Stepping up to the challenge next is Leading Man Clive, who’s dropped a decent size list of goodness. Some of his music tips are amongst my best of 2011, and I’m gratified to note one of my favourite albums of all time as his rediscovery of the year.
Tag: Film
Best of 2011: Trailers
I’ve asked a couple of X&HTeam-mates to help me out in the run-up to the New Year. First up, Simon Aitken has done me proud with a list of the best trailers of the year. Some good choices in here, and I’m in total agreement with his No. 1. What do you think, Readership?
A thought for the Twilight fans
This has started bouncing around the Twittersphere already, so I take no credit for it. But it bears repeating.
Vampires. Dead, right? We’re agreed on that. If they’re dead, then there’s no heartbeat. No heartbeat, no blood pressure. And as Twilight vamps shatter like glass when killed, we can assume that they are effectively bloodless.
Without blood pressure, how then does Edward get an erection with which to impregnate his blushing bride? Unless the process has gifted him with what no less a thinker than William Gibson has already described as:
A discussion to be had along the lines of that which takes place whenever we consider the possibility of Superman and Lois Lane starting a family. Enquiring minds wish to know.
A Long Night Of Shorts
To London, Islington, the Florence Tavern. Clive’s collaborator in The Vanished and independent film-maker in his own right, Keith Eyles had put together a night of shorts in a friendly Norf Londun boozer, and I was there for to show support. One of Keith’s films had Leading Man Clive in a supporting role, and he was also showing Simon’s latest collaborative effort with Ben Green–the boxing vignette Why I Fight.
Continue reading A Long Night Of Shorts
Jodorowsky Week: The Holy Mountain
After the success of El Topo, Jodorowsky was given a million dollars by John Lennon and Beatles manager Allen Klein to make a new film. That film would lead to a controversy that would see both movies vanish from screens for over thirty years. That controversy would give the film an extraordinary, almost mythical status.
That film is…
Jodorowsky Week: El Topo
I was chatting to a work mate yesterday about Jodorowsky, and mentioned probably his best known film, El Topo. He’d never seen it, and asked what it was about.
“Well,” I said. “It’s sort of a Western…”
That was my first mistake. Like The Incal, El Topo wears genre like a disguise, fooling the casual reader into starting the journey, and then dropping the weirdness on them.
El Topo, as the trailer makes clear, is not a Western. It’s closer to a vision quest, an allegorical journey towards self-discovery and reincarnation.
Deceive The Deceiver: X&HT Saw The Ides Of March
“It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver.”
Niccolo Macchiavelli
Continue reading Deceive The Deceiver: X&HT Saw The Ides Of March
Bad Seed: X&HT Watched We Need To Talk About Kevin
The evil child has been a powerful symbol in horror and fantastic fiction for decades. The Children Of The Damned. The Children Of The Corn. The Others. Most boys called Damian.
To that roster we can finally add Kevin Katchadorian. In Lionel Shriber’s acclaimed novel, he stalked the pages while never really springing out at us. The book’s structure, built as a series of letters, provided a sense of distance from him. That may have been a kindness. Thanks to the extraordinary work of director Lynne Ramsey and the actor she chose to play Kevin, Ezra Miller, we are drawn uncomfortably close to Kevin. Close enough to see the fire rising in his eyes.
The story is simple, and resonant. Told through the eyes of Kevin’s mother Eva, we are led through Kevin’s life, and how from the very beginning he was somehow … different. Incapable of love. Manipulative, to an extent that Machiavelli would have admired. Utterly free from morals, from any iota of empathy with the world. A monster.
Ramsey plays with time, sliding us back and forth along the eighteen years from Kevin’s birth to the awful event that he engineers to define himself. We realise early on what he has done, but the director is canny enough to keep one big shock from us until the end. Meanwhile, the monster grows. Throughout, we see Kevin as Eva sees him. In some ways, she is the only person who Kevin chooses to be honest with. With her, he doesn’t hide his true state. With her, he is always truthful.
The film is soaked in crimson, scarlet, bloody washes saturating the screen. It’s the most painterly film I’ve seen in a long time, giallo-garish, lush as an Argento. Ramsey, her DoP Seamus McGarvey and colourist Stuart Fyvie have done extraordinary work here, flooding the screen with coloured light.
The performances throughout are equally remarkable. Ezra Miller, and the boys that play him as a child, create a brooding, demonic presence. A trickster, charming when he needs to be, terrible when the mask slips. Tilda Swinton shines through the horror, bruised, wounded yet never defeated. The final meeting between her and her son tells you everything you need to know about a mother’s love for her son, no matter what the cost. Thinking about it, it also tells you why she stays in a town that despises her – and why, to a certain extent, she is blamed for Kevin’s actions. The greatest horror of all is how unconditional, how illogical, how unbreakable that love can be.
2011 is becoming a bumper year for horrors with strong central female characters, and to my mind We Need To Talk About Kevin fits right in with films like The Skin I Live In and The Woman. These are films that deal with aspects of womanhood, and the darkness at the core of that state. WNTTAK is by far the subtlest of these, keeping the nastiness largely off screen. Yet it still has the power to shock and chill, largely because Ramsey builds a skewed, disturbing atmosphere and allows our imagination to do the rest. This is an astonishing achievement from film-makers at the top of their game. You need to see We Need To Talk About Kevin.
Modern English
DocoDom and I have been working together for quite a few years now, and it’s always nice to see some of the material from our archive popping back up on the interwebs.
Dom’s just uploaded the first major project that we worked on as a team to YouTube, and I’m delighted to showcase it here. Modern English is a half-hour show about the mod subculture, featuring interviews with some of the faces of the scene. Enjoy!
From Here To Hilversum
I try not to talk about work on X&HT, which is in general a solid rule for most bloggers. But this is too cool not to share.
That cool chunk of Lego is the Beeld & Geluid (Sound and Vision) building, in a leafy town called Hilversum about a twenty minute train ride from Amsterdam. It’s the home of Dutch radio and television, and contains all the archives of getting on for 100 years of broadcast history.
The building is just as remarkable on the inside – five stories high and five deep. As well as the archive, it’s home to a huge multimedia museum. The glass wall here has imprinted pictures of Dutch stars of stage and both big and small screen.
These pods contain the contestants of Last Man Watching, a competition where you watch TV until your brains leak out of your ears. It had been running for about 30 hours when I visited. Loads of people had dropped out at the 24 hour mark. Not a sign of the limits of human endurance – if you make it that far you get a free TV.
It’s a fascinating place, and well worth a trip out if only to marvel at a building that’s like a supervillain’s lair if only they were really into Dutch film and TV.
Of course, it was important to find time for a spot of refreshment before we headed back…
EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS 