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MostlyFilm

“A Blog Mostly About Film”

Monthly Archives: July 2011

29/07/11 CAMERA OBSCURER: The Return of the Mostly Film Book Club

By Niall Anderson

Christian Bale in Empire of the Sun, filmed at Shepperton Studios

“Next time you see a Spitfire in a museum, run your fingers over its skin… you might be touching a vanished masterpiece.”

When producer Cecil Hepworth went bankrupt in 1924, his entire stock of film negatives was melted down and turned into waterproof resin for military aircraft. Many of these negatives were unique, and some 80% of all British films from 1901 to 1929 were lost forever as a result. Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema is Matthew Sweet’s attempt to reconstruct this forgotten history, and the other forgotten histories of British cinema: the artistic, industrial and folkloric achievements that always seem to get overshadowed by those in Hollywood.

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28/07/11 First Among Sequels – Twelve Underrated Follow-Ups

Mostly Film contributors pick the best of the-ones-after-the-famous-one. Subject to outrage, this will be an occasional series.

"Sit down, Sofia. You won't be needed here."

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27/07/11 Air Con: The Death of Flight Sims

By Richard

Your face here: Tom Cruise's jacket from Top Gun

Flight! The dream of man from when Daedalus first made wings for his son without first performing a full risk assessment.

Shooting things! Man’s other dream, sadly realised a lot earlier.

Despite the enduring appeal of these dreams, why is it that the once dominant genre of combat flight simulations now survives only because of obsessive Russians willing to work for peanuts?

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26/07/11 Confessions of a soundtrack fan

By Victor Field

John Williams and somebody else: Would you buy a used soundtrack from these men?

The two most annoying experiences I’ve ever had in all my years of being a soundtrack fan both involved people who were supposed to be selling me the things.

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25/07/11 Legally Scorned: Films as Musicals

By Lissy Lovett

Looking down on another West End Musical

I was watching Legally Blonde a few weeks ago on TV and it seemed like it was missing something. It took a little while to work out what it was but then it hit me – there weren’t any songs.  Legally Blonde: The Musical opened at the Savoy Theatre in London a good year and a half ago, and although the critical and commercial response was good overall, there was a certain amount of snobbery in there too.  It was viewed, along with Dirty Dancing, Grease, Sister Act and others, as just another way to entice middle-aged women into theatres. The argument runs that women of a certain age (surely the biggest spenders in the West End) remember the original films fondly, and head to the shows in droves to try to recapture their youth, bringing their friends and families with them.

So here we have a class of musical that’s commercially successful and very often fabulously well staged, acted and sung, which is nevertheless dismissed by many people writing about theatre. The most often expressed reason for this dismissal is that the musicals are not original: they are based on films, and crowd-pleasing mainstream films at that. Dare I say it, but I think they are sometimes also discounted for being based on films that tend to be popular with women, and often “things women like” is synonymous with “things we look down upon”. From time to time there will be an article in The Stage or in The Guardian where the number of “original” shows and/or straight plays is compared with the number of remounts and film adaptations, either between the West End and Broadway or between now and 50 years ago. The subtext of these lists is always that having a greater number of brand new shows is better, and a higher number of straight plays something to be proud of. The list writers suggest that musicals and film adaptations are not as good as brand new work and plays where no one sings. The articles will say things like, did you know that in the 1950s, The Entertainer starring no less than Sir Laurence Olivier was playing at the Palace Theatre, instead of – gasp! horror! – Priscilla Queen of the Desert?  Golly, everyone must have been so much more clever and cultured then than they are now.

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22/07/11 Mostly Links – 22 July 2011

By Niall Anderson

"You want me to do Psycho FOUR?" Tony Perkins decries remakes

As every Cineplexer knows, summer is the season of revamps and remakes, and this summer is as full of them as any. But there are revamps and then there are revamps. Choose, for example, from the following:

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21/07/11 Looking Back into Darkness: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah

By Philip Concannon

Mordechai Podchlebnik, one of the two known survivors of Chelmno-Schlosslager

Simon Srebnik should have died in 1945. As a teenager, Srebnik was a prisoner at the Chelmno extermination camp, where he managed to stay alive thanks to his agility and melodious singing voice, both of which pleased the SS guards. Two days before the Soviet troops arrived, the guards began killing all of the remaining Jews at the camp, shooting each in the head at close range. Incredibly, Srebnik survived, later regaining consciousness in the now-abandoned camp, surrounded by dead bodies. It is a miracle that he was still with us almost forty years later when Claude Lanzmann sought out stories for his epic documentary Shoah. He returned with Lanzmann to Chelmno, now a tranquil spot bearing no evidence of the horrors that once took place there. We only have the memories of people like Simon Srebnik to make us understand what it was like to be a Jew in this particular time and place, and to bear witness to unimaginable atrocities on a day-to-day basis.

