Nobody Knows Anything

Two posts! It’s like a revolution in your head! Blu-ray viewings marked with a †, cinema visit marked with a *. Another reason Cameron may have waited so long to release Avatar (2009) was he wanted it to come out at a time where there was no competition, and there has been nothing at cinemas for a month, which completely sucks. Of course, distributors may have guessed Avatar was going to reign over all and moved everything else out accordingly. Thanks.

Angels & Demons (2009) †

When I’d finished reading Dan Brown’s original novel over the course of 2 or 3 days, what struck me was how much it resembled a bad novelization of a mindless Hollywood action movie, perhaps something directed by Michael Bay. Apart from its unbearable prose style, it’s drenched in all sorts of ludicrous conveniences and poor narrative plants. Oh, so one of the leading characters is a helicopter pilot, and there’s a helipad at the Vatican - what’s the betting that sooner or later, a helicopter is going to figure into the action? Yes, that kind of poor narrative plant. So when the news came that Ron Howard was going to make this film as a follow up to The Da Vinci Code (2006), I thought, best of luck, mate, you’re going to need it. There is an awful lot of tyre screeching car action across Rome and leafing of ancient manuscripts in high-tech libraries. As a divertissement, it is at least fun and has a lot of doomed Catholic cardinals meeting nasty ends, so it’s not all bad news, and you are at least spared having to endure Dan Brown’s deadly sentence construction.

Frost/Nixon (2008) †

In between removing Dan Brown’s verbals from the two filmic adaptations, Ron Howard knocked out this gem, and this time he has an actual playwright and living history from which to draw. Attention to detail borders on the insane. To film the interview sequences between Frost and Nixon, the production team tracked down the actual house that was used to film the original interviews back in 1977 and restaged them in the same section of the living room. The film also enjoys an odd structure with supposed straight-to-camera interviews being interpolated as if by some documentary crew working alongside Frost’s interview team. This has the odd side effect of humanising John Birt (Frost’s producer on the interviews), a man infamous during his period as Director General of the BBC for instituting a number of policies that were massively unpopular with the staff (check out Birt’s entry on Wikipedia for further gruesome details). Birt was called a Dalek by the late Dennis Potter, a label which has stuck ever since.

Being There (1979) †

They’re all dead. Well, nearly all dead. There’s no one (well, nearly no one) left to provide a commentary track or take part in a retrospective documentary. And, well, does the film need that kind of thing anyway? Released at the end of the 1970’s with Reagan’s election as President imminent, the idea of a moron becoming President through his inane babbling about his garden which everybody takes as profound political insight, seems as relevant as ever today after eight years of Dubya in the White House. If you can tune into the film’s wavelength, it remains deliriously, deliciously funny – from the blank faces of the FBI unable to discover anything about Chance’s background to the hopelessly wrong scene in which Shirley Maclaine pleasures herself under the delusion that she’s been magnificently seduced by Chance’s blankness. At the centre is Peter Sellers in the role he was born to play; he famously pursued both Jerzy Kosinski and Hal Ashby with the assertion that he was Chance, no one else could play the part as well, and that was how it had to be. In the gag reel there’s a brief sequence which rather looks like it was made for whatever was the contemporary equivalent of ShoWest (the US film distributors’ annual bean feast) where Sellers and Ashby clown around and hint that the film was as fun to make as it is to watch, even though the film is not an out and out gag fest but achieves its effects in more subtle ways.

Year of the Dragon (1985)

It took five years after the failure of Heaven’s Gate (1980) at the American box office before anyone would allow Michael Cimino anywhere near a camera again. And he turns out this politically incorrect gem, filmed back when Mickey Rourke was originally engaged by acting. It was heavily criticised at the time for its portrayal of Chinese characters as triad villains and its refusal to shy away from the complex racism of Rourke’s character, Stanley White. Looked at today, I don’t find that this criticism makes a lick of sense. The aging triad guys have a whole subplot all of their own which involves a younger man being given overall control of their criminal enterprise and what they choose to do when things don’t work out. If this sounds like the plot of a film by John Woo or Johnnie To or Takashi Miike, that’s because it is. I guess somebody somewhere took offence at a white guy directing a movie like this. Go figure. Cimino is irresistibly drawn to the epic, and a standout visit to a Thai drug lord sequence with thousands of extras sees him at his happiest. In comparison, confrontation scenes in which Rourke and John Lone tear strips off each other crackle with so much electricity and tension that it can only be resolved by a showdown gunfight on a deserted railway bridge at night as they run screaming and shooting at each other. In other words, proper thriller filmmaking of the kind we so rarely see any more.

Che Part One (2008) †
Che Part Two (2008) †

Soderbergh maintains a cool distance from his leading man throughout the four and a half hours of Che Guevara’s revolutionary adventures in Cuba and Bolivia. The two films are a compare and contrast diptych, an observation that becomes more acute when you see the two films really close together. All of the things that go so well in Cuba (they have the support of the people) are reversed in Bolivia (the people have a natural suspicion of strangers), so that by the time the endless trekking through the jungle in Cuba has been completed, they have an aim and a purpose and a clearly more coordinated chance of success, whereas the endless trekking through the jungle in Bolivia, pretty much isolated from any support and with American-trained military forces ranged with determination against them, means there is only doom and death left to face.

The Princess and the Frog (2009) *

Disney’s widely heralded return to hand-drawn animation is mostly successful, but somewhat let down by an overly formulaic storyline, which is not compensated for by the exoticism of its New Orleans setting, a view of the city that remains steadfastly tourist level. What it does showcase is the ease with which 2D animation can shift seamlessly into another visual style in a way that 3D animation, with its emphasis on surface realism and the creation of an imagined world, hasn’t been able to manage convincingly so far. The jazzy score and songs by Randy Newman are terrific, but hardly suitable for a young audience; presumably, once the DVD/Blu-ray arrives, there’ll be some hideous video from another Disney Channel moppet giving the best song a good kicking. So, all in all, good fun, but nothing new, and the addition of an African-American princess to the Disney club of princesses is not much to shout about either, it feels more like the addition of another segment to a market demographic. So yay for that.

Back from the dead. Blu-ray viewings marked with a †.

My Wife is a Gangster (2001)

An entertaining action comedy from South Korea in which, due to the urging of her dying sister, the ass-kicking female head of a criminal gang is persuaded to find a husband and get pregnant to keep the family name alive. Thus ensues much Miss Congeniality (2000) style hijinks as the hard as nails crime boss gets an extensive makeover, starts wearing dresses, goes on dates, and so on, before landing some poor schlub who knows nothing about her day job. Director Cho Jin-gyu doesn’t compromise on the violence like an American director would be persuaded to, so when asses get kicked, they remain kicked, yet he handles the comedy, some of which isn’t terribly subtle, with a deft touch. Best of all are the initial attempts of husband to sleep with wife, which contain a highly effective blend of humour and bone crunching violence.

Wall Street (1987) †

One of the contemporary criticisms of Wall Street was that the female roles were flat and undeveloped in contrast to those of the men. Sean Young was subjected to a certain amount of piss taking on set, and her screen time is limited and pretty anonymous. According to Oliver Stone, Daryl Hannah was unhappy with the rapaciousness of her character, so why, he ponders, did she take the part? So it’s not like this isn’t true, but then Wall Street, like Platoon (1986) before it, is a story of fathers and sons, a story of the multiple masculine role models presented to Bud Fox in all areas of his life. From which of them must he choose to draw upon as he seeks direction in his existence? This is pinpointed by a brief “Who am I?” scene on the balcony of his deluxe apartment. Charlie Sheen seems perpetually puzzled in the part, though this may be inexperience inadvertently working for him in the role. The relationship of fathers and sons is where Wall Street is at, so criticising it for undeveloped female characters seems rather beside the point. Also, lurking on the new Blu-ray, is a 2007 documentary in which some shining examples of modern day trading excellence confess that they thought Gordon Gekko was the hero of the movie and admit he was the inspiration for their career choices. And a year later, the world economy collapses. Are these two events related? Discuss.

Raging Bull (1980) †

I’ve never seen Raging Bull in the cinema, but every step in the home video market has taken me closer to it. My first copy of Raging Bull was a Warner Home Video VHS ex-rental copy in a bulky plastic case, early 80s vintage. And the power of the film remained undiminished in low resolution. Then came the nicely packaged MGM DVD, early 00s vintage, ancient enough to have been non-anamorphic. Finally, a pile of commentary tracks and documentaries and a DTS soundtrack get added to a Definitive Edition re-release with a proper 16:9 anamorphic transfer. And then all of that gets ported over to the new Blu-ray, with increased resolution so you can watch De Niro sweat and bleed in 1080p. Which in many ways is the point of Raging Bull: as much as it’s a Martin Scorsese picture, it’s also Robert De Niro’s. De Niro initiated the project and thrashed through the final version of the script with Scorsese after Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin had taken it as far as they could. And then De Niro went further, insisting upon the famous weight gain tactic that forever put paid to the young De Niro that came before. De Niro looks different after Raging Bull, but then, after Raging Bull, everything looked different because of how high Scorsese, De Niro and their team of collaborators had set the bar.

Appaloosa (2008) †

The Western continues to limp on, the genre that is harder to kill than a Romero zombie. They tend to be made by directors who love them, like James Mangold, who made 3:10 to Yuma (2007). And Ed Harris, who made this one, and a very satisfactory job he makes of it too. It has all the clichés in place, and is none the worse for them. In fact, when it comes to Westerns, you kind of want the clichés to be in play and you’d be disappointed if they weren’t. This is one source of the deep pleasures that genre filmmaking can offer, and is maybe a clue to the resistance of the Western to a bullet in the head.

Burn After Reading (2008) †

What do we want from the Coen brothers? A film like a film that they made before that surpasses it, in the way that Blood Simple (1984) has been arguably trumped by No Country for Old Men (2007)? Or a film like a film that’s purposely obscure and a bit “off” but can win the Palme d’Or at Cannes and seems like a great film but may not actually be one, a film that appeals to a minority rather than a majority, in the way that Barton Fink (1991) is beloved and A Serious Man (2009) may be regarded in the future? Should we demand that the Coen brothers always achieve such heights? And what heights these may be will depend on your personal preference – I’ve always wanted them to make something as wild and crazy as Raising Arizona (1987) again but it would appear they have no interest in doing so. Why is the new Coen brothers film always judged so intensely next to the film that preceded it? Burn After Reading is precisely the kind of film the Coen brothers make, a film that toys with genre, subverts it, is packed with out there characters and laugh out loud funny. Yet because it’s not No Country for Old Men II, it gets marked down as a lesser achievement. To me, the Coens seem more like a flavour that you have to be able to get, and if you get the flavour, you don’t care about the variations the flavour can have. In fact, you savour the variations.

