THE BRITS (ACCORDING TO THE CELLULORD):

You may have noticed a recent trend in whacking-on about how bally ace it is to be British (despite the over-whelming evidence to the contrary).  Well, whilst some German immigrants are enjoying a nationwide party, kamera.co.uk is discussing British films ... I've posted a comment there, throwing-in my thoughts, but it seems rude not to share the same with you my ardent reader ... So here they is:

Ahh ... The timeless conundrum ... What makes a film 'British'?  

Old blue-eyes is back ... Michael Fass - sorry, Peter O'Toole as Aurens of Moravia.

Are '2001', 'Clockwork Orange' and 'Lawrence of Arabia' British?  Depends on your terms of reference, I suppose.  Although they were made in (and around) Britain ... They were made with American money.  Does that matter?  Debatable.  'Lawrence' is obviously *about* Britain and the British mentality ... And the reality is that Britain alone has never been able to afford to make a film on *such* a grand scale.  It speaks volumes about British colonial ambition in a way that we, ironically, couldn't say without spending American money.  So, yes, I'll happily call that an 'assisted win' for Britain.

Stanley Kubrick: The man with the movie camera ...

Did Kubick count as a British director by the late sixties?  Possibly.  Even if they weren't set here, his films were certainly made here and are shot through with a British sensibility ... Albeit seen from an American perspective.  But what about Terry Gilliam?  When he spent Universal's money to make his swinging satire of 80s Britain - Brazil - Did that stop it being a British film? 

Okay, but what about putting the boot on the other foot ... What about Hitchcock?  Can we claim any of his American films?  The perversity and sarcasm at the heart of many of his films feels British.  Psycho?  Can we have that?  Notorious?  North By North West, even?  They feel very British (or at least European) to me!

Alfred Hitchcock on, seemingly, a tightrope.

Are the Harry Potter films ours?  Thanks to Ms Rowling's insistence, they *feel* British, gave work to a lot of British thesps and technicians and, of course, where shot here ... But every penny of the profits goes back to Warner Brothers' vault in Gringotts.  Does that make them British?

I feel this question has a bit of an Andy Murray feel about it ... If they're hits, we'll claim them; if they're flops, they're all yours (unless, like me, your inherent perversity makes the opposite response more likely).

To my mind - and what I've always taught my students - is that the money *does* matter.  British films are 'Financially British'.  A film can have a British identity, a British feel, it can tell the world about Britishness ... But it is *not* itself British if a significant amount of the production budget didn't originate here and/or the bulk of the profits don't stay here.

So, with that entirely arbitrary rule in place ... Here's my ha'penny worth, in purely chronological order (and I'm happy to be corrected if I'm mistaken in thinking these films qualify as 'financially British') ...

Horribly hand-coloured lobby-card from the wonderfully monochrome 'School for Scoundrels'

School for Scoundrels (1960 – ABPC) How does one choose just one Alistair Sim or Terry-Thomas film?  And why this one above Belles of St. Trinians or I’m Alright, Jack, say?  I don’t know.  I just find this film irresistible; whenever it makes one of its regular Saturday afternoon appearances on TV, that’s me spoken-for for a couple of hours.  The humour is so delightfully cynical and the third act offers the most perfect revenge comedy in all cinema. 

Moodily monochromatic shot from the gloriously colourful ... You get the idea ...

The Wicker Man (1973 - British Lion - although I gather they were bought-up or bailed-out by EMI, I believe that was still a British company at the time).  One of those films which still delights ... The more often you see it, the more you see in it and it's a *great* film to show modern teenage film students because they've never heard of it - So the ending catches them completely off guard.

All together now: "We're just haaangin around ... Haaaangin' arooooound ..."

Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979 – Handmade Films) This has just edged out both Time Bandits and The Long Good Friday, ’cos I don’t want Handmade Films to dominate my list, which they very easily could!   The money famously came from a Beatle mortgaging his house … But the end result is probably the cleverest and most ambitious comedy made since the glory-days of Ealing.  And why haven’t I included any Ealing?  Same reason there’s no Hammer … Cos I only have five films!

