Sex, Sadism And The Junior Senator From Wisconsin… January 29, 2007
Posted by John Hodson in : Film & DVD Reviews, Drama / Romance , 2 commentsAll work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. And I’ve been very dull of late, no time to stand and stare, never mind blogging. Janus may look backwards and forwards, but he also looks like a month in which two important deadlines always collide, and there is only one of me. As I’ve yet to perfect a method of binary fission, it will be ever thus.
Still, there’s always cloning.
I’m playing catchup, blog-wise, so the next couple of posts will have to précis what’s been going on movie-wise chez ‘aitch in between dodging the bullets work-wise. Wise guy, huh..?
‘…Some Gratuitous Sex and Violence…’
…was Q’s fervent wish in Sir Sean of Connery’s last outing as 007, Never Say Never Again, and, of course, he got his wish. Bond just would not be Bond without a cocktail (shaken not stirred) mixing both. Apt then, since my piece on Her Majesty’s least secret agent - titled ‘Bond-age’ - search engine reports show that I’ve brought visitors here in a futile quest for a little S&M. See? I just did it again…
I finally caught up with Casino Royale and was more than pleasantly surprised that, for once, all the hype was so. Bond ‘rebooted’ was all they claimed and more, Daniel Craig more than comfortable in, and out, of the Turnbull & Asser dinner jacket, more than believable as everyone’s favourite cold-eyed killer.
Believable. Well, yes, Bond is cartoon violence taken to the very margins of the definition. So in a world where a Saturday night smack across the chops can lead, in one drunken, stupid, moment of madness to the mortuary, Bond is virtually indestructible, impervious to the most bone-rattling blows. And incredibly sexy. And dangerous. Assured, suave, brave, strong, skilled and blessed with a searing intelligence. Safe to say, all your basic tools to save Britain (and the world) in the name of Her Majesty.
He’s everything we aren’t - everything spies are not in reality. Real spies are now recruited from the official MI5 website, real spies are drunken ex-Cambridge graduates or some broadsheet Foreign Correspondents in over their heads in a ‘Great Game’ they, or possibly anybody else, can’t hope to make any real sense of. Real spies even seek to destabalise their own governments, or write the memoirs of their seedy exploits for hard cash. Or both. Real spies aren’t James Bond at all, which is one of the reasons why we want to be him. Huzzah for macho posturing!
And in a world being eaten alive by American culture, he’s British. Even if the latest outing underscores the ’special relationship’ to be along the lines of ‘lease lend’, the product placement - my God, if there was an Oscar for it Casino Royale would be a shooin - for items not from these shores. The Aston Martin might still be built here, but we’re a long, long way from the gorgeous to look at (less so to drive) ‘64 DB4. Gone are the days of David Brown; Henry Ford’s descendants pocket the profits today.
Anyhoo, like most everyone else, I’m sold. It’s a very decent piece of film-making, founded on a sharp script that had much to offer fan boys and newcomers alike, built with all the precision and care we’ve come to expect from the multi-million dollar franchise, that has gone back to it’s roots in great style. Bravo.
However, what I did find disturbing was watching all this mayhem sitting in a cinema filled with young children. The 12A certificate mean that kids under the age of 12 have to be accompanied by an adult. But what on earth possessed any parent to take along children that appeared to be as young as six or seven? The cinema was filled with them.
It’s been a while since I sat down to watch any children’s TV, but I’m fairly sure that CBeebies doesn’t broadcast homo-erotic tinctured torture scenes? Bob The Builder doesn’t feature any characters getting their skulls blown apart by 9mm machine gun fire does it? The small girls behind me - bored to tears by the time Bond was having his bollocks bashed, and laughing among themselves - were actually told to be quiet by what I presumed to be father. I was aghast. He told them to be quiet and watch the film - ‘pay attention to the torture’ he might as well have put it. But I was even more aghast that no-one - not one child - appeared unsettled by what they were seeing on screen.
The BBFC certification amazes me. But the ‘parenting in action’ left me pondering, grumpy old man connotations and all, that if Casino Royale and it’s ilk are now considered fit for a family outing to the cinema then there really isn’t much hope for us at all is there?
Won’t somebody think of the children? Apart from those piggybank raiders Sony that is…
Good Night and Good Luck.
“[T]he people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and then denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
Hermann Goering, the Nuremberg Trials.
If you aim to get your history from any movie, then you’re in big trouble. Movies tell stories, they don’t relate history. Simple narrative necessities dictate that they have to screw around with character, dialogue and timeframe in order to tell their tale in one simple, easy to digest, bitesized chunk.
And I’m not simply talking some specious piece of junk - not naming names here, but they are usually the films that begin ‘based on a true story’ - even movies that go to the greatest lengths for accuracy, must, by dint of the medium, only give one a spectral echo of the actualite. It’s not a criticism, it is simply a matter of fact. So, you want history? I suggest, first stop, a library (and an open mind).
But should you want a flavour, the merest hint of what it was like living under the fear, the nostril flaring terror of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (referred to commonly as HUAC) and the separate but equally corrosive communist witch hunt conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1950’s, then look no further than George Clooney’s remarkable Good Night and Good Luck.
The story of how America’s most famous and respected broadcaster, Edward R. Murrow, decided to unmask McCarthy as an ego-maniacal, superannuated playground bully is perhaps not the real heart of Clooney’s film. It’s the fact that McCarthy’s communist showtrials took place at all, that this puffed-up charlatan held a nation in his thrall, destroyed both livelihoods and lives, turned whole communities in on themselves and astonishingly continues, to this day, to divide opinion in a nation that appears still to be largely introspective and distrustful of those beyond its borders. Indeed, sometimes, those within those borders.
In making that vain but valiant attempt to stick to the facts, Good Night and Good Luck relies heavily on contemporary footage of McCarthy in action both at the hearings - steamrolling witnesses, bulldozing truths into smelly heaps of great steaming lies - and during Murrow’s pivotal TV confrontation with him on his See It Now news programme. Much as in reality, the man makes a noose for his own neck, and America gets a smack across the side of the head, finally waking up from the torpor to what is really going on.
As we know, the senator returned to being a background noise in the parade of history, just another ordinary self-opinionated commie-baiting bar-room ‘Joe’. But he was, perhaps, a whisker away from an even greater all-engulfing tragedy; it beggars belief to think what may have happened had he not been exposed, and, on a groundswell that combined popular opinion with ignorance and fear, run for President.
McCarthy’s sweaty, painful appearance trying to justify himself to Murrow and the American people was followed by the Army lead Senate hearings - the big dogs tearing at the wounded animal - during which lawyer Joseph N. Welch skewered McCarthy even more deliberately, seen in one of the contemporary clips used in Clooney’s film. Welch’s reward from a ravaged but grateful Hollywood was the part of the trial judge in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder.
It’s a relatively short, thoroughly enthralling film with a literate and intelligent script (co-written with Grant Heslov by director Clooney) and some fine performances. David Strathairn as Murrow is spell-binding; a patriotic American who knows the difference between what is right and what is wrong, and who is prepared to make his stand, to draw his line in the sand. Make no doubt. It was an act of great courage, not only by Murrow but by all his See It Now team, especially Fred W. Friendly (Clooney) and, maybe above all, CBS chairman William Paley (Frank Langella).
With Clooney currently the bête noire of the American right, and targeted by right wing commentators in a mirror image, I suppose, of the way Murrow zeroed in on McCarthy, gorgeous George has several points to make and all of them in commendably large letters. First and foremost, it is that no matter how much more sophisticated we think we are than those that cowered before McCarthy, or Goebbels or Robespierre, the lessons of history are there for all of us to see. And learn from (or not - we simply live in hope. Eternally).
The second is written into the speech that Murrow gave to the 1958 Radio-Television News Directors Association convention, scenes which bookend Clooney’s film. Murrow rails against television being used as a means of vacuous entertainment rather than for education. The words are taken almost verbatim from his actual speech and point an accusatory finger down the decades at all of us:
‘To those who say people wouldn’t look; they wouldn’t be interested; they’re too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: There is, in one reporter’s opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost. This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. Good night, and good luck.’