The Departed (2006) †

I still remain puzzled that it takes an extra hour for The Departed to work through the same story that the original Hong Kong Internal Affairs (2002) managed in 90-odd minutes. Still, what an hour it is, eh? The promise in the cinema that this is a film that would reward repeat viewings is more than justified by this return visit. Oh, and Mark Wahlberg really needs to find a lot more movies in which he swears copiously and behaves like an offensive prick, because he’s really, really good at it. Stay away from Disney would be my career advice, Mark, a long way away.

A Clockwork Orange (1971) †

“The point is it works.” Hmm, that’s pretty much it.

My excuse is that I’ve had a hideous backlog of database work to do on the excessive number of DVDs and Blu-rays I’ve acquired since September and so have been unable to make weekly updates during this period. Pretty pathetic excuse. However, all is now forgotten, I’m reasonably on top of the database, and I’m now reporting in with news of watched stuff for the last two months. This was how this all started back in 2007, so this is a kind of retro thing as well. Hurrah! Cinema visits marked with a *, Blu-ray viewings marked with a †. Contains gratuitous use of the word bastard.

Gangsters (1976-78)

I remember the theme tune from the second series, which means that my parents allowed me to stay up to watch this show, and having now seen it all again thirty years later, what were they thinking? It has violence, nudity, some fine writing and some ropy acting. But I think the real reason was that the show was filmed in Birmingham, and really Birmingham, not just somewhere else with a caption saying Birmingham. And what’s more, it was filmed in a Birmingham that doesn’t exist anymore, as the inner ring road has been defanged and made more pedestrian-friendly, and the old Bull Ring has been demolished and replaced by a new one. Despite that, not everything has changed, and scenes shot inside New Street Station and just outside where I work provided a high level of geeky pleasure. There are explosions in the street; there’s a car chase at great speed which looks like it was filmed off the cuff on the Inner Ring Road early one Sunday morning with no police supervision in sight. Great!

Gangsters started as a one-off Play for Today, an attempt to produce something that drew on Hollywood film genres and then transposed them to contemporary society, rather than the standard Play for Today trope of kitchen sink miserablism (I know, it’s a hideous generalisation, get over it). What this meant was that Gangsters uniquely fashioned itself as an actual crime thriller, threw in the iconography of the Western, had a multi-ethnic cast before it was fashionable, and also gently sent itself up both obviously and less obviously, which by the end of the second commissioned series, became more of a problem than it had at first seemed. It was extremely popular with viewers from all backgrounds and was roundly condemned by pofaced killjoys in the media. It is also gleefully politically incorrect (when judged with today’s supposedly more enlightened eyes), relying on tasteless racist jokes and insults delivered by white, black and brown comedians to white, black and brown audiences to provide a commentary on the clashes developing between the characters elsewhere in the series.

The Play for Today is a terrific pilot, and most of Series One follows it up admirably, but Series Two descends into surrealism and self-parody, and not in a good way. By the time the hero has been killed off via an untreated cut finger, and Philip Martin, the show’s writer who turned up in the pilot as the villain, has reappeared as WC Fields for no reason whatsoever, it was clear the show had run its course.

King of New York (1990)

Everybody knows about Scarface (1983) and its influence on a generation of hip hop stars, but there’s another film of choice for dispossessed urban youth, and it’s this one with Christopher Walken delivering another cold-eyed, mesmerising portrait of uncompassionate evil as Frank White, the heir apparent drug lord of all New York. The only people who can stop him are the police, and the only way they can do it is to play dirtier than he does, climaxing in a dazzling car chase in the rain. The look of the film has been copied ad infinitum ever since, and this is also one of those everybody’s in it movies, as most of the supporting cast have gone on to starring roles in TV and films.

Mad Detective (2007) †

It took some time but I’ve finally seen a film by Johnnie To. And what a film to see first! A dazzling Blu-ray presentation from Eureka Video and a real headfuck of a movie. You see, it isn’t just about a mad detective - it puts you in his head so you start to see the world the way he sees it as well, tilting you away from realism and off into some other stranger realm. And a lot of it is awfully funny as well. I want some more.

Lone Star (1995)

I’m not big on John Sayles like some film buffs are, but I did catch this one fourteen years ago and liked it enough to buy it on DVD. Although not in the UK, because it hasn’t been released here, which seems pretty disgraceful when you see how good it is again. Some films are just too good for the mass market, I guess. It’s been released in Spain, though, and Germany. Just too good for the UK, I suppose. If you’re moaning that deeply rubbish films (Exhibit A, Santa Claus the Movie) are being released on Blu-ray before proper movies like this one (and God knows I am), at least you can console yourself with the thought that no one thinks it’s a good idea to release Lone Star on DVD in the UK. Fantastic.

State of Play (2003)

Not the Russell Crowe movie, but the BBC original, courtesy of a £5 price point from HMV. Everybody said that as good as the Russell Crowe movie was (and it was pretty good), the original starring John Simm was better. And it is. Six hours better. Six hours of exemplary thriller acting, writing, editing, filming and directing. And barely a policeman in sight, and when one does turn up, he’s being played by Philip Glenister, which will make some people happy (not necessarily me, I don’t watch television).

A Serious Man (2009) *

To the cinema for the latest hilarious put-on from the Coen brothers, a film that couldn’t be any more Jewish if it came blessed by rabbis, but remains accessible to outsiders because all of us have absorbed so much Jewish culture throughout our lives that all of the events of the film (bar mitzvahs, rabbinic consultations, torments from God, etc) seem oddly familiar as they remain deeply odd. I think the film’ll be even better second time around as the aura of doom that surrounds its hapless protagonist will seem even funnier and doomier.

Paranormal Activity (2009) *

Yes, I jumped. You would think years of horror films would have made me immune to such tactics, but no. You would think I could have figured out the ending after years of plot twists and narrative convolutions and scares and frights, but no. Which must mean this film really works. Sometimes, all it takes is a simple idea perfectly executed (and some savvy marketing) to let you experience the cold, dead hands of cinematic dread clutching you around the ankles, readying you for the jump. Let us hope that it will be a lot easier for the director of this film to get to a follow up than it was for the directors of The Blair Witch Project (1999).

The Box (2009) *

I still haven’t seen Southland Tales (2006) (but then, not that many people have seen it either) so I can’t tell if The Box is a return to form or a continuation of the eerie uncanny Richard Kelly tapped into with Donnie Darko (2001), but either way, The Box, as an all out OhMyGod creepfest, is probably a better film than Paranormal Activity, but may have been let down by a confusing trailer, from which I had taken some doubt that the movie was actually set in the 1970s, when it actually is set in the 1970s. There may well be more than a sniff of Twilight Zone about the whole affair, but that would be Twilight Zone in a good way, and not just a neat twist ending, M Night Shyamalan style. And like Paranormal Activity, it remains true to itself and doesn’t compromise, which may explain its relative box office failure and its no doubt future rediscovery in the video aftermarket, Donnie Darko style. I don’t need to recommend Paranormal Activity because people have mostly seen it, but The Box could do with some help: I think it’s better, I think it’s definitely worth a rental, it’s even worth a blind DVD/Blu-ray purchase later on in 2010. If you like a movie that messes with your head, you can do a lot worse than hang out with this one.

Léon (1994) †

A very young Natalie Portman with a sniper rifle, an unshaven Jean Reno in a beanie hat as the world’s coolest assassin/cleaner, and Gary Oldman popping weird pills, channelling Beethoven and shooting people. Films don’t get much better than this. For the record, this was the International Cut of the film, not the US theatrical version. Creepiest moment in the extras comes when Maïwenn Le Besco mentions that she fell in love with Luc Besson when she was 12 and that the film is in some way their story (probably without the Mob boss and the shootings). It turns out this relationship only developed into an actual relationship in 1993 when she gave birth to a daughter, Shanna, with Luc Besson, at the age of 17. Maïwenn is very eloquent and passionate in defending her right to have such feelings at such a young age. It all seems very French. Another thing that struck me is how come Luc Besson and Thierry Arbogast photograph New York as the most exciting and beautiful place in the world, yet filmmakers who actually live in the city, like Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, and Oliver Stone, are almost entirely unable to do the same?

Avatar (2009) *

It was quite good. It should do some business. This was opening night, first showing at the Imax in Birmingham in 3D. The 3D in this film was so good it made other 3D films look like 2D. One of the things James Cameron revealed somewhere, possibly buried deep in the extras on the Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) DVD, is that he’s always tried to direct his films in a kind of 3D anyway. Once you know this, it’s impossible to watch one of his films without being aware that attention is being paid to the foreground, midground and background all of the time, and there’s a depth being created on screen with a purpose. So it’s a relatively small step to make to filming in actual 3D. Cameron’s been testing out the 3D technology with a couple of undersea Imax adventures - Ghosts of the Abyss (2003) and Aliens of the Deep (2005) - as well as waiting for motion capture to develop to such a stage that production of the film could even be possible. Avatar is a classic style over content film, where the ordinariness and predictability of the story conflicts are overwhelmed by how the story is told. I’ve been hearing the word “immersive” a lot, and it is absolutely true. Maybe such an approach needs to have a fairly mundane storyline to keep you grounded as a viewer even as the characters on screen take flight. And at the corners of this film, what I sense is what the future may hold when a director really takes 3D by the scruff of the neck and tells a story that can only be told best in that way, much as Peter Jackson did with CGI technology, motion capture and large miniatures in The Lord of the Rings (2001-03) trilogy. The future of high tech event cinema remains fascinating, but it will need new, fresh storytellers with exceptional ability to take it to the next level. Talentless hacks need not apply.

The Doors (1991) †

Close your eyes. We’ll see the snake; see the serpent appear. His head is ten feet long and five feet wide. He has one red eye and one green eye. He’s seven miles long. Deadly. I see all the history of the world on his scales, all people, all actions. We’re all just little pictures on his scales. God, he’s big, he’s moving, devouring consciousness, digesting power. Monster of energy. It’s a monster. We’re going to kiss the snake on the tongue. Kiss the serpent. But if it senses fear, it’ll eat us instantly. But if we kiss it without fear, it’ll take us through the garden, through the gate, to the other side. Ride the snake… until the end of time.

In 1080p and DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1. It’s the only way to fly.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) †

Looks awfully good for a nearly 40 year old film. It’s hard to believe that this was the Fistful of Dollars (1964) of the giallo as a lot of it looks awfully familiar. Of course, that would be all of the films worldwide that have imitated it.

Bad Santa (2003)

Because it was Christmas and I felt like watching a Christmas movie.

Well, my kind of Christmas movie anyway.

Team America: World Police (2004)

Matt Damon!

Revenge (1989) †

For the record, this was the newly shortened Unrated Director’s Cut which runs at least 20 minutes shorter than the original version of the film, and is sexier and more violent and pacier and in all probability the film Tony Scott was trying to make back in 1989, except notoriously hands-on producer Ray Stark got in his way in a time before Tony Scott had established a reputation as a man who could be trusted. For me, Tony Scott only becomes a proper filmmaker with this film, and, who knows, if it had been a success, he might not have bothered with Days of Thunder (1990), the Blu-ray of which sits in HMV tormenting me with its badness. It knows I’ll have to buy it sometime, and it knows I don’t like it. Argh.

