Today on Woman's Hour (first item) they were discussing Disney making over Merida, the red-haired heroine of Brave, into something sexier and more feminine for merchandising purposes. Little girls were angry that Disney has spoiled Merida, as Disney does most things it touches.
"I like Merida because she likes wearing loose-fitting dresses so she can aim properly when she's hunting. And I also like her because she's not one of those pink girly princesses who is always flapping around looking for boyfriends."
Going by the pictures, they've changed a quirky kid with a bow and arrows to a hot babe, who spends her time in the hair-dresser's rather than on the archery field.
The mothers on Woman's Hour were annoyed as well, as Merida is a gutsy princess they like their daughters to admire, as any decent mother would far rather their daughter had a pin-up of Jessica Ennis (achievement, drive) than of Kate Middleton (expensive teeth).
The little girls favoured Merida's penchant for dress suitable for active pursuits. One of the worst films I've ever seen in my life was Van Helsing. Among its general badnesses was Kate Beckinsale playing Anna Valerious who was constantly pursued by evil winged vampires. If a family curse had me being pursued by evil winged vampires I'd wear a loose top, jogging bottoms and trainers, or the nineteenth century equivalent, not a corset and high-heeled boots up to my thighs. I'd also tie back or even cut my hair, however tumbling and curly. Throw her to the vampires.
What not to wear when chased by evil vampires
I can understand why the little girls were so furious with the Disney makeover. If you love a character, you hate them being messed around. When I was little I adored Emma Peel, as played by Diana Rigg, in The Avengers. She raced about in a Lotus Elan, wore cat suits and karate kicked the baddies. I'd have been raging if she had appeared in a frilly dress and stilettos, and had waited to be rescued.
Emma Peel was replaced by a less fighting woman, and the show fell out of my ratings.
Mark Kermode has seen about a hundred films to my one, but as his opinion of the one we've both seen coincides with mine, I naturally find him an intelligent film critic. The Good, the Bad and the Multiplex is a collection of essays - on the economic facts behind block blusters; the baseness of the selection process for the Oscars; the awfulness of going to the flicks today where 90% of the commercial thinking goes into flogging popcorn; the hideousness of 3D, and diatribes about very bad films, especially Sex and the City 2. He's broadcasting his opinion of this "ghastly and putrid and vomit-inducing" film in this YouTube clip:-
When I first heard this I had imagined Mark Kermode was a small "l" liberal provoked into a tumbrel momentbut he says he's an old Trot, so seeing the Sex and the City 2 as the nadir of American capitalism and imperialism comes naturally to him.
There are also engaging anecdotes of how he started life as a film critic when a boy scribbling pages about Dougal and the Blue Cat (the film spin off of The Magic Roundabout) then maturing to Blazing Saddles - in order to relive the experience. One bout of entertainment went a long way in those pre-internet, DVD and even video days.
On block busters - he sees them, in corporate speak, as an Opportunity not a Threat to good film-making. To make money - and they almost always do - they have to include a big star, great special effects and a newsworthy budget (he makes the point that the 100 million plus dollars spent in themselves are an audience draw - if it's that expensive people go to see what the pricey buzz is about).
"If you spend enough money, bag an A-list star and pile on the spectacle, the chances are your movie will not lose money (unless it's a comedy), regardless of how smart of dumb it may be. . . an intelligent script will not (as it is widely claimed) make your movie tank or alienate your core audience. Even if they don't understand the film, they'll show up and pay to see it anyway - in just the same way they'll flock to see films that are rubbish, and which they don't actually enjoy. Like Pearl Harbour."
(Pearl Harbour, the movie, has the weakest, wettest, love story ever devised to insult you, the audience member.)
"The idea that creative risk must be limited to low or mid-priced movie-making (where you can in fact lose loads of money) while thick-headed reductionism rules the big-budget roost is the opposite of the truth."
Mark Kermode does love movies and does love his job as film critic even if it means seeing everything including all the Saw series. He talks of the annoyance critics cause film makers who denounce them as elitist snobs, when they are not quoting them out of context to ramp up their movies.