Five little fingers ... But which one's Pinky? (Sorry ... I'm getting tired, here)

Pink Floyd:  The Wall (1982 - EMI)  I have long maintained that Alan Parker is tragically overlooked when one considers the history of British film of the 70s and 80s.  He did pretty much everything Ridley Scott did, he often did it sooner, sometimes did it better, and generally set it to music!  Obviously, to tolerate The Wall, one has to be up for 90-odd minutes of Roger Waters’ self-flagellation, which I certainly am.  Back in the 80s, this was the first VHS tape I bought (as opposed to renting), and I watched it time and again, getting a headache every time from frowning as I tried to fathom the meaning of every frame.

You can't just call ANY film British ... This isn't Viet-Nam ... There are rules!

The Big Lebowski (1998 – Working Title)  Yes, I’m being awkward now but this film was co-funded by Working Title (who paid, at least in part, for The Coens’ Fargo and O Brother Where Art Thou) … So it’s British.  Through and through!  Let’s be honest, would anything as uniquely odd-ball have been produced by a mainstream American production company?  I doubt it.  Besides, it really does hold my list together.

So ... Thoughts:

 

BEING CHARLIE KAUFMAN

Who knew?

Charlie Kaufman has made his scripts available as pdfs for download ... For free.

All his work is here for the eager script-writing student to pore over, including drafts and redrafts of the same scripts, in some cases.

What an incredible insight into the head of the most audacious, literate and thoughtful script-writer of the last decade.

The link, if you fancy a bit of cut'n'paste action is:  http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/index.php

Furthermore, if that puts you in a dangerously Kaufmaniacal frame of mind, you might care to dedicate the afternoon to listening to two and a half hours of Kaufman being interviewed by Wired magazine here.

They also go on to show how the finished article evolved through the rewrites and design stages which is, in itself, interesting and unusual!

Finally, below, is a video interview with Kaufman as guest of honour at the Göteborg International Film Festival in February this year.  This interview is over an hour long.

I think these three resources between them give you an invaluable insight into the working practices and personality of one of the few people working in mainstream American cinema today to whom the word 'genius' could be applied without too much hyperbole.


ADDENDUM:


Having dug around a little further on the huge Being Charlie Kaufman.com website I have also found a chance to own The Theatre of the New Ear.  This was a piece of drama written by Kaufman and The Coen Brothers in conjunction with their composer Carter Burwell.  It was performed live infront of an audience, but was designed to be listened to rather than watched.

You can read all about it on Carter Burwell's website, here.

The all-star cast performed these pieces in a couple of venues in America, but only performed it in Britain at one.  If you weren't there in 2005, never fear, because you can now download the audio.  This isn't free, it'll cost you the princely sum of $7 (or £4.44 in real money, at today's exchange rate) - or $5 if you just want Charlie's part of the evening.  That is a bargain, however you cut it!

So, fire up your Paypal account and head here.

Right, without further ado - that video interview:

TRUE GRIT

The unique 'Best Film Nominee' illustration from the BAFTA brochure beautifully evokes the feel of the film

True Grit ends as it begins, with a consideration of death.  Beyond any of the individual characters it introduces us to, then dispatches, the death the film is really concerned with is the death of The Old West.

I must confess a vested interest.  I have written extensively on The Coens in the past and consider them to be the greatest film-makers working today.  That puts a real burden of responsibility on them which, at least so far, they don’t seem to have buckled under.  Whew.  They can be very variable in their output, ranging from the world-beating magnificence of No Country For Old Men (2007) to the good-natured eccentricities of Burn After Reading (2008) via the simply incomprehensible A Serious Man (2009).  One never knows which way the pendulum will swing, will their next film be a screwball comedy, a fantasy or a gritty crime drama.

Well, True Grit is, as its title might suggest, a very gritty, very dramatic film heaving with crime.  It features career-defining performances and is purely and simply majestic.  Although the year is yet young, this is the film of the year and I don’t see anything coming over the horizon to challenge that.  Except maybe Twilight.

The film’s extraordinarily evocative opening shot fades in gradually, like a developing photograph, an old photograph, shrouded in shades of sepia.  It is accompanied by the narration of an old woman, looking back at her lost youth, her lost father and, of course, the lost West.

How does the saying go?  ‘In the midst of life, we are in death’.  Well, that is definitely the case for young Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) who, at the tender age of fourteen, finds herself taking on the responsibility of dealing with her father’s estate after his violent and untimely death.  She very soon finds herself sleeping with corpses at the mortuary and, as her quest to avenge her father develops; pretty much everyone she meets is murdered or maimed.  But then, this is a revenge tragedy and, as the name suggests, they rarely end happily. 