Inglourious Basterds (2009) †

I’m not offended by the word bastard. At all. It’s a bastard PG swearword. It’s not bastard upsetting in any bastard way whatsoever to me personally. However, it would appear that the bastards at the BBC and the bastards at the ASA have a real bastard of a problem with the word bastard, because they won’t allow any bastard Radio 1 disc jockey bastard to use the word bastard in connection with the bastard film, and bastard local radio ads and bastard billboards and bastard adverts can’t use the bastard word bastard at all, which has had the hilarious effect that the bastard film has been regularly referred to as Inglorious, the new film from Quentin Tarantino. What a bastard!

And since last time, this is what I’ve watched on Blu-ray marked with a † and at the cinema marked with a *.

Wanted (2008) †

Has it remained as stupid but fun as it was in the cinema? Yes it has. I have seen Night Watch (2004) at the cinema but found it to be incoherent enough not to warrant an after market purchase yet. Wanted, however, was a much easier decision to make, it has lots of swearing, crazy action stuff and Angelina Jolie with a big gun. As far as I’m concerned, you could make a dozen movies with Angelina Jolie with a big gun in a tight t-shirt and I would see them all. Give the people what they want. And that’s what I want.

Up (2009) *

I wear glasses and I’m very resistant to the idea of 3D cinema as the saviour of cinema. Because for me to experience 3D in the cinema I have to wear glasses over my glasses, and this is okay at the Imax because they make them specially, but I’m not entirely sure that they’ve taken the same amount of care at my local Odeon. So I saw Up in 2D, old school style. And it was breathtaking and magnificent. All of the cinematography courses that were brought to bear on WALL•E (2008) have been carried over into Up, along with what looks like a lot of work on particle system clouds; the R&D demonstrated in the scrupulously excellent short Partly Cloudy (2009) which runs before the main feature. Unless I’ve missed something, Pete Docter will be carrying away the Best Animated Feature Oscar in February, but to me the more interesting question is when will Pixar win the Best Film Oscar? It could even be this year because Up is so fabulous it’s hard to see how live action filmmakers can compete against a film this accomplished, generous, warm, genuinely emotional and richly comedic. For being “merely” a bunch of pixels pushed around a screen, Up has genuine depth, and has enabled the company to reach a new plateau in excellence. I think Pixar is already better than Disney in the 1940s, and maybe better than their contemporaries at Studio Ghibli in Japan (Pixar wouldn’t think this themselves; John Lasseter’s immense respect for Hayao Miyazaki has been made widely known).

Jennifer’s Body (2009) *

In which Diablo Cody proves that Juno (2007) was not just a one-off, and that she has a sustainable talent which, if it can continue to produce films as fun as this, will run and run. Although there is a limit to how much Hollywood execs are prepared to invest in a woman writer with a yen for creative control. The film was made on a limited budget of $16 million and took pretty much the same amount at the box office in the States, and at the moment has a pretty mediocre imdb rating because most Americans (well, American imdb voters anyway) aren’t for the most part smart enough to realise what kind of movie this is. And they’ve even got this year’s most highly gratuitous lipstick lesbian makeout scene to point them in the right direction (see Amanda Seyfried and Megan Fox snog for a bit for no readily apparent reason other than that it’s hot, and it’s what we always secretly want). This film is a satire of high school movies very much in the vein of Heathers (1988), and has any number of dopey plot points and silly cliches not because of bad writing but because that’s what high school movies have to have.

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) *

In which Wes Anderson takes his highly stylised, deeply formal, idiosyncratic filmmaking style, imposes it on the world of stop-motion animation, and makes an animated film that is in every sense the equal of his live action work. Anderson’s films are an acquired taste, and they might not appear to be for everyone, but I can report that a young boy sat with his family pretty near me in the cinema enjoyed the film as much as I did, so perhaps Anderson’s filmmaking point of view isn’t as arty and esoteric as the critics might like it to be; maybe Anderson’s had it right all along, and he’s making films that are accessible to everyone while not looking like they are accessible at all.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) *

Which will probably make a lot more sense after seeing the Blu-ray with a Terry Gilliam commentary in which he can explain the movie more clearly than the movie can explain itself. A big reduction in the price of special effects has allowed Gilliam to put on screen for fake what he had to build for real when he made The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) twenty years ago. After all of the trauma of the production, which saw Gilliam endure not just the death of his leading man, Heath Ledger, but  the death of one of the producers, William Vince, as well, it’s amazing that what’s left is as coherent as it is, although it’s more of a Gilliam kind of coherence than what usually passes for coherence in the cinema. At its heart, the film may well be a simple restatement of the power of stories, and thus film, and thus the narratives we tell each other to sustain our lives, and story is something which should be valued in our culture and not denigrated or devalued or denied. It’s certainly what they think at Pixar.

So what does Blu-ray mean? Does it mean we’ll be buying our DVD collection all over again? As we bought our VHS collection all over again? As we bought our LP collection all over again on CD? And are we doomed to repeat the whole process in 10 years time when the next generation format comes out? Blu-ray Plus, or green laser, or illegal downloads or whatever that next gen format is. For me, Blu-ray boils down to two categories.

Dr. No (1962)

I ummed and ahhed about buying James Bond films on DVD, because although I’ve always kind of liked them and been willing to watch them, even on ITV, even censored as all get out, even full of adverts, I’ve also been very aware of their enormous shortcomings as entertainment, where the very repetition of the format has hindered anything resembling any meaningful development. This tiredness set in early while Sean Connery was still playing the part. I’ve never found that the speedboat finale of Thunderball (1966) benefited from being artificially sped up in the editing process - it didn’t make it more exciting, it just made it look a bit crap. And an awful lot of You Only Live Twice (1967) is only made bearable by one of John Barry’s best scores. The volcano set is fun, but it wasn’t quite so much fun when it turned up again on a supertanker in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and in outer space in Moonraker (1979). However, I’d bought a couple of Bonds because I ran across them cheap: Goldfinger (1965) and The Living Daylights (1987). And when I ran through the extras I discovered they were awfully good and full of arcane Bond trivia I’d never come across before. So I was tempted. But not until the good folks at Lowry Digital had set to work on the original negatives rescanning and recorrecting for the next generation formats (HD-DVD coasters are now £1 in Computer Exchange - remember when they were the future of high definition for about five minutes?). And doing the sound in DTS. And with MGM adding even more extras, so the Ultimate James Bond Collection became the one I could no longer resist. And so then 6 of the films are issued on Blu-ray, and HMV crazily knock them down to £35 for the boxset, which is slightly less than £6 each, in 1080p and DTS-HD Master Audio. And you know, as good as Dr. No looked on the Ultimate DVD (and it looked very good indeed), it looks even better on Blu-ray. Which means that the first category of films I’m acquiring on Blu-ray are films I’ve already bought on DVD that I either a) like very much indeed (such as Blade Runner (1982) - hint: the American 5-disc set will work on UK machines) or b) I’m willing to rebuy on Blu-ray, but only if the price is right. And I’m not prepared to resist such a temptation. Hell, I’ve even bought Lady in the Water (2006) which I’ve not yet watched and which is widely regarded as very poor indeed, but it was £6. I’m not made of stone.

Inside Man (2006)

Which brings me to the second category of Blu-rays I’m buying: new releases. Now if Inside Man had been issued properly on DVD back in 2007 with all of the American DVD extras ported over, I’d probably already own it. But since Universal very kindly and incompetently couldn’t be bothered to release it properly on DVD in the UK, I was able to wait for it to be issued with all US extras intact on Blu-ray. Result. I’m sure I’m not the only one to notice that a certain number of discs from Warners, Sony, Universal and Paramount commence with a FBI warning and an intent to fine me in dollars if I pirate this Blu-ray content. This means only one thing. A UK disc issued like this is identical in every respect to the US disc, and for someone like myself, long infuriated by the shortchanging of US content on UK discs, this is heartening indeed. Things aren’t perfect by any means, and new releases even from the dedicated region free companies may still be issued as region Bs just like Fox and Disney do, but for now I think we’re heading in the right direction. And with the news that multi region Blu-ray machines are already on the market, I’m quite confident that by next Christmas I’ll have one, and be able to start buying those Criterion Collection Blu-rays which have, unless I’m mistaken, all been naughtily issued as Region A, like Criterion aren’t making sufficient effort to release all region Blu-rays, and are instead claiming that it’s not their fault, it’s down to the rights holders. Hmm. Even Fox have issued some catalogue titles coded all region. And how many more customers would Criterion be able to reach if The Last Emperor was an all region Blu-ray? You know, it’s not a coincidence that for some time Warner Home Video in the US has been issuing a lot of its back catalogue DVDs as region codes 1, 2, 3 & 4; they know there’s an overseas market for these discs, and they do not want to cut anyone out. If only Criterion were as smart as their cover designs and packaging.

The future is bright. The future is Blu.

And not downloads. Certainly not in the UK, not for ten years at least, because the broadband pipe is simply not fat enough to accommodate the downloading of up to 50GB of data that makes up the typical BD-50 dual layer disc. We don’t have the speed. We don’t have the network. We don’t have the time to wait. If you want to watch something now, in Blu-ray quality, recorded media is still going to be the only way to go for some time to come. Sky don’t transmit 1080p (and I may be wrong but nor does anyone else), and iTunes doesn’t sell it to you, and even if they did, are you going to wait a day to watch in quality, or are you going to accept a live internet stream in lower picture quality with inferior sound that stutters and starts as your existing connection struggles to cope?

The future is bright. The future is Blu.

So I’ve been on holiday, and this is some of what I did.

Tuesday 8th September 2009

The latest outrage at Birmingham Airport is that there’s now a £1 charge to use a trolley for your cases. So I didn’t. Dad dropped me off in the Drop and Go car park, which also costs £1. There was a slight Thomas (our cat) scare as we backed out at home, as he spotted his mortal enemy (next door’s cat) and ran at him alongside the car. I then heard yowling and jumped out to see what was up. Merely the latest in a long series of territorial battles. Long queue which moved slowly to check in. My suitcase was a couple of kilos overweight, and since it’s now the credit crunch and since I couldn’t be bothered to offload some things into my hand luggage, I paid the £20 extra because why not? I’m on holiday. The big shock in security was that a slight level of sanity has prevailed and I was no longer required to remove my shoes. Halleluyah. That shoe bomber goon has a lot to answer for. I mooned around in Departures for a bit, bought a lot of Diet Coke and eventually went for one book when I could have had 4 for 3. The new Stephen King proved irresistible. The Impulse record store which yielded five bargains last year has gone, replaced by some appalling wacky shoe dive. So to the plane. I was in 18D, apparently the world’s most cramped aisle seat. The couple next to me were silent the entire trip, mostly sleeping with headrests they’d come prepared to use. The aisle was endlessly busy, and now you have to pay for a meal, almost no one had one. Odd. I regard the inflight meal as an essential part of the whole flight experience. Very smooth take off, quite bumpy landing. The movie was Night at the Museum 2 (2009), which looked utterly dreadful. I drifted off to sleep for at least half an hour somehow.