"the difference between film criticism and pub talk. Pub talk can be all opinion and nothing else; film criticism, if it is done properly , should involve opinion, description, contextualisation, analysis and . . entertainment. . .
To illustrate these essential elements, here are five short reviews of Saw 3D, each adding another key ingredient:
1) Opinion Saw 3D is rubbish.
2) Opinion and description: Saw 3D is a horror film that is rubbish.
3) Opinion, description and contextualisation: Saw 3D is the seventh episode and the first stereoscopic instalment in a long running horror series, and it is rubbish.
4) Opinion, description, contextualisation and analysis: Saw 3D is the first stereoscopic instalment in a series that began life as a tortuously inventive low-budget chiller but which as descended over the course of six sequels into gory, boring torture porn which is rubbish.
5) Opinion, description, contextualisation, analysis and entertainment. It took the once-inventive but increasingly depressing Saw series seven movies to resort to the hackneyed headache of 3-D, but despite the promise that this is "The Final Chapter" (just wait until the sums say otherwise) you keep wishing those protruding spikes would leap a little further out of the screen and puncture your eyeballs to ensure that you never have to watch rubbish like this ever again."
(The movies marketeers extract "inventive" from that paragraph and mount it on the marquees.)
Kermode is a total cineaste, a lover not just of movies but of movie theatres; of the smell of celluloid and the look of reels from the pre-digital age, which always jumped at the same point; the actual physical appearance of a strip of film with frames missing because the projectionist had snipped a piece showing a female naked bottom for a souvenir. He's the vinyl lover - even the shellac lover - groaning at the CD and I-Pod and lamenting that the skilled projectionist has been replaced by a button pusher.
He's good fun and good company. If you want to spend an easy 10 minutes look him up on YouTube on any film and he'll come out with something worth listening to.
Shakespeare's birthday and death day so here's a bit from Kenneth Branagh's Henry V. This is the speech of parlay at the siege of Harfleur. I think it was left out of the Olivier version, which was made in World War II, and was colourful and patriotic.. Branagh's take on Henry V was to make it far greyer, muddier and bloodier than Olivier's, emphasising the horrors of war.
Henry V. How yet resolves the governor of the town? This is the latest parle we will admit; Therefore to our best mercy give yourselves; Or like to men proud of destruction Defy us to our worst: for, as I am a soldier, A name that in my thoughts becomes me best, If I begin the battery once again, I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur Till in her ashes she lie buried. The gates of mercy shall be all shut up, And the flesh'd soldier, rough and hard of heart, In liberty of bloody hand shall range With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass Your fresh-fair virgins and your flowering infants. What is it then to me, if impious war, Array'd in flames like to the prince of fiends, Do, with his smirch'd complexion, all fell feats Enlink'd to waste and desolation? What is't to me, when you yourselves are cause, If your pure maidens fall into the hand Of hot and forcing violation? What rein can hold licentious wickedness When down the hill he holds his fierce career? We may as bootless spend our vain command Upon the enraged soldiers in their spoil As send precepts to the leviathan To come ashore. Therefore, you men of Harfleur, Take pity of your town and of your people, Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command; Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace O'erblows the filthy and contagious clouds Of heady murder, spoil and villany. If not, why, in a moment look to see The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters; Your fathers taken by the silver beards, And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls, Your naked infants spitted upon pikes, Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry At Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen. What say you? will you yield, and this avoid, Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy'd?
One way to get rhythm in a saying, sentence or paragraph, is to use words or concepts in threes. Threes are very satisfactory, like "burn, pillage and rape" or "blood, sweat and tears." Churchill originally said "blood, toil, tears and sweat", but the toil has been dropped by popular memory and the result sounds more satisfying.
So this is how the Observer film reviewer, Philip French, gave his paragraph a pleasant ring:-
At the age of six, Polanski began a life of persecution, flight and the threat of incarceration – first from the Nazi invaders of Poland, then an oppressive communist regime, and finally the American criminal justice system after his newfound sense of freedom led him into transgression. The world must seem a prison, society a succession of traps, civilised values a deceptive veneer, life itself a battle against fate.
