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“A Blog Mostly About Film”

Category Archives: Politics

March 22, 2013 Ready to take your order

Niall Anderson watches two very different cinematic confidence tricks

The Sting

Paul Newman knows more than you know

As the old joke has it: on the internet nobody knows you’re a dog. But what kind of dog are you? Are you housetrained? Do you like children? Do you have any infectious diseases? Are you even, actually, a dog?

Hoaxes and confidence tricks have always been fertile ground for drama, but certain crops have withered in recent years. The clever confidence caper (epitomised by The Sting) doesn’t seem to flourish as it used to. If it hasn’t quite died out, it’s been genetically modified into something almost unrecognisable. The films of Christopher Nolan, for instance, are all confidence capers at root, but you wouldn’t know it to look at the overbearing foliage.

Besides, there’s a new harvest. Films about, for want of a better term, being a dog. Where once the cinematic conman played a short game, hoping to trick himself into money or out of danger, he now does what he does indefinitely and for no immediately intelligible reason. His first hope is that you’ll accept him as a dog. His highest hope is that you’ll accept him as a dog for a really long time. The usual pleasures of the cinematic con trick – whether and how he’ll get away with it – are replaced by the mopier issue of why he wants to be a dog in the first place.

Catfish (2010) remains the exemplar of this new tricky cinema. A transparent and risibly faked “documentary” about how social media allows people to disguise their real identities, Catfish takes callow New York brothers the Schulmans into the American heartland to discover that the hot twentysomething pixie one of them fancies is actually a dowdy middle-aged woman with no friends and a lot of Facebook accounts. There is shock, followed by hugging and learning. The Schulman brothers learned so much, in fact, that they felt compelled to franchise their wisdom into Catfish: The TV Show – an MTV production in which Nev Schulman spies on internet daters and exposes them if they’re not telling the truth.

This seems to me to be a fairly crippled notion of the truth. It is also a fairly obvious bit of reactionary posturing about the rise of online communication. But the note of paranoia – the idea that you can’t trust anybody till you see them in the flesh – feels authentic in both its fear and naivety. Everything will be all right once all the masks are dropped. Two films coincidentally released this week take on this idea in very different ways.

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February 15, 2013 Tanner 88

On the 25th anniversary of its debut  on HBO,  Phil Concannon looks back at Tanner 88.

While campaigning in New Hampshire ahead of the 1988 primary, Republican Presidential hopeful Bob Dole ran into an unfamiliar Democrat candidate. Dole did not immediately recognise this congressman and his daughter but he certainly was aware of the cameras surrounding them, and so the two men exchanged greetings like old pals, smiled, and wished each other well before going their separate ways. That might sound like a mundane incident, nothing more than a footnote to that year’s Presidential race, but there was something unusual about one of those two men. Jack Tanner was not a real politician. In fact, Jack Tanner was not even a real person.

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January 5, 2012 The Iron lady

By Gareth Negus

My earliest political memory dates to 1979, and my parents’ moans that “that dreadful woman has got in.” The dreadful woman was, of course, Margaret Thatcher, the so-called Iron Lady, who was to dominate the next decade of British politics.

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September 12, 2011 Kill BBC4

By Niall Anderson

Do you remember the furore when BBC Knowledge was axed? Were you part of the protest?

Here was a channel dedicated to the purest Reithian ideal. It had science documentaries, serious arts coverage, challenging first-run drama and comedy. It ran twenty-four hours a day. It had recognisable anchors and presenters. Now its budget and personnel were going to be slashed by two-thirds.

Its replacement would be a mere eight hours of programming every night. Most of that would be repeats and imports. BBC Knowledge had won a small but committed audience that was growing month by month. It was surely too soon to pull the plug.

This was 2002.

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September 6, 2011 Friends Like These . . .

In the second of an occasional series of what is basically an angry man baying at the moon, Caulorlime, the foul-mouthed English teacher, turns his attention to television advertising.

My wife once bought me a Fawcett Society “This is what a feminist looks like” T-shirt. It doesn’t fit any more, which is good as I have reached, and passed, the age where writing across your flabby man tits is not acceptable, no matter how ideologically sound the message. However, I stand by the sentiment. It is partly in this guise as PC Brigadier and partly as an old man that shouts at the television that I have come to a new, and depressing, realisation.

Adverts hate us all. We know this. They hate all races, socio-economic classes, ages, sexualities and genders. They hate Londoners. They hate the Welsh. They probably hate kittens. There isn’t a single stratum of society that the advertising industry doesn’t vomit contempt over. But they really hate women.

This might seem an odd proposition in 2011, after all, adverts really hate men, don’t they? Men are the ones portrayed as selfish, child-like appurtenances who, on their best day, serve only to irritate and hinder their female masters, right? It’s men who are shown misunderstanding vitamin supplements; men who are weak and hypochondriac; men who, even when the advert wishes to appeal to them, are portrayed as cock-led sex pests. The advert a year or so ago (for some shit, I can’t remember what) that had the tagline “So simple even a man could use it” would never have been screened had the gender been reversed.* Right? Right, but file all this under “Adverts Hate Us All.” Yes, men are portrayed as arseholes, but if you want to see really sinister stuff have a look at the way women are portrayed in ads.