Wednesday 9th September 2009

My suitcase was one of the first off the plane. Astounding! The Tigger stickers (stuck to my case for identification purposes) come through once again. I left the airport, found the Thomas Cook rep, found my coach (first on board) and off we went. The rep clearly didn’t know the layout of the Klio Apartments at all and led me down steps and up steps, when actually Room 10 is a straight walk from reception. Hey ho. I unpacked; the suitcase food had stayed pretty chilled. The room is small, but probably the best equipped I’ve ever been in. It has a TV, a kettle, a hair dryer and a telephone. And then I left the place to sample some fresh air, closed the door behind me and locked myself out of the room for a couple of hours. D’oh! It wasn’t till nice English speaking reception lady arrived that I could get back in and have breakfast. Went shopping for basic provisions at the local supermarket which is v basic and there was a guy ahead of me in the queue buying 20 giant 200s of cigarettes for €357. In cash. Astounding! Then went to welcome meeting where perfectly nice Leanne passed out leaflets and brochures and things. The Jeep Adventure looms large (as the only viable excursion) but the cost is a prohibitive €75. Had lunch, then attempted to get a little sleep, despite Rave FM sounding out from the pool bar. Got a little sleep, but not much. In the afternoon, I went on a Gouves recce by turning left (at the front of the apartments) down to the beach. Sunbed central with some small headlands and a small marina. When looking for a way back to the Klio Apartments I followed a kind of storm drain back inland, and found little but a supermarket and a slew of deserted, half built buildings. Gouves is clearly waiting for the good times to return. Returned, showered, had tea, went to bed at 7pm, slept four hours, woke up, reprogrammed the channels on the TV, went back to sleep.

Thursday 10th September 2009

Woke up and felt a lot better for ten hours of sleep. Breakfasted, had a coffee, which for a Greek holiday felt like an extraordinary luxury. Then walked out to the bus stop and within five minutes I was on my way to Iráklion to scout it out. The bus dropped us by a square, the Platia Eleftherias, which was right by (the pedestrianised) Dedhalou, where the record and DVD shop Metropolis is located. It wasn’t open yet. I found a real bakery, where the Greeks were buying bread and I bought a couple of rolls. I wandered the streets, browsing, I found a supermarket near the market street. I had lunch back in the square where the bus set us down, after visiting Metropolis to buy some neat stuff, all DVDs except for one bargain Blu-ray of Revolutionary Road (2008). Then more aimless wandering, camera at hand throughout, as I continue the anti-tourist stance of last year’s photography. I returned to the supermarket where I scored a bottle of the Lyrarakis Dafni, a dry white wine recommended by the Rough Guide to Crete, as well as some reheatable chicken fillets I figured I could heat up with some oil and have in the bakery bread rolls with some cheese and a Mythos beer, which is what happened. Much in need of a shower when I returned, after a typical Greek bus experience where the one I was refused entry to the bus I was booked on and ended up waiting an extra half hour before boarding another bus and getting off at the correct stop. Alarmingly, it started to patter with rain a little in the evening. On Rhodes last year, this was good because it cooled everything down. What you don’t want is it raining during the day.

Friday 11th September 2009

I spoke too soon. There was rain overnight and more rain this morning, although it is thundery rain, which means it will be shortlived. As of 9am this morning, I don’t have to worry about topping up my tan, and the breeze is awfully nice. Still raining at 1pm, looks like an all-dayer to me. It finally died out around 3-4pm, and at 5pm I went out on a second Gouves recce and found out what I’d got wrong two days before. The storm drain road that ends at the supermarket is the second road along of the three down to the beach, and you have to walk further than that to get to the third road along which is indeed the main shopping street that leads up to the main road and then back towards the beach turning to the left to rejoin the storm drain road. Good day for photography as post-rain overcast situation made for neutral light. I was not the only one with a camera. Tattooed biker and biker chick were decadently in the pool past closing time when I returned. Did the chicken thing again, successfully managing to set off the over-sensitive smoke alarm for 10 seconds, and had half a bottle of the Lyrarakis Dafni, a very good dry white wine.

Saturday 12th September 2009

Off at eight to catch the bus into Iráklion. Decided it would be a good morning to walk the walls of the old town as it was overcast before a newer warm front pushed the nasty wet stuff away. Managed to access the walls down by the tomb of Nikos Kazantzakis, and was rather surprised to discover that essentially a large concrete road has been laid down to run all the way around the main city, far from the dusty track I was expecting. Kazantzakis’ tomb was very simple: a square of stone slabs, a raised tomb area and a permanent wooden cross wedged in behind it, and in light of Kazantzakis’ rejection of religious beliefs, a somewhat ironic gesture. That, and the Greek inscription placed on the other side of the headstone. I had the place to myself till a group of Greek tourists arrived to pay their respects. You can indeed see for free down into the football stadium below, and you can see down into an outdoor cinema and an athletics track as you progressed along the walls. There are a number of bastions along the walls which used to support forts as well, but have now been made into parks, and very nice it is too. Iráklion is an extraordinary town, carrying on the tradition of Greek building practices I first observed on Kos, Rhodes and Zakynthos back in the 1990s. This boils down to: it’ll be nice when it’s finished. A house will have a ground floor, and the first floor will be bare concrete, or vice versa. In Gouves, a taverna will be up and running while the planned apartments are concrete holes waiting to be filled. In Iráklion you also come across absolute derelict shitholes in otherwise perfectly ordinary streets and you wonder why on Earth no one has pulled the shitholes down. From the end of the walls on the west of town, I veered back in to pick up a slew of bread from my designated bakery, tracked down another supermarket north of El Greco Park, and went back to Metropolis and climbed the stairs to discover more stuff to look through, more Western music to explore next Tuesday, I feel. Had lunch in the same plaza in the same seat as Thursday, and then checked out the Archaeological Museum. As indicated in the Rough Guide, this Museum is currently being upgraded to the 21st Century and might be ready by 2012. What they have now is a temporary display of the choicest bits, and in many ways this might be a neat transition to the new museum, when it’s finished. The level of craftmanship on pieces more than 4,000 years old is astonishing, and being in the presence of so much highly wrought antiquity gave me the chills. All it gave an Italian coach party was a desire to talk, and there was much sshing from the museum’s staff. Which the Italians ignored. Then I came back and very much chilled out for the rest of the day.

Sunday 13th September 2009

About mid-morning, I decided this was Leonardo day, so I kitted up and headed west down the coast in the direction of Háni Kokkini. As promised by the rep, it was only about 20 minutes before the Cretaquarium came into view. This, and the International Exhibition Centre of Crete, have been built on the remains of a US air force base, of which many of the buildings are still standing, though in an advanced state of disrepair and neglect. This includes the control tower near the runway, which I climbed in clear contravention of EU health and safety regulations. The metal stairs were a bit rickety, as was the tower above. I discovered I had no drink and no crisps so headed down to the main road and found a handy minimarket to rectify the situation. Thence to the Leonardo Da Vinci exhibition, which was very decent and interesting, with models, photographed notebooks, interactive CD-ROMs and facsimiles of original notebooks - I’m pretty sure they weren’t genuine. The whole place was blessedly cool and air conditioned, as I found out when I went out to lunch and heard the deafening sound of the industrial-strength machinery required to keep the place cool. After lunch there were a lot more visitors, most of them, not surprisingly, Italian. I then headed back down the coast in great heat and chilled for the rest of the afternoon. It became overcast around 5pm as I headed out to the larger supermarket I found the other day to get some hamburgers for a hamburger and chicken fillet tea. And so to bed.

Monday 14th September 2009

Today was Knossos day. Up and out at 8pm as usual to get the bus to Iráklion. Once at the bus station, I wandered around aimlessly until I found the well-camouflaged ticket office for the city buses. Bought my ticket and we were off through the traffic. Just outside Knossos the road was lined as promised with tacky souvenir stalls and overpriced tavernas, and dodgy ripoff parking setups. I slid into the queue and slipped into the place. There were a lot of tour groups, of many nationalities. The Rough Guide had led me to suspect that a lot of Knossos was off limits, and this was true to a certain extent of the main buildings. But it turned out to be not true for the periphery of the site. I headed down to the South House and then found myself able to circumnavigate the entire site close to the perimeter fencing. All this time I was occupying myself with two tasks: photographing the site, and photographing the tourists visiting the site. Once I’d walked around the edges, I proceeded to the centre right at the hottest part of the day (though there was a cooling breeze) right as even more tourists arrived, so many that if the site wasn’t as large as it was, could have become easily impassable. Knossos is fairly notorious in archaeological circles, as Arthur Evans, principal surveyor of the site in the early 20th Century, restored bits and pieces without any real justification, and freely applied concrete throughout. Evans’ actions, however misguided, have been able to preserve a lot of the site for thousands of tourists to visit it daily, and they, and some of the current restoration work, do give some sense of what an extraordinary building it was. In particular, there’s a vertiginous staircase near the Royal Apartments that you find very hard to believe could have been constructed nearly 4,000 years ago, but it was. Guides on the site occupy themselves with blowing whistles at tourists standing on the wrong plinth, crossing the ropes or walking on some edges next to sheer drops. The modern additions of Evans seem out of place, and yet they do convey a vague idea of what the place was like better than a lot of preserved stonework is able to do. And so back to Iráklion. I got off the bus in my favourite square, tried the bakery no luck, went to my supermarket, scored some wine, and revisited the Diskorama store that seemed a little disappointing the other day. Well, what a surprise, upstairs was where the treasure was stored, and I scored €44 of goodies. All the international CDs and obscure soundtracks that weren’t downstairs. What was curious was that they only sold childrens’ DVDs. Back to the bus station, this time via the port down the front. Restocked at the supermarket, and ate at the restaurant for the first time. Had the mixed grill with garlic bread and a pint of cold beer, and very good it was too. I was knackered, and was off to sleep very quickly. My bed, which seemed quite comfortable and sturdy when I first arrived, is becoming less so with every night. I intend to do bugger all tomorrow.

Tuesday 15th September 2009

And indeed I did. Just read Let the Right One In and listened to ABC on my iPod all morning. Had cheeseburger and fries at the pool bar with a beer for lunch courtesy of the pool bar woman. More reading in the afternoon. Slipped out for another Gouves recce in the afternoon and turned right when I got down to the beach. This front with the umbrellas turns out to be it. There isn’t really much else until I imagine you get a lot further down the coast. Was also on a search for more Becol (Flora) light and eventually found it in the last place I looked. Back to hamburgers and half a bottle of Lyrarakis’ The Last Supper, a red that really did the trick and sent me to sleep early.