That's threes for you. You make each word or concept seem of about equal weight. Blood=sweat=tears. So here Nazi invaders=oppressive communist regime=American criminal justice system. There's loads wrong with the American criminal justice system but it's not quite down there with Nazi persecution and communist oppression.
We now have life of persecution=flight=threat of incarceration. The life of persecution and flight were the plight of the innocent victim, the threat of incarceration was for a criminal act - rape, in fact, with the girl being the victim. and Polanski in this case, with the misuse of his power as a Hollywood prince, being the Nazi persecutor and communist oppressor in his little domestic way.
However, it seems a "newfound sense of freedom" led him to "transgression." "Transgression" these days usually refers to edgy art, e.g. a sculpture of the Virgin Mary made out of used tampons and sanitary pads*. It's a wet word for crime. Next time someone assaults Philip French and nicks his wallet, let's see if he'll call that "transgression".
Also, if a "new found sense of freedom" leads to such acts, shouldn't we start tightening up border controls against refugees and asylum seekers, especially the male ones?
If Polanski is making films then people can review them. What I can't go along with is false equivalences of events that were done to him and actions he carried out, he being seen as a victim in one instance because he was a victim in two others. Nor can I bear this kind of cod psychologising and this blurring of what wasn't a "transgression" but lust for nymphet flesh along with the piece of power and entitlement that are given to Hollywood's big shots.
* Any installation artist who nicks this idea had better give me some credit
Update:- I posted this as a comment on Philip French's article. It has been removed. By the look of the thread, a dozen other comments which took exception to this paragraph were removed as well.
Further update:- There's a discussion over at Crooked Timber among other Guardian Deleterati.
For those who can't remember the Great and Good's inconsistencies and double standards over the Polanski affair, read here.
When Margaret Thatcher saw the film The Iron Lady she wept for the painful memories of her time in office, and not for her dead husband, and her own confused old age, which are what the film deals with to the nth degree. Thatcher's being was that of an ideological politician and we saw her instead as a wife to the funny, supportive Dennis (especially endearing when young and played by Harry Lloyd with his charming smile). It was as if they had done a film about, say, Muhammad Ali and after a quick run through his rise to fame and a lot on his marriage and Parkinson's disease had touched briefly on his boxing matches. There was another twentieth century British prime minister who had a vision of how Britain should be reformed, and whose policies changed Britain considerably. He was also happily married - but if anyone was inspired (unlikely I know) to make a film about Clement Attlee, there would be ten minutes or so of his relationship with his devoted wife.
The film became a love story - an Everyman's love story, for those of the population who grow old together, until one dies and the other is left to decay alone. As a love story and a picture of the body and mind fading and falling, it was mildly touching. Olivia Coleman was brilliant as Carol Thatcher. With one slight expression she can look concerned and hurt - the look of the dutiful daughter always passed over for the negligent brother in her mother's affections.
Everyone agrees that Meryl Streep was stupendous in the role of the former PM and she will be buckling under the weight of the awards she will receive for her performance. She did do a great feat of physical acting as Thatcher the shuffling aged lady and of mimicry as the politician in her prime ministership but I didn't feel I was getting a sense of what Thatcher was like. What drove Thatcher was really portrayed by Alexandra Roach as the young Thatcher, the gawky grocer's daughter, earnest and single-minded, with notions that the economy is a chain of self-reliant families and small businesses. (The shop-keeping self-employed class loathe the striking wage earning class). How she enacted these ideas in policies was hardly touched on.
That may be something that this kind of biopic drama can't deal with unless it is done totally differently i.e. leave out a half hour or so of Thatcher meandering round her flat sorting through Dennis's things and have some scenes with people who weren't Thatcher, or Dennis, or cabinet ministers - people who were in fact affected by her policies, not the angry rioters and bombers who appeared as a back drop. That though would have been making quite a different kind of film, without the chance of a great central performance. Biopics do this - everything becomes a set of planets orbiting the sun of the subject.