In a world of pathetic soundbites, carpet bombings - ’Live! From Eye-raq’ - reality TV, Big Brother, shopping channels, Derek Acorah, Channel 5, Jack Osbourne and Vernon bloody Kay, the struggle may already be over.
The R2 DVD of Good Night and Good Luck boasts a quite beautiful black and white transfer with Robert Elswit’s gorgeous cinematography evoking perfectly the smoke-filled editorial offices of CBS and the up-close and personal style that was all Murrow’s own, stiffened by Strathairn’s imperious impersonation. It’s the type of film that I thought had gone out of fashion, one that relies on a good script and demands a modicum of intelligence from the viewer.
By the by, this may be an apochryphal tale (I prefer to believe not), but some members of preview audiences, unaware that the footage of McCarthy was real, said that they felt that whoever was portraying the Junior Senator from Wisconsin was clearly overacting. Good call. He was.
George Clooney just a pretty face? Not a bit of it…
The Empress, The Misanthrope…And ‘Arfur’ January 7, 2007
Posted by John Hodson in : DVD News & Info, Film & DVD Reviews, British Film , 3 commentsNo, worry not; this is not some kind of ‘Groundhog Day’, and you aren’t trapped in an inverted ‘Narnia’, where it’s forever Christmas.
But after grumbling long and hard about the failure of anyone, in any region, to market a definitive DVD version of Scrooge, the 1951 version of Charles Dickens fable, A Christmas Carol, and lambasting DD Home Entertainment for marketing what was reported to be an obviously flawed Scrooge: 2-disc Collectors Edition, I had to find out the truth myself. Even though the turkey has long gone, and Easter eggs are very probably starting to clog the aisles of supermarkets up and down the land.
However, I have good news I must impart; DDHE’s 2-disc CE of Scrooge contains the best version I have ever seen on home video, with a more than decent transfer, an excellent selection of extras, including, at last, the inclusion of that previously missing commentary by ‘young Scrooge’ himself, George Cole. Ah, bliss.
At the risk of coming across all Mark Kermode like (the quiffed one can find a link between The Exorcist and, well, anything…), those extras also held a surprise for this John Ford fan. Finding something new about your favourite director, long dead though he be, gives one a taste of the excitement that archaeologists must experience when they peel back the layers of history to find that blurred vision of the past, coming ever clearer.
I didn’t know, for instance, of the life-long bond between John Ford, my appetite for whom grows more insatiable, and Brian Desmond Hurst, the director of Scrooge, and the self-styled ‘Empress of Ireland’. As George Cole says to Marcus Hearn in the film’s commentary, struggling and failing to imbue the word with as little innuendo as he can manage, he was, ah, a ‘flamboyant’ character.
In fact, as Christopher Robbins describes in his book The Empress of Ireland, Hurst was indeed the most flamboyant eccentric and bon viveur imaginable. A fascinating raconteur and man of enormous charm, Hurst was a man of many contradictions. He was a Protestant Ulsterman who converted to Catholicism. A republican sympathiser who fought in the first World War and made propaganda films during the second. A devout homosexual who was equally as fervent in worship of his patron saint St Thérése.
After enduring the horrors of Gallipoli, following the ‘war to end all wars’, Belfast born Hurst travelled first to Canada to study art, then to Hollywood, where, in 1925 at the age of 30, he spent the next eight years as an assistant to Ford, studying how the great man worked. A spinner of yarns himself (he talked of being the son of a wealthy doctor, when actually his father was an alcoholic shipyard worker), he must have found himself at home with Ford, who delighted in introducing the Irishman to colleagues as his ‘cousin’. Typical.
Hurst’s version of Scrooge, while not quite in the same league technically as those other great Dickens adaptations Great Expectations or Oliver Twist, is nonetheless an undoubted classic and fully deserves to be mentioned in the same breath. It is raised to that status by an iconic central performance from the incomparable Alastair Sim, a superb supporting cast and a production design and attention to detail that is as faithful as it could be both to the period and to illustrations that accompanied the contemporary publication of A Christmas Carol.