Wednesday 16th September 2009

Up very early and out at 7.15am to get the bus to Áyios Nikólaos, which arrived pretty smack on time. It took about 55 minutes to get there for a mere €4.80. On the way I saw a lot of Crete, from the tourist hellholes of Hersónisos and Mália to the mountains and heavily greened hills as we crossed over via Neápoli to Áyios Nikólaos. As promised, there wasn’t much to this place, which was pretty but was also very hilly. I found the Wednesday bazaar straight away, which had a pile of fresh fruit and veg on sale from multiple stalls, as well as every counterfeit clothing and perfume item in existence. Some tourists were loading up. I was not one of them. Followed the bazaar down to the inner lake, walked over the bridge, found the record store, not open, so headed to the coast and rounded promontories to see the marina and the boat trip harbour. Had to take on a Toblerone and my first Calippo in years as I felt my blood sugar was flagging. Circled back to the now open record store, which didn’t have much stock but did have a very English-speaking owner. Headed uphill to have my lunch overlooking the lake I was on the lower portion of when I first arrived. A lot of German tourists wandered past admiring the view. When I was done, I returned to the bus station, where there was the usual uninformed bun fight until the right bus turned up a few minutes late. The conductor was a woman, and she spent most of the trip back busy up and down the aisles as various enormous tourists got on and off. I left at stop 11 as usual and idled away the afternoon sleeping and reading and drinking. I drink, but very little comes back out. More burger and wine action followed.

Thursday 17th September 2009

Lazy day today. I did very little other than finish Let the Right One In and have another decent meal in the Klio restaurant. So, instead, some observations on Cretan/Greek television which I’ve been idly channel surfing every now and then. Every cheesy video effect from the 1980s, and every disjointed editing effect from the 1990s, think in particular the short-lived innovation of Network 7 and the Quantel paintbox, is alive and well on Greek TV. They love split screens and talking heads in boxes. One of the big stars of local TV appears to be this dreadful bald comedian with ambitions to be both Benny Hill and John Cleese. He thinks there’s nothing more hilarious than a bald bloke in a bad wig surrounded by various hotties in discreet states of undress. He also appears to have bought the local TV rights to Fawlty Towers, which he has “improved” by adding scenes of him in a bad wig surrounded by undressed hotties. This is something I recall John Cleese did once, to serve several points, and not in every episode. They also love ad breaks that go on for fifteen minutes, and have helpfully added the infamous Channel 4 red triangle to material that might be a bit racy, but usually isn’t.

Friday 18th September 2009

Up early and out to catch a Ierápetra bus out to Mália Palace at bus stop 36. The Rough Guide came through once again: the site was a lot quieter than Knossos, with barely three separate small tours going around by the time I left at around 11am. It was also a more complete experience; the location was ideal with misty mountains behind and the coast not far in the other direction. A fairly complete palace layout is still extant, together with surrounding structures. It’s also a place of mystery, with several objects and places still the focus of unresolved speculation today. Storehouses, an agora (market?) and the M Quarter were also preserved under giant airline hanger style sheds. You sense that Mália wasn’t just the site of an ancient palace, but the centre of a thriving community. After the culture, I walked down to the beach and had lunch. Today’s odd sight was the topless quad bikers. Two girls walked off the beach to their quad bike, still unclothed, then climbed on board and drove off. Turned out they were just driving up to the beach shower, where I hope they didn’t then drive off further topless, but then this was Mália so you never know. Then I made my way slowly down the coast to Mália, which only became unbearable at the centre, or the end. There, the sunbeds and umbrellas were packed and stacked together far too closely, which was nothing compared to the horror of the kilometre of beach road which led back to the main old road. Bar after bar, club after club, quad bike hire dump after quad bike hire dump, English pub after English pub, everything you could want, but nothing you could need. I chilled in front of the local church, then caught some rays waiting for a bus. When I was back at Klio, I had a beer and a bowl of chips, which was great. The overgrown adolescents at the bar amused themselves by dunking the pool bar woman fully dressed in the pool, but without malice. More burger action in the evening, then I chilled out by listening to some Laurie Anderson.

Saturday 19th September 2009

We had a early morning rain shower here, and it’s still overcast, so I don’t know what I’m doing today. As it headed towards nine and was still a bit gloomy, I decided to head into Iráklion to the Historical Museum. There were some tense moments at the bus stop as a largish crowd had appeared. Fortunately, the fourth bus stopped to let us on and I was spared another half hour queuing in the sun. Picked up some bread at the bakery and then trekked off hopefully in the direction of the museum. Eventually found it, and was, bliss, able to dump my rucksack in a cupboard in the front hall. In direct contrast to the Archaeological Museum’s temporary hall, the Historical Museum felt a little more contemporary and up to date. You could press buttons to make things light up, they had video screens and slideshows running and clips from The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). The museum fills in the history of Crete from the end of the Roman period to the present day, times marked mainly by occupation by foreign powers before independence and union with Greece were achieved only in the early 20th Century. I saw the two El Grecos, the icon paintings, a reconstruction of Nikos Kazantzakis’ French study, and, most thrillingly, the original, handwritten manuscript of the novel The Last Temptation. That was worth the price of admission alone. Had lunch outside the museum, did a quick run through Metropolis in preparation for Tuesday, visited the supermarket to pick up some more chicken fillets and another bottle of Dafni, and then headed to the bus station. Saturday is clearly their busy day, so the toilets were closed, the bus I had a ticket for pulled out ten minutes early, and the remainder of us Mália-bound folk were dumped on one of the barely ventilated city buses and driven out. More sleeping and reading and showering followed. Had final hamburgers and drifted off.

Sunday 20th September 2009

Lazy day around the studio. Read a bit in the morning. Idled in the afternoon. The weather went off more than a bit in the afternoon, becoming overcast, windy and cool. Not unpleasant after the heat but far from ideal. Just before I left England, the Greek prime minister declared a general election, possibly because his policies were failing, and the end results are displayed nightly on local TV. The choice appears to be between a large bald bloke and a thin bald bloke, both of whom spend their time addressing arenas and squares and rallies full of people waving flags like it was Glastonbury or an Italian football league tie. Oh, just as on both of those occasions, there’s also endless analysis back in the studio. Less tomorrow.

Monday 21st September 2009

Lazy day two as I fine tune down the remaining food and cheese in preparation for home time tomorrow. There was an extravagant amount of sleeping too as I prepared for the great yawnfest of tomorrow evening. Not much more to report, it really was a very lazy day indeed.

Tuesday 22nd September 2009

On the last day, somewhat inevitably, I woke up pretty early and basically started to assemble all my various bits and pieces to be divided between my suitcase and my hand luggage. Pleading lack of cereal (my Fruit n Fibre ran out yesterday), I forced myself along to the restaurant to have a cooked breakfast, which was beyond fabulous after 13 days of Fruit n Fibre. I then packed things away very slowly, drawing it out and taking time to get it right. It was complicated because I had a cunning plan to avoid any excess baggage charges at Iráklion Airport, which involved a late night repacking session to put the weight in my hand luggage. And it worked too. Around 11am we had a power cut which meant I couldn’t have my lunch at the bar as planned, so had to hustle down to the supermarket for a couple of rolls and some meat. Naturally enough, the power came back just before twelve and I ended up ordering a portion of chips from the pool bar woman anyway. Lunch very leisurely till I finally took my leave of the Klio Apartments to head for Iráklion. Left my suitcase in the lounge with all the others. At the bus stop I offered a pile of travel tips to an Irish couple staying at the Magda Hotel. Eventually a bus arrived. My intention this day was to visit some of the places I hadn’t visited because I was wearing shorts. Now I was in long trousers I was more respectable. We ended up at the bus station, and I took an odd route up through side streets from there to get to the Plaza, and then another Plaza where an old Turkish mosque had been converted into a restaurant. From there I went across road via alleys to the cathedral which was open and the smaller church which has the icons I wanted to see which was closed. First strike. As that hadn’t worked I went to Metropolis and combed the shelves for goodies, eventually inflicting €93 of damage to my credit card. I then ventured down to the fortress on the harbour, which was also closed. There was, however, a long jetty leading out to sea behind the fortress which looked interesting, so I set off for a walk, little realising how long the jetty was. It must run for at least a couple of miles! So after walking most of it, I headed back up to Pagopiion Restaurant for my evening meal. Arriving at 7pm I was the only diner inside because the Greeks don’t eat in the evening till a lot later, so I was their early evening rush. I was drinking Diet Coke because I don’t drink before I fly. I ordered a basket of bread which was just as well because the main course came with half a potato. Still, it was three pork fillets in a lemon and ginger sauce and it was fabulous, accompanied by a giant mushroom thing and some sort of courgette/legume thing and a tomato and half a potato. As it was my last evening on Crete I had a dessert, a generous slice of sour cherry cheesecake. Naughtily, the restaurant foisted a serving of raki on me, which I was unable to refuse. Raki is something like Crete’s moonshine, and is a common courtesy drink in Cretan tavernas, and, evidently, smart urban restaurants. I downed three shots of the stuff and felt more than a bit wobbly as I staggered back to the bus station the long way round in the dark snapping final pics. Arrived back at the Klio around 10pm and then had to footle around until 2.45am the next morning when the coach arrived to pick us all up. By then I had repacked my luggage to cheat the weight machine, read some Q, listened to some music, attempted to snooze in a darkened lounge by lying on a narrow sofa and then mildly falling off it, plugging my ears with my earphones because the bar remained open playing loud music till 2am even though they only had a dozen customers, slumping in a chair listening to more music, then standing up, then finally boarding the bus to the airport, enlivened by some drunken cards from Manchester who cheered every announcement from the young camp rep who looked like he’d barely started shaving. We were in safe hands. At the airport we queued outside, which is always a thrill, before reaching the check in desk. As refurbishing Iráklion Airport so it can actually accommodate the thousands of tourists Crete would like to funnel through it each year is clearly at the bottom of the list of priorities of the local government, the departure lounge is tiny and the check in technology hasn’t yet reached the stage where you can check in and hand over your suitcase, you have to join another queue to have your suitcase scanned and then handed over to be loaded onto the place. Security turned out to be a little lax as well as I managed to smuggle 200ml of Factor 8 suncream which I’d forgotten I had in my hand luggage onto the plane, who knows what damage I could have done with that, eh? The flight looked to be going well as two seats next to me were empty until just before takeoff, when a couple were moved up from the back and I was cramped in next to the window. Thankfully, the lead stewardess took pity on me and moved me up to 1D where my legs were at least unpressed into the seat in front. And so the flight proceeded with a meal and some listening and some snoozing. We took off 15 minutes early, and the pilot was able to finagle us a route so we landed at Birmingham 50 minutes early. As ever, I, Mr Seasoned Traveller, had a jumper to greet the 8 degrees temperature that greeted us, while most everybody else was still in flipflops and shorts. Nobody ever learns. Once again, my suitcase was one of the first off the plane and I have no idea how that’s happened twice this trip. And that was it. No films. No internet. No email. No news. No sport. No work. Two weeks of bliss. See you next year.