The portrayal of the woman in a man's world part was pedestrian. It was much better fun in The Long Walk to Finchley. For a tighter and more dramatic film on Thatcher I would go for the BBC's Margaret. Lindsay Duncan played Thatcher, not doing a tour de force of acting dazzle but perfectly fine as the regal lady whose arrogance brought her down. Margaret, dealing only with Thatcher's ousting, had a dramatic tension and shape. The effect was of a killer whale barrelling through the sea unexpectedly being mauled by Tory sharks and stung by Tory jellyfish until she sank. The Iron Lady is a shapeless film although it's not dull or unwatchable. Anyone interested in recent British history, or who lived through the eighties, can be curious about how certain events and people are portrayed.
Meryl Streep said she was a little awed at performing with a gang of Britain's character actors, who appeared as the politicians of Thatcher's day. It was enjoyable seeing who would play which cabinet minister or leader of the opposition. When Richard E Grant appeared as Michael Heseltine I, and no doubt 90% of the audience, immediately thought Withnail and I. Heseltine always seemed a little louche and Richard E Grant was a pleasure as a long-legged high foreheaded take of him.
In this modern world film actors are far more highly regarded than politicians. The reaction of the British media is to be overwhelmed at the honour that one of Hollywood's queens plays our former Prime Minister.
I saw the film We need to talk about Kevin. I have read the book and I think I would have had some trouble following the story if I hadn't. The narrative is choppy, cutting to and from a radiant past, a troubled past, a terrible incident in the past and a miserable present for the main character, Eva (Tilda Swinton).
Tilda Swinton is terrific - fine-drawn, wound taut as a violin string - playing a woman living in recognisable hells - the hell of a mother whose baby won't stop crying, whose child is a destructive brat, refusing to be toilet trained and whose teenage son has all the nihilism of adolescence to the nth degree. Then the hell of being a pariah among her neighbours so her house is vandalised and she's attacked in the street (though I did wonder why she hadn't moved somewhere a thousand miles away from the place where she was known). And a further hell of remembering a different existence as a Lonely Planet type of traveller, a successful publisher and of being in love with her cuddly bear of a husband. The final hell - the event which brought about her life as an outcast - is shown to the audience in flashes.
Tilda Swinton was given black narrow eyes, matching those in the dark, handsome face of her son Kevin (uncanny representation from the actors that played him as a child (Jasper Newell) and an adolescent (Ezra Miller). Visually the film was great - the blowing curtains, the scuffed floorboards in the Bohemian apartment, and the smooth surfaces of the suburan palace where the family lived as practically no family has lived in the history of our species. Once a family as rich as this would have had servants around, and their leisure would have been in a much more peopled space but they were isolated in this clean dwelling among their gadgets and computers. When Eva searches Kevin's characterless room, she finds his malevolence hiding in a computer disk which destroys her own and her business's system. In a smaller, poorer household in most cultures in the world he would have been clipped around the ear instead of being patiently appealed to by his parents. They seemed like suppliants at the court of Caligula. (I don't say that would have made him any less prone to extreme cruelty).
Most mothers have felt now and then that their misbehaving children are imps spawned by Satan sent to torment them. This feeling is distilled in this film, as is Kevin's malignancy, which is as motiveless as Michael Myers's in the Hallowe'en series. It's hinted that it's hereditary -, his mother has a harsh view of other people - but she is capable of love and has a passion for travel. Kevin is full of anomie in a 1950s existentialist way, - everything is dumb, life is absurd, hell is other people, so why not go on a murderous rampage? I found the film weird and disturbing - there's no real answer to someone who feels like that. I mean, I have one, which is find an activity which you lose yourself in (not killing sprees) and people to love who will love you back, and that will get you through the time, but it's a feeble response and not cinematic - too much like It's a Wonderful Life.
I remember going to a photographic exhibition and among many beautiful faces of Hollywood stars, her face made me stop and gasp. She was extraordinarily beautiful.