And if Hurst did learn anything at the feet of the master, it may be detected possibly not only in the delightful staging of Fezziwig’s party, and the repeated musical motif of the beautiful lilting ballad ‘Barbara Allen’. He may not have been Ford, or even Lean, but Hurst is more than competent, especially when, as he himself generously pointed out, he was in possession of a first class script. From first class source material.
Kathleen Harrison, Ernest Thesiger, Jack Walker, Michael Horden, Mervyn Johns - Scrooge boasts a superb list of players. Nonetheless, it’s Sim’s bravado portrayal of Dickens’ eponymous greedy, grasping, vindictive misanthrope, who is transformed into a giddy, repentant, giggling embodiment of Christmas itself, that impresses on the memory.
Funny thing this ‘Scroogery’; I’ve read so much around the ‘net the last couple of years - one IMDB commentator says: ‘a truly excellent quality print of this 1951 film apparently does not exist due to irresponsible storage & treatment of the original negative’, others state authoritatively that there are several mint 35mm prints owned by collectors, even that American rights holders VCI last, frankly disappointing, release was ‘fully restored and re-mastered from the original 35mm negative discovered in England’ (hasn’t stopped VCI saying that they’re going to have another go and dropping hints that they’ll get it right next time.)
DDHE announced this Collectors Edition of Scrooge around Easter last year. It was only available from them direct at that time and then only went on sale at other etailers on-line in recent months. However, it has been confirmed by at least one purchaser that early pressings did not contain the George Cole commentary that was promised by the packaging. DDHE said it was a mistake…and that appeared to be that. But now the commentary is there, and it is the inclusion of Cole speaking, in 2005, so fondly of the film, and colleagues he appeared with, that makes this set so worthy of Collectors Edition status.
Okay - what of DDHE’s latest transfer? I’ve compared it with their ‘50th Anniversary Edition’, and while it’s evident that the same elements have been used for both, this Collectors Edition, with both discs inside a clear case with quite attractive artwork (the whole in a sturdy embossed slipcase), is clearly superior. DDHE has given the transfer another digital wash and brush-up, thus there are many fewer distracting nicks and marks on display leaving the CE remarkably clean.
It also looks a tad sharper and maybe a little more detailed than the AE, though not hugely so. Yes, it’s still high contrast, something that Hurst was aiming at, but maybe not this much, and in some scenes very black blacks lack any detail at all, and the whites are blown, particularly at the start, the ‘Renown Films’ logo and the opening scene not boding well. But in others, it shows terrific detail and greys right across the scale; so clear that in one scene, as Scrooge peers into a mirror, you can quite plainly see one of the technicians peeping from behind a curtain.
The mono sound is quite decent, there’s some background hiss, but nothing too distracting.
So the transfer is, happily, better than expected, what of the extras? Do they really make this a true ‘Collectors Edition’? Most certainly. Let me get the least wanted extra out of the way; the ’colourised’ version, which dates from the days of VHS. Introduced in sickly fashion by Patrick McNee (’I love Christmas…’), who plays young Marley in the film, it’s another of those genuine paint by numbers atrocities. I’ve seen proponents of this practice excuse themselves by claiming that ‘they wanted to film it in colour anyway’ (honest, guv!). Apparently, in the US, Legend Films, are preparing to crayon in Scrooge again. Groan…
If there’s any doubt, on the commentary track, George Cole makes it clear that Scrooge was always going to be in black and white, and was conceived and designed for such. Hurst himself preferred to film in black and white, loved the contrast and deep shadows it produced and ‘couldn’t really handle colour’ - you’ve been warned; watch the colour version and Hurst will come back from the grave and haunt you Jacob Marley style.
I’ll add that in any case, the colour version is less detailed, and quite heavily marked compared to it’s better black and white iteration. It is, in short, a humbug. Bah!