Firefox crashed while I was writing this, but I’ve been able to restore most of what I wrote first time around. Films watched on Blu-ray are marked with a †, cinema trips are marked with a *.

30 Days of Night (2007) †

Which once again proves the case that to make a proper horror film you need to take the premise, the characters and the mythology seriously, and avoid camping it up. On a certain level, this kind of genre exercise could have been wholly unrewarding and unoriginal - the last thing the horror genre needs right now is another vampire movie. In fact, as a long time horror fan, I despair of the need to rely on such hoary old staples as the vampire; the genre needs new blood, but the vampire is an undead horse that surely can’t be flogged anymore. And yet, and yet, because director David Slade, whose previous film was the excellent Hard Candy (2005), has chosen to try to put on screen as much of the tone of the original graphic novel’s Ben Templesmith art as possible, he ends up with a deeply atmospheric look and vampires that are creepy as all get out, with their own disturbing language and a habit of going for the blood like wild animals. Maybe when time and a succession of pointless sequels have ground down whatever made this one work in the first place [cf. Blade (1998)], one might look back upon this original with a more jaundiced approach, but for now, both this and Let the Right One In (2008) prove that there is life in the undead corpse of the vampire movie yet.

The Wild Bunch (1969) †

It’s convenient to focus on the passionately filmed and edited violence of Peckinpah’s films, but really, it’s the quiet moments of the film that make it great and have turned Peckinpah’s single, properly achieved Western epic into a timeless classic.

W. (2008) †

After the cut-up experimentation of JFK (1991) and the doom-laden brooding of Nixon (1995), what approach can be taken to the presidency of George W Bush? Inevitably, satire. The film also fits into Oliver Stone’s career alongside Wall Street (1987) and Platoon (1986) and others as one more example of his studies of the relationships between fathers and sons. Stone’s take, based on extensive research, finds the root of Dubya’s character in his inability to match up to his father’s expectations for him, and the chaos and mayhem that resulted from Dubya’s wilful disobedience in his rebellious, hard drinking younger days and his presidential attempt to outdo his father in the wake of 9/11 and depose Saddam Hussein from the leadership of Iraq. There is much, highly amusing Team America: World Police (2004) style discussion of WMDs, and the overriding impression I took from the film is how on Earth could this bunch of dipsticks been allowed to run the largest war economy in the world in the first place? Answer: the American people voted them in, and then, even when by 2004, the sheer, crass incompetence and stupidity of these dunderheads had become all too apparent, even to a congenital idiot, the American people voted them in again. D’oh!

Unforgiven (1992) †

Unforgiven is really dark, both on a thematic level and cinematographically. It was awfully dark in the cinema, and the long forgotten VHS release couldn’t cope with the lack of light at all. The DVD release was something of an improvement, and now the Blu-ray gives a decent measure of just how dark the film is.

L’Ennemi Public Nº1 (2008) *

I’ve continued to stay away from an internet search for information about the real Mesrine. Part two of this French diptych is as compelling as the first, but takes on a different style. Gone is the use of splitscreen, and in its place is a more handheld, more Bourne Trilogy style urgency, as Mesrine’s world falls apart around him without him noticing. Vincent Cassel, in what is clearly a career highlight for him, continues to excel, switching between charm, menace, violence and incipient insanity often within the same scene.

The Hurt Locker (2008) *

This is a welcome return to form by one of the most interesting directors of the last 25 years: Kathryn Bigelow. It’s also a return to one of her favourite fascinations: the actions of men and their machismo and the effects this has upon the world. This is also an entry in one of the most venerable of thriller subgenres: the unexploded bomb movie. “No, don’t cut the red wire!” That sort of thing. One of the best examples of the subgenre is Richard Lester’s excellent state of the nation film Juggernaut (1974). The Hurt Locker ups the ante by having not just one unexploded bomb, but lots of them. It also imperceptibly shifts from being a tense, high octane thriller with some amusing anti-Hollywood, satirical points to make about big movie star casting into a psychological study of what drives one man to seek the adrenalin rush of defusing unexploded ordnance, and by extension what drives all men towards conflict and violence, and it does not make for comfortable viewing.

Inglourious Basterds (2008) *

In which Quentin Tarantino continues the ongoing project of his career: finding and identifying genres and subgenres he admires and then bringing them into his own world by trying them out. This is Tarantino’s bash at a World War II movie, and whereas one might expect some mad bastard child of The Dirty Dozen (1967), Where Eagles Dare (1969) and Kelly’s Heroes (1970), the end result is more surprising and fascinating. There is an awful lot of talk in this movie, an awful lot of people sat around tables playing games with one another with deadly intent and to deadly effect. I’m pretty sure we don’t see a single tank in this film, or an aeroplane. This table talk conceit has allowed Tarantino to highlight Christoph Waltz, a seasoned German actor with a string of credits behind him who’s not before appeared on the international stage, draw an actual performance out of Diane Kruger, who has previously looked like a model trying to act than a real actress, and cast Eli Roth as a mad, baseball bat wielding psychotic, a role he fits eminently well. The big name actor, Brad Pitt, in another Tarantino surprise, has been cast as comic relief. In being a talkfest broken up by brief spates of ultraviolence and a fiery finale straight out of Dario Argento, the film also owes a lot to Elmore Leonard, and his fascination with dialogue and getting characters talking to each other, and also the ways in which Leonard will employ two plot strands which eventually meet up and cross over into each other in unexpected ways.

Point Break (1991)

“You’re sayin’ the FBI’s gonna pay me to learn to surf?” Who can not love that?

This week it’s been athletics and not many movies, but those that have been seen in cinemas are marked with a *, those seen on Blu-ray marked with a †. Let it begin, let it begin.

Woodstock (1969)

It hasn’t escaped my attention that the 40th anniversary of Woodstock happened this month, so I checked out my DVD of the Director’s Cut of the documentary. Woodstock has a lot to answer for. It, allegedly, signals the high point of the hippie movement, when 500,000 seekers kept it together against all the odds in a field on Max Yasgur’s farm near Bethel, New York, thus putting in motion a rock festival mentality that would dominate the hot summers of the 1970s, decline in the 1980s and reemerge in the 1990s with Glastonbury and Lollapalooza. Now, everybody and his dog has a festival all over the UK, all over Europe, all over the world. Yet watching Woodstock always makes me think how little I would ever like to be standing in a field breathing in pollen, marijuana and body odour while rock musicians high on acid (but stay away from the brown acid, man) noodle endlessly somewhere in the distance. Woodstock looks like what it was, a natural disaster scorched by the sun and pounded by rain, plus some choice musical moments and great chunks of noodling painlessly excised. Yet Woodstock is more of a full stop than the fresh start a lot of commentators and participants have suggested. It signals the end of the 1960s as effectively as the Tate/LaBianca murders that took place the weekend before: the murders, carried out at the bidding of Charles Manson, expose the dark, manipulative side of the hippie dream, in which the search for meaning and enlightenment can be twisted into a willingness to kill. The onscreen murder of Meredith Hunter at the Altamont Free Festival is a mere four months away (see the documentary Gimme Shelter [1970]). Woodstock marks the crest of a wave; once a wave makes its crest it only has one place to go, crashing down and taking anything and everything with it, including those who didn’t stay away from the brown acid and never came back. Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, to name but two who kick ass and take prisoners on stage, both had only a year to live. Nobody has put this better than Hunter S Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

“And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009) *

When I heard that there was going to be a remake of the grimy 1974 classic, I wasn’t interested; when I heard Tony Scott was the director, I changed my mind. Starting with the joyous visual assault of the title sequence, there’s probably nothing Tony Scott likes to hear more than that the script consists of two blokes who only meet once and spend the majority of the movie talking to each other on the radio. “Fire up the helicopters!” comes the command, and the film loops and soars over Manhattan at will. With proper swearing as well. For a Tony Scott fan like me, this movie was a trip to hog heaven; for the unconverted it may be more of a trial, but those people have got bad Transformers movies to divert them, and they’re welcome to them.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) †

For a film billed as a romantic comedy, it wasn’t that funny, though everybody looks so fabulous, it barely matters, and high definition was made for “scenes we want to see” such as Scarlett Johansson and Penelope Cruz snogging like it was going out of fashion. Marked or marred with a philosophical voiceover, the film aims for a depth its lightness and airiness means it can never reach, though as a diversion, it’s certainly worth the time.

L’Instinct de Mort (2008) *

Which is the original French title of this two part French crime movie known in the UK as something like Mesrine: Killer Instinct. You know, it’s that one. With Vincent Cassel delivering what looks like a career best performance as a notorious French criminal and troublemaker who can switch from loveable rogue to violent bastard at the drop of a hat. Because I don’t want to spoil part two, I haven’t read up on this Mesrine guy at all to find out how much of the film is true, and how much of it is speculation (something the filmmakers acknowledge themselves at the start with an onscreen caption). It seems incredible that one man packed so much into his life that by the end of part one you’re wondering what the hell he’s going to do in part two. Favourable comparisons with The Godfather (1972) may be claiming too much for these two films, but part one is easily as good as Scarface (1983), and the relationships between Mesrine and his women are a lot more convincing than Johnny Depp and Marion Cotillard were in Public Enemies (2009). The movie also makes excellent use of Brian De Palma-esque split screens, especially at the start and at a key moment in a lawyer’s office and a prison near the end. Worth checking out, roll on part two.

glass: a portrait of Philip in twelve parts (2007)

Even fans of difficult music find Philip Glass a little too difficult for them. Because he foregrounds the repetition and rhythm that all classical music has as its base and makes it the centre if not the subject of the music, Glass has frequently faced the criticism that his music doesn’t develop, when in reality it is the developments and changes in the music that are at its core. Because the changes can be concealed by the repetition, they are all the more startling when they occur. The music of Glass has also been characterised as cold and mechanical, when even just a small sampling of a solo piano piece will reveal itself as warm and emotive. In reality, the music is deeply emotional and deeply felt, and this incisive documentary grants access to an artist at the height of his powers, and illuminates the obsessiveness, sacrifice and dedication required to maintain at that level, and also the cost and emotional trauma that such effort leaves in its wake.