That's one bad hat, Hailee

Mattie describes her night in the mortuary as being “… like Ezekiel in the valley of the dry bones” but, unlike the bones in the Bible story, these skeletons don’t come back together with tendons and flesh and skin.  However, when Mattie later finds herself surrounded by more bones, they do come to life in a very Biblical way.

Commentators wiser than I have noted that, in the Old West, what literacy there was likely came from reading the only book everyone out there was likely to encounter: The King James Bible.  It would influence everything, from the way people thought to the very words they spoke, and so it is here.  The Coens have long demonstrated a love for precise, often complex, occasionally arcane dialogue and this film gives them ample opportunity to indulge that love, with poetic, florid and deliciously illustrative language issuing from practically every mouth.  I won’t steal the best lines; feel free to discover them yourself.

So the film is rich with its Biblical texture and atmosphere heavy with death.  Reuben ‘Rooster’ Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) is a man steeped in death.  He is described, before his entrance, as “a pitiless man, double tough …” and, when he does appear, he is being grilled in a court about the twenty-two men he has killed in his four years of duty as a Marshall.  This is why Mattie chooses him to be the agent of her vengeance; she wants an irredeemable man with no fear of killing.  

A pitiless man and double tough, if you're not into the whole brevity thing.

Mattie herself is utterly merciless in her determination, she destroys a poor horse-trader by out-witting him with her remorseless logic and rapier-sharp mind and, when the Texas Ranger, Le Boeuf (Matt Damon), introduces himself by entering her bedroom, he is proud and preening and patronising and she effortlessly outwits him, though only half awake.  This not simply a quest for blood for Mattie, her revenge is philosophical, even intellectual … She discusses with Rooster the definition of malum in se, a crime which is wrong in itself, a crime which is, essentially, against God’s Law.

Her two adult protectors have far simpler motivations than she, pride in LaBoeuf’s case, cash money in Rooster’s.  Out on the range, the two cowboys bicker like little girls while the little girl with them is the constant voice of maturity reason, but that’s fourteen-year-olds for you.  When he is alone (and at a good distance from a gin bottle) Rooster gets to show her his considerable tracking skills while they ride through an ever-changing landscape, as though passing through the levels of Hell, taking them ever nearer to Mattie’s prey, the cowardly murderer, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin).

As usual in a Coen film, the violence is sudden, messy and definitive and the resulting corpses are generally treated with a cold disregard.  As Rooster ruminates, when considering the four men he has killed, all lying on the frozen ground: “They wanted a decent burial; they shoulda got themselves killed in the summer”.

Without wishing to discuss the film’s dénouement in too much detail, it is fair to say that it is satisfyingly bloody and Biblical, and leads to Rooster taking on a burden of responsibility which, before meeting Mattie, he probably wouldn’t have shouldered, and which earns him the redemption he doesn’t particularly want.

I love the period feel the publicity people have given to the teaser posters.

And so, our tale of the Old West ends as it began, bathed in sepia light and fading into memory.  This leaves only the film’s coda – and the point where this version and the John Wayne original part company most significantly – which considers how, by the early years of the 20^th century, the legends of the Old West, such as Cogburn, Younger and James, have become a sideshow attraction.  An ignominious reward for those who carry the wounds of a nation’s birth-pains.

Once again, the Coens have hewn-out a masterpiece.  Every line of dialogue, every moment, is rich with detail and significance and I am sure that deeper layers of subtext will offer themselves to me as I re-watch the film many, many times over the coming years.  It needed brave directors to take on territory already charted by Henry Hathaway and, as for the main role … The Duke won his only Oscar for this role, although it was really in recognition of his whole career … Possibly the only man big enough to fill those boots was The Dude, fresh from winning his own career Oscar. 

Bridges’ performance retains the gruff exterior of Crazy Heart’s Bad Blake, but, unlike that role, Rooster is utterly incapable of communicating his feelings.  This comes across by turns as hilariously funny and deeply tragic when, for example, his desperate insecurity in front of LaBoeuf drives him into a destructive drinking binge.