On disc one, the black and white film comes with the aforementioned commentary by George Cole, moderated by Marcus Hearn. I much prefer moderated commentaries, especially when the commentator needs to be sometimes teased out of a reverie as Cole does. Much is discussed, not least Cole’s relationship with Alastair and Naomi Sim, George as the perfect choice to play a young Scrooge (except in the school scene, where the 27-year-old is clearly a little too long in the tooth), the production and Cole’s career. Cole sometimes frustrates Hearn - when the moderator asks for the third time ‘What was he like?’ about some member of the cast, Cole hits straight back, for the third time, with a slightly terse ‘He was a very nice man’ instead of the gossip that may have been expected.
It’s the moderators lot, when, in a bid to fill dead air, to also ask the occasional daft question and Cole is clearly a little miffed when asked did he fear being typecast, the decades of work between ‘Flash’ Harry and ‘Arfur’ Daley apparently dismissed. Overall, it’s an interesting commentary track, Cole’s affection for the Sims more than obvious, with lots of anecdotes on both his and Alastair’s career, heaps of genial nostlgia. And in between that, Hearn has done his research and has trivia a plenty to keep the whole thing moving nicely.
Also on disc one, The Spirit of Christmas Past, a 15 minute interview with Cole, in which Marcus Hearn covers most of the points already handled in the commentary, albeit with less spontaneity. There’s a 28 minute 1950 BBC radio play of A Christmas Carol with Alec Guinness in the lead, a 14 minute silent version of the piece, with Charles Rock (that looks as if it’s about to jump off its sprockets at any moment), and a short photo gallery.
Alongside the colour version on disc two you’ll find another BBC radio version (both plays were apparently destined for the aborted BBC/Warner R1 release), this time from 1964 and with Ralph Richardson as both narrator and old Ebenezer that runs nearly an hour - Richardson is a much better Scrooge than Guinness by the way - another silent version from 1922 with a suprisingly decent transfer, a throwaway five minute Traditions of Christmas feature that looks at why we stuff ourselves with pudding, send cards (but not why we need so many bizarrely wrapped pairs of socks), and all things ‘Christmassy’, plus another short image gallery with pages from a book of A Christmas Carol that was published to promote the film.
Finally, there’s also a 16 minutes plus interview with Christopher Robbins who recalls his friend in The Legendary Brian Desmond Hurst. It’s an affectionate look back at the time Robbins, then a young hack, received a call out of the blue from an aging Hurst to help write a screenplay (though he had never done so before) on the life of Jesus Christ. It was never filmed, but the ever-colourful Hurst and Robbins had one hell of a time…
Accompanying the set is a very nicely researched 24-page full colour booklet of ‘viewing notes’, in which Marcus Hearn points out that the film was not particularly well received by some critics, who were somewhat sniffy (’too grim for kiddies, too dull for adults’). But, nevertheless, others did hail it as a shot in the arm for the ailing British film industry, and it put plenty of bums on cinema seats both sides of the Atlantic. Over the years, with repeated seasonal TV showings and theatrical revivals, Scrooge’s reputation has grown and grown. Rightly so.
Place your order now for the Scrooge 2-disc Collectors Edition; just in time for Christmas 2007…
On Buffery and Blogging… January 3, 2007
Posted by John Hodson in : Film General , 2 commentsNow tell me; just what is a film buff? Friends often label me ‘a bit of a film buff’ while looking at me askew with a wry, slightly pitying smile. It’s an appellation that’s clearly on a par with being ‘a bit touched’, and, no doubt they substitute ‘buff’ with ‘bore’ when my back is turned. Frankly, straight to my face if I’m honest.
But just what is a ‘film buff’? Because I’ve never considered myself so. I’m not talking about someone who merely likes a good film, I’m thinking more someone who absolutely lives film, who salivates at the mere thought of a season of Pro-Maoist Chinese propaganda movies at the NFT.
An analogy. I have a friend to whom football, as Bill Shankly famously said, is not a matter of life and death. It’s more serious than that.