Koyaanisqatsi (1983)

Because I like to see something at the cinema I’ve never seen before, I have, since an early age, found myself drawn to more oblique and offbeat films, and, generally speaking, these have been more rewarding experiences than turning out for the summer blockbusters (though I like a good summer blockbuster as well). I saw Koyaanisqatsi very early when it was screened on Channel 4, attracted to it by its billing as a non-narrative experience with no dialogue. You mean, there’s no story, and no talking, sign me up! I do understand that this is exactly the kind of thing that would turn most people off, but as I have learnt to my cost, I am not most people. Koyaanisqatsi isn’t just extraordinary, it’s astonishing, and it remains astonishing 26 years later, a sad, desolate, haunted lament for the human beings we have become and the technology we have used on ourselves and the planet to reach that place. Appropriately, the film itself is highly technological and used state of the art cinematography techniques to achieve these effects, an irony of which the filmmakers are only too aware. Koyaanisqatsi is as driven by the music of Philip Glass as it is by its imagery, and it is one reason I have never understood the claims that Glass’ music expresses no emotion; if you can’t be moved by the music that scores this film, you must be an emotionless husk and there’s already no hope for you. Yet as much as it’s a lament, the film, especially in the 20+ minute sequence known as The Grid, also revels in the neon and the light and the speed as the imagery overloads your senses with too much information. I’ve never needed to spend much time watching films that lecture me about the ozone layer or global warming, because seeing Koyaanisqatsi back in the 1980s put me ahead of that curve and raised my ecological consciousness just be being what it is, by embodying what all of the films I’ve seen this last month exemplify:

A state of life that calls for another way of living.

And in the meantime, films watched on Blu-ray have been marked with a †.

Apt Pupil (1998)

A word about telecine transfers. This is one of the earliest Region 1 discs, issued in the 2nd year of DVD releases in the United States, and it looks barely better than VHS. Thankfully, the poor quality of the image doesn’t affect the film’s power, and though markedly different to Stephen King’s original novella in a number of ways, it finds a route to achieve the same ends with different storytelling emphases. But 1998 telecine technology could not cope with Newton Thomas Sigel’s subtle use of smoke for atmosphere at all. It is a mark of how far telecine technology has advanced in the intervening eleven years that you can look back only a decade at a relatively recent film from the tail end of the 90s and be shocked not by the events depicted in the film, but by how shoddy the film looks. And there’s already been a taste of this in the Blu-ray era with Sony’s first bash at The Fifth Element (1997) which was by all accounts a long way from the look and sound of perfect. Every advance in audiovisual technology, it would seem, has to undergo a bedding in period before it can start to deliver the goods.

Reindeer Games (2000)

For the record, this was the director’s cut available on Region 1 DVD. John Frankenheimer’s final completed film was shorn of 20 minutes for its original cinema release, which Frankenheimer was allowed to restore for the after market. Though some of the poor response to the original film may perhaps be the fault of a less than tight script than to issues of length. Regardless, the film is a perfectly serviceable thriller which doesn’t announce all of its surprises ahead of time. File under: misunderstood and worth watching.

300 (2007) †

THIS! IS! SPARTA! I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling a warm glow just from typing those three words. Perched right on the edge of ridicule and unafraid to push things over the top, Zack Snyder’s Watchmen (2009) warmup is tremendous fun, a R-rated movie like they used to make. All right.

White Men Can’t Jump (1992)

Before Wesley Snipes turned into a spliff-punishing, tax-dodging, direct-to-DVD disaster area, he was a really good actor, and this is just one of his great run of films from the early 1990s, which pairs him with Woody Harrelson as a couple of basketball hustlers, who, in true Ron Shelton writer-director style, have more problems with their relationships with women off the court than they do with their ball skills on the court. The film came out in America in the spring of 1992, and was a big hit just before the riots triggered by the acquittal of the police officers on trial for the beating of Rodney King, an incident accidentally videotaped by an onlooker, George Holliday. The film is all about relations between black and white in Los Angeles, and this extends to this week’s quote title in which Snipes invokes the apparently widely held view that the music of Jimi Hendrix expresses something ineffable, a rage, an anger, perhaps a blackness, that white guys can’t hear because they only listen to Hendrix and only pick up on the rock and roll. Myself, I’m not totally convinced, but you know, I think Snipes has got something there. He’s not the first to say something similar, and he won’t be the last.

The Godfather (1972) †

Talking of transfers, The Godfather on Blu-ray looks like it was made yesterday, instead of 37 freaking years ago. I still spot details in this film I hadn’t picked up on before, and this time around, what impressed me most deeply was Al Pacino’s performance. Since this film came around so early in his career, Pacino hadn’t yet found his favourite trick of starting to talk quietly, AND THEN SHOUTING OUT THE REST OF HIS DIALOGUE!! Pacino is very still in this film, and his stillness is both threatening and intimidating. I always wonder what kind of war hero Michael Corleone was, and if that might be a key to his onscreen character and the dead-hearted monster he has become by the end of the film.

The Godfather Part II (1974) †

Which is nothing in comparison to the husk he’s become by the end of the sequel, a film both greater and longer than its predecessor and a fine example of what can happen when you give a director at the top of his game complete creative control; this can also go horribly wrong of course, but only at the box office. Generally speaking, folies de grandeur like Heaven’s Gate (1980) are way better as they are free from executive interference than they would ever be cut down to a tidy two hours with every little bit of directorial indulgence carefully excised. Heaven’s Gate at four hours is a masterpiece, and so is The Godfather Part II. Sometimes, you just can’t tell a story in 90 minutes.

The Godfather Part III (1990) †

Sofia Coppola’s much-criticised performance in this film is actually not bad at all. Because she actually was an 18 year old girl at the time of its production, she brings a naturalness to the part that a more professional actress has long had trained out of them. On the other hand, the part is fairly thankless, but I just can’t see that Winona Ryder would have been able to bring very much more to it; I don’t think Oscar would have been beckoning in the Best Supporting Actress category. So maybe it’s just as well that exhaustion kept Winona out, and fate put Sofia in her place. And the response to her performance was so aggressive that it led Sofia towards what looks like it might be a long career as a talented writer-director. Some things are just meant to be. Would we have had The Virgin Suicides (2000) et al if Winona Ryder had been able to play this role back in 1990?

“The concept of ‘obscenity’ is tested when we dare to look at something that we desire to see but have forbidden ourselves to look at. When we feel that everything has been revealed, ‘obscenity’ disappears and there is a certain liberation. When that which one had wanted to see isn’t sufficiently revealed, however, the taboo remains, the feeling of ‘obscenity’ stays, and an even greater ‘obscenity’ comes into being. Pornographic films are thus a testing ground for ‘obscenity’, and the benefits of pornography are clear. Pornographic cinema should be authorised, immediately and completely. Only thus can ‘obscenity’ be rendered essentially meaningless.”
Nagisa Oshima, from ‘Theory of Experimental Pornographic Film’ (1976)

“It is my dream, it is my goal, it is my idea, to make a film that the story just sucks ‘em in, and when they spurt out that joy juice, they just gotta sit in it, they can’t move until they find out how the story ends.“
Mike Horner, Boogie Nights (1997)

This is an article about mainstream films with unsimulated sex scenes, so if this is a subject in which you have no interest, you’re allowed to leave early. If however, you’re prepared to stay the course, please feel free to open the Official In the Realm of the Senses Spotify playlist below, cue up Donna Summer, and we’ll begin.

http://open.spotify.com/user/robertsharp/playlist/1iThAMbtlZVtwJ8fGCvkpY

How significant is it that after the development of a new form of media, it is more commonly pornography that becomes a driving force in its adoption? This goes back to paintings on the walls of caves, ancient fertility symbols and the mosaics of Pompeii. After Caxton printed the Bible,  should we be surprised that printed woodcuts of people having sex were soon to follow?

So it is with photography. So it is with cinema. One of the earliest surviving examples of early cinema is a short film in which a man has found a woman willing to undress in front of a motion picture camera. The recent French compilation, The Good Old Naughty Days (2002), brings together a group of early pornographic scenes originally intended to be screened in French brothels. The films are populated possibly by the very prostitutes of the brothels that showed the films; the men are disguised very poorly behind fake moustaches and bad wigs; and, in advance loving tribute to the dialogue of Shakespeare in Love (1998), there is even “a bit with a dog”.

The status of the pornographic film remains resolutely underground throughout the 20th Century until the 1970s. The majority of the product at the time consisted of very short films known as loops, mostly shot on 8mm in anonymous motels and clandestine destinations, mostly shown at stag nights or accessed via subterranean connections in the backs of dubious magazines, or friends of friends, or friends of friends of friends. Due to its illegality, organised crime became involved in providing finance and reaping the profits.

It isn’t until the liberalisation of the MPAA in 1968 and the introduction of the X certificate that something starts to shift in film culture. Denmark becomes the first country to legalise hardcore pornography in 1969. Respectable filmmakers, such as John Schlesinger with Midnight Cowboy (1969), produce films with tough content, rated X, but still able to compete for and win Oscars. In certain quarters, the liberating effects of the 1960s create a climate in which America, for a brief moment, is willing to step up a year or two in its always problematic adolescence of sexuality. The X certificate meant adults only; more permissive legislation was passed; metropolitan audiences were willing to attend X rated films; organised crime was ready to finance the brief era of porno chic, in which educated liberals would test their audiovisual boundaries by seeing Deep Throat (1972).

Deep Throat (1972)

Well it certainly doesn’t look like a cultural phenomenon 37 years after the fact; instead, it looks like what it is - a poverty row cheapie filmed in twelve days (six days filming, six days waiting for the sun to come out, as Linda Boreman states in Ordeal) at an anonymous motel somewhere on Biscayne Boulevard in Miami, Florida. The plot of Deep Throat is disposed of within the first half hour with the introduction of the classic porn trope: a woman in search of her first orgasm (an idea which will be revisited in Shortbus (2006) below - I should mention here the sense I’ve had watching all five of these films in a concentrated burst; that each filmmaker has seen all of these films as well, so that Oshima could not have embarked on Ai No Corrida (1976) without seeing Deep Throat; that John Cameron Mitchell names the Shortbus vibrating egg In the Realm of the Senses in tribute to Oshima’s film, and so on).

The odd thing about Deep Throat is how much it resembles all the ineptly made pornography that has trailed in its wake: the unadventurous camerawork, sledgehammer editing, poor lighting, awful dialogue, bad acting, irritating music, closeup gynaecology, etc. As if all of these things can be excused by the fact that the cast engage in sex with each other for real. Even this early in the hardcore genre, the film looks played out and derivative instead of innovative and daring, a creative dead end instead of the new set of clichés it should be. Linda Boreman can’t act for toffee and delivers a flat, toneless performance that will inspire Julianne Moore’s flat, toneless porn film acting in Boogie Nights (1997) 25 years later. Harry Reems offers the other porn film acting choice: he overacts with a bad English accent for no reason at all. Overacting as a doctor, he makes a unique medical breakthrough with the aid of what looks suspiciously like a novelty telescope and discovers why Linda Lovelace has been unable to have an orgasm: her clitoris is located in her throat. This leads to Linda’s first orgasm (and much intercut clanging of bells and launching of rockets *rolls eyes*) via a demonstration of the ‘sword-swallowing’ fellatio technique taught to Linda by Chuck Traynor, who was at the time of Deep Throat’s production Linda Boreman’s boyfriend, manager, pimp and domestic abuser.