On Monday, its last night at a cinema near me, I went to see The Social Network. It’s an enjoyable, fast paced film about a very modern subject, the invention of Facebook, with some excellent performances by Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg, the nerdy programmer and Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker, a man with full assurance that he is surfing the Zeitgeist. Afterwards I did a little googling to find that the film’s start off point, that of Zuckerberg being chucked by his girlfriend inspiring him to go into social networking was Hollywood rubbish. Zuckerberg says
"I've been dating the same girl since before Facebook," adding that filmmakers "can't wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things."
Not in Hollywood matey. There has to be a psychological fuel to get that creative motor humming.
I also had a look at Mark Kermode’s review. He found Zuckerberg’s actions “Infantile crass, chauvinistic and basically revolting. . . These people are interesting but they’re poisonous.”
I suppose they are poisonous - Sean Parker was vile and obnoxious - but the rest? They looked to me like very clever, very gifted but most of all very young men. So of course they are callous, callow, ruthless, mad with testosterone, arrogant, capable of huge feats of concentration at 48 hour stretches, capable of crazy acts and gross irresponsibility. That spirit of male youth - that is what gave the film its zing.
This clip is my favourite piece of Black Swan, the melodrama that‘s doing the rounds at the moment. When I saw it one part of my mind or perhaps my gut was gripped with suspense, the other part, the feminist critic part, was saying, is this for real? Frightening things approach you in basements, subways and behind doors in a claustrophobic apartment, which works very well on the suspense level, the acting is good and so in spite of the crude stereotypes of character and story which date from an earlier Bette Davis age than from films like Carrie, Hallowe‘en and the slasher stable it keeps you thrilled in your seat. But those few minutes, of a woman dancing and turning into a swan are real film magic. (My favourite bit of Billy Elliot, which is a run of the mill film about the outsider finding his true role is the final scene when the grown up Billy Elliot jumps across the stage in Swan Lake. It‘s such a great effect, the mechanics and cogs backstage then the dazzle of performance, and Tchaikovsky’s crescendos and climaxes can‘t help but exalt you).*
A tyro feminist critic could watch Black Swan and observe:-
1. The oppositions, on the Madonna vs. Whore, Classic vs. Romantic lines. So here we have the pale, frigid perfectionist versus the dark sexy let-it-all-hang-outer. Nathalie Portman plays, with believable intensity, Nina, an ambitious young ballerina who is a natural for the White Swan in a production of Swan Lake but is too cold, too repressed to play the Black Swan. She has to learn to “feel” the part by finding her own sexuality. This all-powerful magic token she unearths by biting the director, masturbating and having Lesbian wet dreams about her rival, Lily (Mila Kunis, managing to look voluptuous with her heavy black eye-liner, even though voluptousness is not what you expect in classical ballerinas). Lily of course is not so technically proficient as Nina but dances effortlessly and gropes her partner’s crotch, representing wild abandoned sexiness. Nina, the perfect White Swan, must learn to become the dangerous and erotic black swan, Carmen in a tutu.
This pale virgin versus the dark sexy piece is an old theme. It appears in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) with the figures of Rebecca and Rowena. Maggie Tulliver in The Mill of the Floss (1860) chucks aside a novel when the insipid blonde heroine appears who she knows will defeat the dark interesting woman. I would have thought feminism had come into the mainstream to the degree that someone in the production must have recognised this, but evidently not. The film is done straight.
For thematic purpose Lily and Nina have to appear together in many scenes but it makes Lily’s motivation puzzling. Is she after Nina’s role, or is this in Nina’s mind? Otherwise why does a likable young woman pursue the friendship of a frigid unpopular priss like Nina after several rebuffs? Is her warmth assumed, covering malice? It’s not made clear.
2. The controlling stifling mother (Barbara Hershey). She isn’t as batty as the mother in Carrie, but getting there. Nina’s bedroom is sugar pink and full of stuffed toys, which an eleven year old would find too much. Three felt markers on a placard:- “Infantilised young woman dominated by disappointed mother.”
3. The idea the dedication to an art and ambition are basically bad for a young woman's womanhood and lead to neurosis.
4. The Svengali figure - the man who can make and break the dependent female. He’s the director of the ballet, an excitingly attractive Frenchman (Vincent Cassel) with a crooked nose. Like the hero of a Georgette Heyer novel he can read Nina’s mind and know exactly what’s wrong with her.