I always fancied myself a fan of the beautiful game, but close proximity to this chap, revealed to me that I was someone who just, well, liked football, even if I like it rather a lot. I didn’t lock myself away in darkened rooms when my team lost, I didn’t hate the opposition with a bile spitting fury, and I didn’t foster small vendettas stretching back through the decades (of which I was reminded on a recent trip north of the border and a Victorian era statue that trumpeted ‘Remember Bannockburn!’, complete with what looked like Blair era spray-painted invective beneath, the gist of which - expletives deleted for this ‘U’ certificate post - was ‘English Go Home!’ Long, long memories the Scots…)
The point is, that though I wept like a baby the night my team won the Champions League final in 1999 (the memory of the previous European win 21 years previously being all too vividly recalled), that I shed more tears when George Best drank himself to death, I realised that, compared to my friend, my fandom was merely skin deep. And the realisation left me slightly wounded. I shouldn’t just ‘like’ my team, pecking it on the cheek like some bespectacled third cousin, I should be deeply in love with it to the point of obsession, full-on French kissing, tongues and all. I’m not a ‘fan’, I just - shudder - like football. A horrifying moment of self-realisation. Me and football are, clearly, going to have to go to counseling…
Oddly enough, as I’ve mentioned previously, my passion for kicking an inflated bladder around, and being conned at 24 frames per second, hit me at roughly the same moment in my childhood, the gladiators of Old Trafford vying for wall space with Bogart, Karloff and Dietrich. But if I don’t consider myself a proper football fan so, it follows, the same might also be true of film.
All it takes is a quick look around FilmJournal and the reviews at DVD Times and it’s revealed to me that I must be playing fast and loose with the truth when people say to me ‘You’re a bit of a film buff aren’t you?’ (sounds to me like ‘a bit unique’; you either are, or you’re not…) and I nod grimly in the affirmative waiting for them to ‘test’ me some damn silly pub quiz question. I’m a blundering, stumbling amateur compared to the legions of witty, intelligent, authoritative commentators writing on the ‘net. I come at this whole film blogging thingie with no formal education in film, no experience of film-making, no blinding, razor sharp, critical, intellect. Film and I have long enjoyed a quick fumble on the back row. But is it love? And as such why should anyone - you dear reader - take a blind bit of notice of any opinion I hold? Witnesses for the prosecution please…
For a start I don’t go to the movies very often - I think I went three times in the whole of 2006 - and you’d have to drag me, kicking and screaming, to a festival of Stalinist Czech animation, or Iranian comedies. I have never sat through any Bollywood film, and when I do watch any recent movies I ruin them for anyone else by lecturing those few that will listen (or even those that won’t) on what a complete pile of poo this is, as if I’m some kind of bleedin’ expert, or my views are needed or welcome. Pul-lease; my head sometimes screams at my mouth, just shut the hell up.
So, if I do have a passion, it is, most affirmatively, for films of a certain vintage, having been educated, movie-wise, on a diet of ’30s and ’40s films on TV, and being an avid cinema-goer for much of the ’60s, ’70s and half of the ’80s, when, well, other things in life began to shoehorn in on my time and disposible income, and ‘avid’ became ‘irregular’. That and the fact that I carelessly dubbed much of Hollywood’s output at the time to be pants. Very large y-fronted pants indeed.
I fancy I’m an admirer of certain actors, directors or genres, but I find, that compared to some, I’m oddly passionless, for instance, about collecting, say, every single film noir on the planet (even knowing what even constitutes noir these days. Western-Noir? Aw, come on…), or digesting every small scrap of detail about the careers or privates lives of the film community.
I had a salutary, possibly life changing, experience as a third form oik at school, having long bored my chums with an enthusiasm for Universal monster movies that was possibly a tad unhealthy in a 13-year-old boy.
Then the bigger boys come; the towering hulk that was fourth former Garth Davies (later a guitarist with The Buzzcocks; no, you won’t have seen him, record management having convinced the band they must ditch him should his cleft palate frighten the pre-pubescent girls that watched Top Of The Pops), cornered me during lunch-break and said ‘So you like films do you?’ in a quite threatening manner. I stammered into a credential proving eulogy on William Henry Pratt, and he fired back a question about Buñuel. I stared at him silently (probably wondering if he meant Isambard Kingdom Buñuel, the famous Spanish architect and ship designer), and he looked at me with a mixture of both contempt and satisfaction in equal parts. No. Contest.
