old computer and it suggested BARNYARD BERTOLUCCI. I like this name and I always think of it.

Footfootnote: Making THE LAST EMPEROR, Peter O’Toole always called him BERT.

Strange Danes are Here

Beowulf. An Imagemovers Production. Directed by Robert Zemeckis.

I have seen the future, and it’s berks.

There’s something intriguing about taking an unimagineably old story and bringing it to the screen with handy-dandy fancy motion-capture CGI and 3D imagery. Intriguing and deeply wrong.

Well, I wouldn’t want to say the idea couldn’t be done well, I’m just going by this, this THING which has washed up on the cinema screens. There’s a colossal mismatch of technique and story that’s pretty fascinating to gaze at in wonderment, but you really need an old-fashioned set of 3D glasses to bring some unity to this, the red lens for the prehistoric narrative, and the green lens for the flashy computer images.

It’s a story full of primal emotions and elements, set in a cold and hostile landscape, here relocated to a world of snowy Christmas Card illustrations. The papier-mache rocks of Orson Welles’ MACBETH are far more tactile and real, even if what they are is real papier mache. It matters that they have some physical substance.

It took around half an hour of viewing before I saw anything that even felt like an image: a gilted Angelina reflected in water, distorted to the point of reptilian abstraction. Ironic that in this hyper-sharp piece of animated fan art the only frame-able shot is an impenetrable miasma of gold and black. Lovely, though.

The 3D is arresting (flat, or on the small screen, this movie just wouldn’t EXIST), but Zemeckis uses it in all the ways we’ve always been told 3D shouldn’t be used: he chucks things at the audience relentlessly, things we’d rather NOT have chucked at us, like when a hapless warrior is ripped asunder and we get a pair of meat-filled trousers slung in our faces. And when he’s not chucking, he’s pointing, rudely.

Then there’s the motion capture. A rather too-varied cast are smeared over with a glaze of CG, which deadens their eyes but fails to unify the various performing styles and accents. I understand why Beowulf and his gang of Geats sound different from Anthony Hopkins and his little tribe, but not why Beowulf is the only Cockney in Denmark, why John Malkovich is off in a world of his own, why Grendel and his mum communicate in what amount to different languages (and have no family resemblance to speak of). I also feel sorry for Ray Winstone, the only one whose CG version looks better than the real him, even though the muscle-bound Beo still runs like a fat guy. Robin Wright Penn looks as if her face has been pressed flat. Crispin Glover as Grendel is like a mummified Peat Bog Man. Anthony Hopkins has been rendered as the Dancing Baby. Angelina Jolie is just Jessica Rabbit 0.2. With high-heeled feet. Which is silly when you think about it.

Watching her big virtual nude scene, which is virtually sexy, the thought comes home that all of this would just be better in live action. Admittedly, Angelina was four months pregnant with little Shiloh when she played the part, but that would still be more interesting than the de-nippled avatar paddling around here.

There’s a whole other, more enjoyable, movie to be experienced — the original footage used for motion capture. Everybody in green jumpsuits, no sets, like an avant-garde mime version of DOGVILLE, with more fighting.

All this CG could be seen as just mismatched and garish window-dressing to a rip-roaring story, if the story ripped and roared with any real competence. But there are problems of tone: since none of these characters resemble human beings at all, they are incapable of humour (nearest thing to an exception is Brendan Gleason’s Wiglaf, who is mainly funny because he’s called Wiglaf) and Zemeckis overcompensates with odd gestures towards comedy: a Mel Brooksian chorus of belching Danes; Beowulf in the buff, his modesty protected by trained furniture, which interrupts our view of his genitals with a variety of horns and spikes and beams and other phallic alibis. It’s all rather Austin Powers. And bear in mind, this is during the first main action climax. A strange choice.

There are also problems of character: Malkovich is a motiveless creep throughout, but never pays off as an actual villain. It’s like the writers (Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary) felt the need to flesh him out so they made him a one-dimensional bad guy in a second-string hero’s-friend role. Pasting contradictory cliches together doesn’t automatically create depth.

And there’s the rather deadening effect of too much video-game style action, whereby characters can survive utterly fatal situations, but we still have to believe they’re in some kind of jeopardy. And of course we don’t. It’s a bit like Peter Jackson’s KING KONG in that way. Just because the filmmaker can show us this stuff and make it look sort of real, doesn’t mean we have to believe it.