But the performance of the film and, to my mind, the performance of the year, is Hailee Steinfeld’s.  She is the age Jodie Foster was when she was Oscar nominated for Taxi Driver (1976), and has a similar towering confidence on screen.  This will take her a long way and, if there’s any justice that doesn’t have to be taken at the muzzle of a gun, it will take her all the way up to the podium to accept her gold statue on Sunday the 27^th.






Dir: Joel Coen
Stars:  Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin
Dur: 110 mins
Cert: 15

OSCAR NOMINATIONS

.

So, The Academy Award nominations are with us once more. The year's biggest popularity contest has begun in Earnest (a small town just outside Hollywood) with lots of well-paid slebs maintaining an air of casual disdain as they desperately compete with each other to win the affection of The Academy.  But, over the last decade or so, said Academy has proven itself to be a wily beast largely immune to the tides of fashion (as evidenced most recently by last year's shock rejection of Avatar's opulence in favour of The Hurt Locker's gritty realism).

Let's have a closer look at a few categories, shall we?

Best Film:

And the nominations are:

• Black Swan
• The Fighter
• Inception
• The Kids Are All Right
• The King's Speech
• 127 Hours
• The Social Network
• Toy Story 3
• True Grit
• Winter's Bone

Unusually, I've actually had the chance to see most of these (reviews of The Fighter, Black Swan and True Grit will be with you shortly).  If I were a member of The Academy (surely my absence is just an administrative over-sight) I'd be divided between hanging my hat on Inception and True Grit but, as a long-time lover of all things Coenical, I'm afraid it wouldn't be a long debate: The clear winner is True Grit!

 Can't see the real Academy going for a remake, especially not when The Social Network has got such a head of steam but, these are my choices, not theirs!

Best Director:

• Darren Aronofsky – Black Swan
• Joel Coen and Ethan Coen – True Grit
• David Fincher – The Social Network
• Tom Hooper – The King's Speech
• David O. Russell – The Fighter

Without wishing to pre-empt my own unpublished reviews too much, I'll simply restrict myself to reiterating that True Grit is the latest in a long line of Coen masterpieces and, as such, would get my vote.  But, again, in the real world, I'm thinking its Fincher's year.

Best Actor:

• Javier Bardem: Biutiful
• Jeff Bridges – True Grit
• Jesse Eisenberg – The Social Network
• Colin Firth – The King's Speech 
• James Franco – 127 Hours

This is an interesting year because three of these characters (I haven't seen Bardem's turn so can't speak for him) are really quite unlikeable.  Eisenberg's Zuckerberg particularly so!  Will Jeff Bridges be the third actor ever to win two years on the trot?  Well, since his Cogburn is essentially Bad Blake all over again, just with an eye-patch instead of a guitar, I'm thinking not.  It's a shame they decided to give him a consolation It's-Your-Year Oscar just before he turned in the performance of his decade.  But, hey, a gold statue is a gold statue.  I'd like to see Firth get it, just because he gives jaw-droppingly wonderful acceptance speeches, but I think Eisenberg will be swept along on The Social Network wave.

 Having only seen Portman in Black Swan, I can't comment on the 'Best Actress' noms, save to note there must be a typo somewhere - no Meryl Streep.  I know she hasn't done anything this year but still, surely she's overdue for number seventeen.

Best Supporting Actor:

• Christian Bale – The Fighter
• John Hawkes – Winter's Bone
• Jeremy Renner – The Town
• Mark Ruffalo – The Kids Are All Right
• Geoffrey Rush – The King's Speech

Bale.  Deal with it.

Best Supporting Actress:

• Amy Adams – The Fighter
• Helena Bonham Carter – The King's Speech
• Melissa Leo – The Fighter
• Hailee Steinfeld – True Grit
• Jacki Weaver – Animal Kingdom

 Melissa Leo is quite extraordinarily loathsome as Marky Mark's mum in The Fighter but, Hailee Steinfeld (at just 14 years old) is just riveting as Mattie Ross in True Grit.  Definitely the performance of the year in any category, the little gold doorstop must be hers!


Original Screenplay:

• Another Year – Mike Leigh
• The Fighter – Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson
• Inception – Christopher Nolan
• The Kids Are All Right – Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg
• The King's Speech – David Seidler

Okay, so we'll skim over The King's Speech's debatable originality, given the historical records of the events in question, and recognise that it is a fine piece of writing but, for me, Inception wins hands down.  The Americans are great at assembling complex ole structures in their screenplays and along comes a quietly-spoken Brit who makes as mind-blowingly-complex a structure as I've ever encountered in a script seem so simple.  An extraordinary piece of technical writing.