I can’t compete with those that attack the output of some foreign studio, whose name I can’t even pronounce, with obvious zeal. I can’t hope to match those that find genuine delight in broadening their cinematic horizons, that boldly go where few have gone before. I’m goggle-eyed in wonder at those that declare a DVD presentation to be as so unlike the film they saw three or four decades previously as to be a total travesty. I am in awe. Plant me in front of, say, Peter Jackson’s King Kong on DVD and ask me if it resembles the theatrical showing and I’ll stare at you blankly. I can’t bloody remember that far back.
I can’t even play the game of one-upmanship, long enjoyed by some on various film fora, where not knowing who choreographed / photographed / assistant produced / best boy(ed) a film you claim to love is clearly grounds for committal. Can’t play. Won’t play.
And so it has ever been. I look at my collection of films on DVD, mainly Hollywood, mainly films and artistes whose work I’m familiar with, and wonder what my passion really consists of? Does it revolve around a genuine love for these movies, or is it just the pull of pure nostalgia, some dismal desire to regress into a past when my world was young and everything was possible?
Hmmm. I suppose there’s an element of nostalgia in the mix, it’s not wholly that but it’s there, certainly. I can’t - won’t - deny that. As I’ve probably postulated before, Mrs H tells me that’s why I weep so easily at films these days; the recollection of days long, long gone is almost too hard to bear. She may have a point there, or maybe not. I can’t be certain without the ministrations of a psychiatrist. But do I love them? Well, again, if I’m honest, not all of them. Revisiting some films that I have a happy memory of is a sometimes depressing experience. Working my way through the recent Paul Newman Collection, I found myself beginning to hate Harper (my memory went straight into a hissy-fit, recalling the film as a minor masterpiece), and even finding Newman mildly irritating. I shouldn’t read too much into that I suppose. I watched a BBC transmission of Jaws a couple of years ago and found myself extremely agitated with the fact that it appeared to be complete rubbish - the fact that they showed a washed out print in the incorrect aspect ratio might have had something to do with it. Within a couple of weeks I watched the DVD and fell in love with the movie all over again. It was a strange experience.
But I’m not a film buff. I’m just a guy into his fifth decade of movie watching, who has never ’studied’ film in the truest sense of the word, who has picked up a little knowledge, some of it trivial, or prurient, some of it in a bid to better understand what it was some long dead artist was trying to say, not only to contemporary audiences, but to those down the ages about the human condition.
I get a kick out of watching a film that I’ve seen maybe a 100 times (slight exaggeration, but bear with me…) and seeing something new, something that peels back the layers a little further that changes, perhaps, my perception of the whole piece. And I get a kick out of reading the views of film writers and reviewers - and in the main the standard on the ‘net is very high - which also may help in achieving that better understanding or appreciation.
I also get a kick out of being entertained. If all I’m doing here, pontificating about the films I love, is entertaining myself then there is absolutely nothing wrong with that because writing this rubbish is, actually, pretty good fun even if I’m the only fella reading it (otherwise why the hell do it?) Bizarrely, I do know it would be less so, would I have to churn out the words, were I, heaven forfend, a professional movie reviewer or commentator. But, midst all these ramblings, if I can also introduce you, gentle reader, to a film you’d never seen before, that you too can fall in love with, then, hey, that’s good. I get a kick out of that too.
If you haven’t got one right now, you might sign up for your own FilmJournal blog. It’s a fine thing, this passing of accumulated intelligence; as was said to me yonks ago (and which is why I display the symptoms of film buffery so publicly) what’s the point in knowing something, something potentially useful, something potentially life-enhancing, if you don’t get it out there and tell somebody who may benefit from it?
Who knows? If you aren’t one already, you might become a film buff. Hell; I might even become a film buff one day…