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August 30, 2011 Shake Your Money Maker

MarvMarsh looks at the history of big finance on screen

Gordon was very happy with his 'free calls on the beach at sunset' plan

Gordon Gekko; Larry the Liquidator; the Duke brothers. They may sound like professional wrestlers but what they actually are is nothing like as honest and noble. They are cinema’s money men. The people at the top of the writhing pile of maggots that is the financial industry. It is not an industry that Hollywood understands, or if it does then that does not translate into a willingness to portray it accurately. A few broad strokes give us a man on the edge, betting the firm in a desperate attempt to save his drink-soaked skin; a few more give us his boss, who spends his days in his gigantic office or the back of his limousine, drinking whiskey and handing out lessons on what life is really like. A final few more gives us the young Turk who realises something is badly wrong and saves his soul by bringing down the firm and walking away. And that, pretty much, is the financial industry on film.

Given that we now live in a post-apocalyptic landscape after our dreams were all laid to waste by the feckless actions of some greedy banker scum, or so the story goes, perhaps that is all the financial industry really deserves. Films have a difficult relationship with work as it is, so to accurately and interestingly cover the work of people it is going to be hard to portray as human, let alone sympathetic, is a big ask. Also, is there really an audience for a film about an individual diligently carving out a good reputation for himself in the Compliance department of an international bank? Perhaps, but I wouldn’t want to be the one pitching it. Actually, of course I would because what if it sold? I’d be a millionaire! But it wouldn’t. I can’t even get that to fly in my dreams.

Here’s an idea for an exciting scene in a film, Producer Guy.

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August 2, 2011 New Art Galleries: Remaking Margate

Ann Jones introduces the first of an occasional series about new art galleries.


Turner Contemporary in Margate

Over the last couple of decades art has acquired an unprecedented audience in Britain. Blockbuster museum shows still draw big crowds but contemporary art also pulls in visitors in huge numbers and the London art market is thriving – in so far as such a thing is possible in the current economic climate.

In response, towns and cities across Britain have sought to use art to attract visitors and aid regeneration either through staging festivals, commissioning landmark public art works or building new museums and galleries. The most prominent of these art works has been Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North, commissioned by Gateshead Borough Council and funded in the main by the National Lottery. The best known new museum is also in Gateshead: the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. BALTIC is a converted flour mill, part of a trend for converting disused industrial spaces into galleries and museums that also gave us Tate Modern. Most of the high-profile gallery spaces opened in recent years have, however, been new buildings, often partly commissioned to attract not just art tourists but architecture fans as well. (Examples include the New Art Gallery, Walsall; Nottingham Contemporary; the Towner, Eastbourne; and Mima Middlesborough.) The spectacular success of the Guggenheim Bilbao seems to have played a part in the design and commissioning of each of these buildings, albeit tempered by a traditional British reluctance to wholeheartedly embrace contemporary architecture – the Bilbao effect versus the Prince Charles effect, if you like. This is the landscape in which Turner Contemporary has opened in Margate.

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July 11, 2011 The land of the Bolsheviks: early Soviet cinema at the BFI

BY JOSEPHINE GRAHL

Eisenstein's Fantasia: a scene from Ivan The Terrible Part I

How would you go about making film propaganda in support of a new, revolutionary state? The Russian revolution coincided with the rise of the cinema as mass entertainment, a cultural development which didn’t escape the attention of Lenin or the Soviet bureaucracy. In the 1920s, the Soviet film industry was state-sponsored and subject to state interference, its propaganda function for the new Soviet state accepted as a matter of course. But surprisingly, most of the films in the BFI’s Kino season of early Soviet films transcend the sort of didactic political preaching you might expect from that set-up.

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June 2, 2011 Art and the Political Message: Ai Weiwei and Peter Kennard

by Ann Jones

Ai Weiwei's ‘Surveillance Camera’ installed at the Lisson Gallery; Rirkrit Tiravanija’s banner outside neugerriemschneider in Berlin.

In the film that accompanied his Sunflower Seeds installation in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, Ai Weiwei says that he wants “people who don’t understand art to understand what I am doing”. In his recent book @earth, Peter Kennard has attempted communication that is purely visual: barring the title, the book – including both index and contents page – is without words; attempting to find a more universal visual language and create a book that needs no translation. Seeing these two things in fairly quick succession made me start to think about the degree to which art relies on verbal language – be it a title or a longer explanatory text – to help get the message across. Is visual language alone ever enough, and to what extent is it culturally specific?

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June 1, 2011 Osama bin Laden – Michael Bay’s Biggest Fan

by Preposition Joe

It’s simultaneously too horrible to say aloud, and too obvious to ignore. Osama Bin Laden based the 9/11 attacks on the films of Michael Bay.

Perhaps that’s not fair. He based 9/11 on the films of Michael Bay, and the films of Roland Emmerich and Mimi Leder. And possibly Tim Burton too.

Disaster movies were a staple of 70s popular culture, but they seem rather innocent today. Yes, there were burning buildings, crashing planes, cities in ruins. But their disasters were accidents or natural events, with no villain more sinister than a cost-cutting corporation or complacent authorities who won’t listen to the warnings of our hero. Audiences tired of the disaster movie after a while and the genre lived on only in parody.

And then, in the mid-1990s, the disaster movie had a resurgence, as the kids who’d grown up on Towering Inferno and Earthquake graduated from film school.

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