Best Adapted Screenplay:

• 127 Hours – Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy
• The Social Network – Aaron Sorkin
• Toy Story 3 – Michael Arndt, John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich
• True Grit – Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
• Winter's Bone – Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini

Now this is a more vibrant category than the Original one, this year.  Beaufoy and Doyle's script for 127 Hours manages, I feel, to do more with recent actuality than Sorkin's The Social Network, and it pains me to admit that because I loves me The Sorkin.  For me what broke The Social Network was the flashback framing narrative, it just seemed disappointingly safe!  And, hang on, Toy Story 3  … since when did being a sequel and therefore containing the same characters and situations as a previous film make your screenplay adapted?  Maybe it and The King's Speech have been entered into the wrong categories?  But, anyway, none of that matters because nothing comes close to the richly textured poetry of The Brothers Coen's take on Charles Portis' True Grit.  The statue is theirs.

The Pixar Award for Best Animated Feature:

Goes to ... ehm ... Pixar.

Although it's a goddamn crime that 9 wasn't even nominated.  Was that ignored this year or last year?  Can't remember.

Best Cinematography:

• Black Swan – Matthew Libatique
• Inception – Wally Pfister
• The King's Speech – Danny Cohen
• The Social Network – Jeff Cronenweth
• True Grit – Roger Deakins

Now, you see, again this is a very rich category.  Even with the surprising omission of 127 Hours, Pfister’s work on Inception was sublime, but Deakins does it again.  He won it with the opening two minutes of True Grit!


Best Visual Effects:

• Alice in Wonderland
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1
• Hereafter
• Inception
• Iron Man 2

Despite my thinking that the ‘Iron Man-in-a-Suitcase’ gag was the best single effect of the year, this statue has gotta go to Alice, hasn’t it?  Because, of course, a lot of the stuff in Inception that you think was CGI, was actually shot in camera.

 If ‘Visual Effects’ still includes things like blowing up miniatures and rotating a set and suspending your entire cast on wires then, well, I think my choice is fairly obvious.

Best Makeup:

Only three nominations, sadly.  Gotta be Baker and Elsey’s Wolfman, for old time’s sake!

Best Costume Design:

I think Colleen Atwood is a shoo-in for the extra-ordinary work she did on Alice In Wonderland, provided The Academy’s collective memory stretches all the way back to this time last year.

Oddly, I notice that the incredible work done by Lee Smith on Inception has been completely ignored in the ‘Editing’ category.

And they are really the only categories on which I have an opinion, apart from ...

Best Original Soundtrack:

• 127 Hour  – A.R. Rahman
• How to Train Your Dragon – John Powell
• Inception – Hans Zimmer
• The King's Speech – Alexandre Desplat
• The Social Network – Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

Rahman won rightly two years ago, but this year's soundtrack lacked the distinctiveness of his Slumdog Millionaire work.  Powell's Dragon soundtrack was an underappreciated delight and I'm glad to see it getting a nom.  Reznor and Ross' The Social Network is just an hour of ethereal electronic meandering.  Now, don't get me wrong, I paid good money for their Ghosts I - IV album, I am more than receptive to ethereal electronic meandering, but here it just never coalesced into a stand-out soundtrack.  Inception, on the other hand, is wonderful, powerful piece of work and I imagine it will win ... but it doesn't really advance the work Zimmer achieved with James Newton Howard on The Dark Knight, which was magnificent and revolutionary and completely ignored by The Academy in 2009.

But, here's a thing:  Irrespective of the qualities of the film, the single stand-out element of Tron Legacy was Daft Punk's soundtrack.  From its Coplandesque Overture to the dance floor remix of the single, Derezzed, it is by turns spine-tingling, moving and thrilling and it's a FUCKING TRAVESTY that it hasn't been nominated!



Are they all deaf over there?  I'm sorry, but no amount of Randy Newman-warbled sentimental syrup will make up for the absence of those crash helmets on the big night.

I've decided that if Daft Punk aren't going, neither am I.  So just don't expect to see me on the red carpet, alright.  I've made my mind up.  So there!