Zemeckis used to be a maker of rather dislikeable comedies: USED CARS is a hateful farce, and he co-wrote Spielberg’s loud and obnoxious 1941 (loud and obnoxious almost become positive qualities in that film. Almost.) He moved from this barbaric phase into a period of relative civilisation (ROMANCING THE STONE, BACK TO THE FUTURE), and now looks to be truly embracing his decadent period, using each project to push the boundaries of technology rather than to communicate anything he believes in. When he wanted to twist Meryl Streep’s head back to front (be honest, we’ve all felt that way occasionally) in DEATH BECOMES HER, the writers asked “Can that be done?” Zemeckis is reported to have chuckled, “I don’t think so!” And so it belonged in the film for that very reason.

That seems the defining aesthetic of this film: things are done based on their difficulty. Zemeckis is undoubtedly generous to his audience, showering the bespectacled masses with expensive ones and zeros, but somehow the numbers don’t add up to anything human or true or memorable or original.

*

Apparently WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT was the last film the great Michael Powell went to see, and he was rather depressed by the experience. All that money and technical expertise and talent expended on flat, charmless characters and ropey, hackneyed plotting. I’ve always been forgiving of R RABBIT’s faults, but they’re back again in BEOWULF, without any of that film’s modest virtues to disguise them.

*

Footnote: as Grendel attacks the lodge, the camera moves rapidly through the hall in sudden violent pulses, in time with the hammering on the door. I was reminded of the strange pulsations in and out of focus, in time to an eerie heartbeat, as the Ghost appears in Olivier’s HAMLET. Since this is another ancient Danish yarn, it’s just possible Zemeckis checked it out as research. Or he may have been influenced more by Sam Raimi. 

But since I know a story about HAMLET, I’ll pass it on. My late friend Lawrie worked as an assistant on that shoot, and recalled Olivier sending an assistant sprinting around the sound stage in order to get his heartbeat racing. Sitting the panting runner down on a box, the sound department pressed a microphone to his bosom to record the resulting sounds.

“Nothing but indigestion!”

In the end, a  drum was used.

Footnote to footnote: but you can hear the real heartbeat of director Rouben Mamoulian in his DOCTOR JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE during the amazing transformation sequence.

The Other Place

Check out the amazing www.jacques-rivette.com, one of the best websites about any particular director. And particularly check out Jacques Rivette and the Other Place by B. Kite, which is available in the Essays and Criticism section there.

You can read the piece here too:

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/rivette/OK/otherplace.html

Mr. Kite is a great inspiration to me as a writer and as a reader and critic of my stuff. This piece is just stuffed with ideas and observations, many of them as eccentrically brilliant as the filmmaker profiled.

The Words of the Prophet are Written on the Subway Wall

Seance on a Wet Afternoon. Written for the screen and directed by Bryan Forbes. A Beaver Film.

Starring Kim Stanley and a false nose driven by Richard Attenborough.

SOME WORDS I READ OFF THE SCREEN DURING THIS FILM

 ”FORECAST 2/-” This is inscribed above each window of a derelect building where Sir Dickie Lord Attenborough stashes a Rolls Royce he’s stolen while abducting a rich little girl. I have no idea what this signage means, but perhaps everybody in 1964 would have understood it perfectly. It adds a weird little mystery for me though, and connects to the film’s psychic theme.

“BREAD”. This is written on a bread bin in Kim Stanley’s kitchen. Bread is what they feed the “borrowed child” and bread is what they demand from the girl’s parents.

“TY-PHOO”. This is written on the side of a bus. It’s a popular brand of tea – perhaps relating to tea-leaf reading?

“Get on the trail of the happiest ale. BEN TRUMAN.” Another bus. This is also a detective story, and the police will soon be on the trail of a less-than-happy Dickie.

“THE PUBLIC EYE”. Big ad for a play, seen behind a crowd scene as Dickie makes himself furtive in the foreground.

“MUST END.” To do with the play, but we see a Greater Significance, and this is the first of several signs tainted with ominous subtext.

“SEEDLESS”. Written on a box of grapes in a market stall. Possibly a comment on Dickie’s impotent character, seen loitering nearby.

Also around here is a Max Factor ad but I can’t quite read the product name. “Coiffure Italienne”? I am reminded of an anecdote of uncertain veracity told me by my late friend Lawrie Knight, and since Lawrie knew Bryan Forbes slightly, I’ll reproduce it here:

Lawrie was running an ad company in Soho and he was approached by someone from Max Factor and offered the lucrative Max F account. But there was one condition: to prove his abilities, Lawrie was instructed to make a copy of a mysterious film handed to him by the Factor factotum.

He runs the film in his screening room and it’s hardcore porn. He tells his projectionist to get it duped. The projectionist hurries off, but soon reports back that no lab will touch it — this is the sixties and such material is very illegal. Lawrie says he’s sorry but the man will have to get the film copied or he’s fired. (Lawrie wasn’t this harsh when I knew him, but it’s, like, necessary to the plot, so we’ll accept it).

Next day the projectionist proudly presents a copy of the film. They run it for Max Factor man and the first thing up is a title, “The BBC Proudly Presents,” or some such, followed by the standard erect cock. Which means that the film is a kinescope. Which means that it’s a recording of a TV broadcast. Which means that the projectionist had taken the film to BBC Television and bribed somebody to transmit this hardcore porn extravaganza to the entire nation in the middle of the night when there were no official broadcasts and nobody was watching… except maybe some drunk somewhere, nodded off in front of the telly, awakened by sudden grunting and unable to believe his bleary eyes.

End of digression.

“GENTLEMEN.” Sign on a public lav. Which is an odd thing for it to say, when “POO AND PEE” would give you a more accurate account of the likely contents of the establishment.

“WALPAMUR Petrifying Liquid”. This is printed on a canister in Dickie’s garage, which a policeman searches. Again, I don’t know what this one means but it’s bloody terrifying. I’m going to have Walpamur-based nightmares tonight, I can tell.

“CLOSING DOWN”. Another sign weighted with foreboding.

“LONGFELLOW. AM READY TO OBLIGE. CHARLES.” The cryptic personal ad by which the child’s father signals his willingness to cough up the swag.

Now Dickie descends into the Underground, and suddenly his whole world is a speeding mass of signage. Only a few can be by read in all the flurry of ransom-collecting:

“WAY OUT” and “NO ENTRY”.

“People With Interest In The Future”. An ad, and another reference to crystal-gazing etc.

“Leave Something Solid Behind You,” another ad, certainly full of possible significance for Dickie. Could also serve as a slogan for the “Gentlemen”.

*

A few years back Bryan Forbes, along with many other directors, picked his ten favourite films of all time. He was the only one to choose one of his own movies. He picked WHISTLE DOWN THE WIND with performing prodigy Hayley Mills, which is an outstanding film, but  he could have equally picked this one. (My late friend Lawrie did not find it at all surprising that BF would nominate himself. I think it’s a rather splendid thing to do, personally.)

We have a suburban Lady Macbeth with whispery voice, in supposed communication with her still-born son Arthur, pushing her sappy hubby into this crazy abduction venture in order to prove her psychic abilities to the world. The domestic conspiracy scenes are quietly skin-crawling — this is a matrimonial horror film. Kim Stanley’s softly domineering Myra has the absolute faith of the true believer, which tells her that whatever she feels like doing is RIGHT, while Dickie is the weak man with no particular beliefs except a vague sense of right and wrong, which really proves his salvation.

I’ve never been very taken with Attenborough’s films as director, but as a performer he’s often remarkable: a fidgety, actorly outside, fussing away at bits of business, while a fierce-burning core of intense emotion rages behind the eyes. Here it feels like his big bald forehead is going to burst like an egg from the incredible pressures building within.

Also appearing: Nanette Newman as the kidnapped child’s mother. Forbes’ wife and frequent star, NN is a sort of English Rose type only her face looks like an Identikit of Sophia Loren: all the features are slightly the wrong size, which is definitely a good thing in this case. Patrick Magee as the Third Act Detective Inspector. This is the most restrained I’ve ever seen Madman Magee. He doesn’t even look as if he WANTS to start drooling and gnawing the chair legs. And he’s mesmeric.

Attenborough’s partner in Beaver Films was Bryan Forbes, a good actor and an often marvellous director. Here he seems to have picked up some tricks from the nouvelle vague and maybe the British New Wave: raindrops spatter on the lens turning the scene into a funhouse mirror wibble-wobble; we direct-cut from scene to scene and dissolve DURING scenes; we wipe between scenes just once, almost randomly. And this is combined with a staunchly classical mise-en-scene, strong compositions and elegant camera moves, especially around the seance table, which we circle counter-clockwise opposite Kim Stanley as she prepares to Make Contact.

British films have often seemed conservative to the point of petrification, a touch too much Walpamur Liquid perhaps. It’s not surprising to me that we made a film celebrating Douglas Bader, a war hero with tin legs: he has the perfect gait for our pictures. But in between the crazy dreamers like Michael Powell, and the plodding craftsmen like, well, 90% of everybody else, there are a few clever, skilled storytellers like Forbes who sometimes make contact with the beyond.

*

 

Footnote: Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s SEANCE is inspired by Forbes’ film. It shatters the neat structure, deploys an even more elliptical approach to narrative, and is a very interesting flick in it’s own right. The British film resists the supernatural without ever quite denying it altogether: offscreen spirits seem to breathe into its rooms. The Japanese quasi-remake teeters on the edge of total irrationality, and its protagonists plunge headlong into the terrible place that we sometimes see reflected in Attenborough’s glassy eyes.