5. The dangers that the city holds for solitary young women. There are apprehensive shots of subways and of the practice rooms in the basement of the ballet studio. Nina, sitting in the carriage of the subway, is confronted by a pervert who jiggles his tongue at her while touching his crotch.
6. The ageing woman (Winona Ryder) who after being thrown out of her primadonna role goes mad and stabs her own face.
The film taps into particular female fears - the menace of the streets and public transport, the fear of their own bodies, the fear of being unattractive, the fear of ageing and being discarded, the fear of sex and men Nina’s body attacks her, by getting odd rashes and marks on her skin. Finally she accepts her body and her own power but in her moment of consummated perfection she throws herself from a great height and dies. Pure romantic, pure Gothic.
Of course a classical ballet dancer does horrible things to her body to make it do things that a human body is not designed for. Classical ballerinas get eating disorders and break their toes. I went to Black Swan with a friend whose daughter had done classical ballet but when the daughter got older she didn’t encourage it, having by then met crazed dancing teachers who were crippled with arthritis. She says she now finds the shapes and angles that classical dancers get into ugly. Mind you, the daughter, who is beautiful, walks like a princess.
*I was once on holiday in Estonia, staying in a town on the Baltic called Haapsalu, which had been a resort for Russians and where Tchaikovsky had often stayed. In the evening we were walking in a park beside the Baltic and sat down on a park bench, then leaped up with shrieks as the bench struck up Swan Lake. Behind the bench was some kind of music player with a sensory device. In a holiday mood by the tideless Baltic which was covered with wild fowl the Tchaikovsky played as if by ghosts was the icing on the cake, being both beautiful and absurd.
I heard a critic praising Of Gods and Men and I liked his description of it as a film that took its time, therefore as unlike as possible as the films around now that gives you an explosion or special effect every three seconds. Of Gods and Men by Xavier Beauvois won the Grand Jury prize at Cannes. The films takes us to a monastery at the edge of a poor Algerian village, and the first twenty five minutes or so are spent establishing that the monks get on well with the villagers. They are of the Cistercian order which has a tradition of labour and service, so we see them gardening, making honey to sell in the market and giving medical care to the children. The colours are muted - the monks are in their Cistercian white tunics and black scapulas, the village women wear colourful clothes and scarves, the colours softened by shabbiness. The camera lingers on the flat roofed houses of the village, on the singing of the monks, on the bareness of their monastery and on the single track road in this remote part of the country.
Then the Islamists turn up and cut the throats of Croatians who for some reason (not explained) live at the village. The villagers tell stories of Islamist cruelty and rising power. The monks are offered army protection but will not take it. When the Islamists come again on Christmas Eve the head monk, called Christian (a sour severe looking man, in contrast to the other monks who are much cuddlier) persuades them that the Koran calls for peace between Christians and Muslims, and so the head Islamist and his band then depart. The monks debate whether they should leave and for various reasons - duty towards the village, community solidarity, the painfulness of leaving the life they have established - decide they will stay. Eventually they are taken hostage.
Yes, it’s beautiful to look at, like a wonderful travel documentary, where everyone is picturesquely dressed, including the Islamists with their beards, round hats or cloths wrapped round their heads. The monks never speak about the Catholic church but of God and Jesus Christ. The religious texts quoted, both Koranic and Biblical, are those that are tell of love and tolerance, i.e those most appealing to a secular audience. The monks are shown as admirable men, ranging from a sturdy fellow of about 40 to a very old man with rheumy eyes, all strong and capable. At their Last Supper, - which is how their final meal is portrayed - they listen to Swan Lake and the camera really moves in and absolutely hangs on to each lined and seamed face.
It’s a serious film about a serious subject - how living in a faith can make men steadfast and self-sacrificing both in life and death. I found it a little ponderous, a little too stately, the points made heavily underlined and was looking at my watch rather a lot. There is one intensely moving scene though, the last, when the Islamists herd them up a hill through falling snow and they walk holding on to each other until the snow blots them from the screen.