For 9½ hours, Shoah presents these memories to us. Lanzmann spent more than a decade tracking down and interviewing people who had been involved in the Holocaust in some way – victims, perpetrators, witnesses – compiling over 350 hours of footage that he subsequently edited into one 567-minute monument to those who died as part of the Nazis’ “final solution.” Watching the whole film in one day, as I did recently, is an extraordinary, singular experience. Taking breaks and a lengthy Lanzmann Q&A into account (during the latter, Lanzmann coped well with the unbelievable crassness of a question comparing Holocaust deniers with climate change deniers), the event lasted for almost 12 hours and I have never been left feeling so exhausted – physically and emotionally – by a single film. Shoah is a torrent of words, and those words conjure images capable of breaking the heart many times over.

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20/07/11 The Music of 2011 So Far

Mostly Film contributors discuss the music of the year so far after the jump …

The Mostly Film panel pretend they wouldn't rather be listening to Adele

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19/07/11 Mostly Minor Characters

Mostly Film writers pause and reflect on the blink-and-you’ll-miss em parts that make the film work.

Kronsteen – From Russia With Love.

By Paul Duane

"Congratulations, sir. A brilliant coup."

In a vast hall, a creepy, languid character resembling Ren the cartoon chihuahua plays chess against somebody who seems to be called Canada MacAdams. Kronsteen has only one word of dialogue here – “Check” – but it’s impossible to look away from him. See him manipulate chesspiece and cigarette in one hand with movements that hint he’s skilled in horrible varieties of martial arts. Observe the way his mouth opens impossibly wide to receive the cigarette, as if he was a deep-sea fish that somehow, eerily, smokes. Watch the impossibly slow movement of his head, then his eyes, as they register the fact that some lackey has brought him an unrequested glass of water. See the thought form as if in a bubble of noxious gas above his head – “he will suffer before I allow him to die” – while his eyes slide to the glass. And now look – who in the history of drinking has ever drunk like that, holding up the little paper napkin that sits under the glass as he drinks? The next shot explains why, but there doesn’t need to be an explanation – this is just part of the ineffable creepiness of Kronsteen. He probably eats his mashed potatoes with one single black obsidian chopstick. Reading the message on the napkin, he mops his fishlips, then – without warning – that cigarette is back, perched, languid. How the FUCK did he do that? Never mind, soon he’ll be dead.

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18/07/11 Manchester International Festival 2011: Art

by Ann Jones

Until recently I had always considered Marina Abramović to be formidable to the point of scariness and possibly not entirely of sound mind. Her work is extraordinary and utterly compelling but its intensity and seriousness seemed to leave no space for the woman herself to have a sense of humour. But then until recently, though I’d read about her work and seen it in reproduction, I’d seen very little of her work in galleries and had never seen Abramović herself in the flesh, something of a limitation when talking about the work of a performance artist. Somehow I never quite made it to Manchester in 2009 to see her piece at the Whitworth Art Gallery for that year’s MIF and, more annoyingly, was in New York a few weeks too early to see her retrospective at MOMA in 2010, for which she created a new performance The Artist is Present which saw her sitting virtually motionless facing a succession of visitors to the exhibition for the duration of the exhibition (over 700 hours in total). But last autumn, I saw her Lisson Gallery show and talk at Tate Modern, and discovered that the woman who has made uncompromising performance art for several decades, at times risking her life (usually, but not always, intentionally), is unexpectedly personable. Indeed at Tate Modern she started with a story – one of the childhood memories that featured both in Confession (2010), shown at the Lisson Gallery, and in The Life and Death of Marina Abramović (2011), which had its world premiere at MIF last week – and ended with a joke. Perhaps age is softening Abramović. Or perhaps she was never as scary as I’d assumed.

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