After the first day’s shooting on the film, Traynor was so outraged by Linda’s behaviour on set (she was smiling at people, enjoying her work, and expressing relief at being out from under Traynor’s control) that he attacked her so violently that the bruises can be seen on her legs in an early scene near the pool, the abuse visible across the years as a reminder that though the world of porn likes to present itself with an upbeat face, there are sometimes emotionally damaging reasons why these individuals have found their way to this world, or been coerced into this world, or forced into this world, or forced to have sex with a dog at gunpoint, or forced to urinate on another woman at gunpoint, both of which happened to Linda Boreman during her time with Chuck Traynor. Interestingly, although Boreman became an ardent campaigner against pornography in later life, she remembers her brief time making Deep Throat with a certain amount of fondness; after the first day’s beating, the director, Gerard Damiano, took Traynor aside and conveyed to him the fact that he should leave Linda alone for the rest of the shoot, or the film’s producer may want to have some words with him, and since the film’s producer was a Mafioso, Traynor took the hint and stifled his abuse of Linda for a couple of weeks. No one knows how much Deep Throat made at the box office for the modest outlay of its $22,000 budget, but all of that money, and it numbers in at least the tens of millions of dollars, ended up in the hands of the Mafia.

As lifeless as Linda Boreman is in the dialogue scenes, as Linda Lovelace in the sex scenes, she comes to life, and demonstrates what would become another porn trope: porn stars act best when they’re having sex. However, the sex in Deep Throat in relentlessly unsexy, scored by bad pop music overlaid with endless bubble sound effects for no reason at all, and the novelty of the sword-swallowing fellatio quickly grows old. Deep Throat doesn’t have any content away from the sex, and that is why Nagisa Oshima could see that more was possible; if you could surround the sex scenes with proper filmmaking, you could forge new ground in unexplored territory, and this must have seemed terribly appealing to Oshima, a filmmaker in the John Huston mould who doesn’t like to repeat himself from film to film.

(Sources [all books]: Inside Linda Lovelace (1974) by Linda Lovelace (ie. Chuck Traynor); Ordeal (1980) by Linda Lovelace with Mike McGrady; The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry (2005) by Legs McNeil & Jennifer Osborne with Peter Pravia)

The success of Deep Throat was followed by a number of other high profile porn films, among them Behind the Green Door (1972) with Marilyn Chambers, Devil in Miss Jones (1973) with Georgina Spelvin, and Debbie Does Dallas (1978) with Bambi Woods, one of those films that can’t be as good as its title (it isn’t). Infamous male porn star John Holmes also rises to prominence at this time. And that was essentially game over for mainstream filmmakers wanting to make films rated X for content, not just rated X because they contained scenes of unsimulated sex; the certificate had been permanently stolen by hardcore pornography, no newspaper would carry adverts for X rated films, and few cinema owners would book them onto their screens. (This situation remains in place today - the introduction of the NC-17 certificate for Henry & June (1990) did little or nothing to change the situation - and often the only option for filmmakers has been to release their films unrated by the MPAA, though few newspapers will carry ads for unrated or NC-17 films, and few cinema owners will book them.)

It is in this cultural arena that a respectable Japanese filmmaker, Nagisa Oshima, decides that his next film, Ai No Corrida (1976), will contain scenes of unsimulated sex which won’t be the film’s be-all and end-all. Rather, the scenes will be as important in plot, character and symbolic terms as any other scene in the film. Japanese cultural censorship rules forbid the showing of pubic hair in cinema films, so unsimulated sex was never going to be welcomed with open arms. The French producer of the film, Anatole Dauman, had been inspired by the American success of early 1970s hardcore pornographic films to propose a similar project to Oshima in 1972, and after mulling it over for a few years, both Oshima and Dauman were able to agree on a deal. Although the film was made in Japan with a Japanese crew, the negative had to be smuggled out of the country and processed and edited in France. To this day, the uncut version of the film recently released by The Criterion Collection has never been shown in Japan. Legally, at least.

Ai No Corrida (1976)

Based on a well-documented incident in Japanese history from 1936 where a woman named Sada Abe was found wandering the streets with the severed penis of her dead lover, Kichizo Ishida, Oshima’s film fills in the backstory of this incident from a number of accounts, but then ups the ante over previous film versions by committing to a portrayal of the lovers’ couplings without simulation.

Filming on a closed set allows Oshima to create a closed private world in which the couplings of the lovers act as a rejection of society and the growing militarism of the time as Japan geared up for its expansion into China and its participation in the Second World War. This rejection is a defiant expression of personal freedom and leads to the creation of, in the words of lead actor, Tatsuya Fuji, “an absolute realm that doesn’t recognise others’ judgements or conventional morality”. In short, in order for the film to be what it is, there is no choice available other than to play the sex scenes for real, because without this commitment, the film would be unable to transcend its subject matter and break the longstanding sexual taboos of Japanese culture. Without real sex, the film could be dismissed as just another “pink” film (“pink” is a sex film category in Japan that emerged in the 1960s that stays within Japanese sexual taboos: no pubic hair, no genitalia, no real sex). Oshima has no interest in being dismissed, he wants to break taboos he regards as unhealthy, and ultimately he failed in life but not in film.

The actors are extraordinary, particularly the intensity Eiko Matsuda brings to the role of Sada Abe, a woman with a past obsessed with knives and acts of violence. The film takes its time, often holding shots for minutes on end, often resembling sexually explicit art from earlier periods of Japanese history, often observing the action like a voyeur, often from the viewpoint of an onscreen voyeur. The film knows you want to watch it, knows why you’re there, but is prepared to take you on an arc of voyeurism and intrusion into a hitherto private sphere designed to make you feel uncomfortable as slapping, choking and strangling come to dominate the couplings and the film heads to its inevitable conclusion and my least favourite cinematic sight: the severing of an onscreen penis. Sada Abe became a hero to Japanese feminists as a result of this act; she had turned the lover who’d initially seduced her into a willing provider of her orgasms - it is no coincidence that the Sada Abe character starts the film in the missionary position and ends the film on top, dominating her counterpart as she strangles him to prolong their mutual pleasure.

These are not effects films like Deep Throat (1972) can ever hope to achieve. Oshima brings proper filmmakng skills to Ai No Corrida, and initiates a new undefined genre of cinema, but one that would take time to gather other members to its fold.

(Source: The extras on The Criterion Collection’s US DVD release of Ai No Corrida)

The rise of video sees off whatever ambitions the makers of hardcore pornography had as filmmakers (if they ever had any in the first place), and the American genre of hardcore pornography settles into a familiar pattern of VHS tapes which contain scenes of unsimulated sex separated by scenes of bad acting that could now be fast-forwarded through. If there ever was any artistic ambition in the genre, it had been firmly ejected from the moneymaking process. Porn films would become known for the campness of their reappropriation of mainstream film titles and styles (or what style could be done on video with minimal editing and zero budget) and their willingness - perhaps unknowingly, perhaps not - to exploit vulnerable, underage girls like Traci Lords, or, indeed, exploit vulnerable adults of legal age with chaotic, abusive family backgrounds.

The next 20 years in mainstream film see only the occasional unsimulated sex sequence. For example, producer and owner of Penthouse, Bob Guccione, secretly films hardcore inserts for Caligula (1979), detonating lawsuits left, right and centre from which the film itself, never properly edited to completion by its original director, Tinto Brass, never recovers. Paul Verhoeven, a stickler for authenticity, hires two male prostitutes to engage in a brief onscreen fellatio scene to add some local colour to Spetters (1980). Respected Dutch actress, Maruschka Detmers, performs fellatio on co-star Federico Pitzalis in Marco Bellocchio’s Devil in the Flesh (1986).

These seem pretty much like one-off, every now and then aberrations until The Idiots (1998), when Lars Von Trier, freshly armed with the Dogme Manifesto and always a provocateur, turns unsimulated sex into an arthouse strategy in opposition to mainstream Hollywood filmmaking with its enormous budgets and CGI special effects. The thinking goes that a European arthouse filmmaker can put on screen what no Hollywood filmmaker would be allowed to: real actors having sex for real, and that this can be a way of drawing audiences to arthouse films as a way of giving them something they can’t get from Hollywood films, but also can’t get from pornography, since pornography is all about the sex not the acting, but arthouse cinema with unsimulated sex scenes can be all about the acting (and filmmaking) as well as the sex. Alongside this in 1998, Von Trier’s mainstream production company, Zentropa, also started financing female-friendly, hardcore pornographic films, intended to be viewed by couples, perhaps the best known example of which is All About Anna (2005).

Though The Idiots only contains about 3 seconds of unsimulated sex during an orgy sequence and an actor with an erection in a shower, these were enough to cause disquiet when the film was screened on the UK’s Channel 4 in 2005 as part of a censorship season; in the end, common sense prevailed, Channel 4 were allowed to broadcast the film uncut, and Ofcom backed the decision against whatever protestations had been made.

One of the first responses to the challenge laid down by The Idiots was Catherine Breillat’s Romance (1999). Breillat is a Frenchwoman with a longstanding interest in sexuality and relationships, as demonstrated by Une Vraie Jeune Fille (1976), banned in France after its initial premiere until 1999, and 36 Fillette (1988), which was retitled in England as Virgin, a decision which surprised Breillat. It would be good to report that Romance is worth seeing, but I found the film’s basic premise absurd. The setup is that Marie (Caroline Ducey) is so unhappy that her boyfriend Paul (Sagamore Stévenin) won’t have sex with her (for no particular reason other than that he is French and full of inarticulate angst), that she decides to embark on a series of sexual encounters with perfect strangers, amongst them notorious Italian porn star, Rocco Siffredi, in the hope she can change his mind. Instead of just dumping the loser, of course, like anyone other than a Frenchwoman would.

Baise-Moi (2000)

“This here’s the future. Videotape tells the truth.”
Floyd Gondolli, Boogie Nights (1997)

Who mourns for Karine Bach? She committed suicide by overdose in January 2005 at the age of 32, but she was better known as Karen Lancaume, a French porn star who quit the business in 1999, but was persuaded halfway back to see off her porn past for good by Virginie Despentes, author of the original 1993 novel, and Coralie Trinh Thi, a fellow ex-porn star, both of whom would serve as first time directors on an ultra-low budget, punk rock Thelma & Louise (1991) ripoff shot on video in natural light to keep costs down.

I say video, but it seems more like the cheapest, most horrible looking, dingiest video camera anyone could find. And it gets taken to the most awful looking places, from the nasty warehouse where one of the leads and a friend are raped to the tacky sex club near the end. Though the grunginess of the film’s look is neatly counterbalanced by the slickness of the editing. Unsurprisingly, there was some resistance to casting two ex-porn stars in the lead roles (what? Ludivine Sagnier and Romane Bohringer were unavailable?) but Karine Bach and Raffaëlla Anderson acquit themselves better than well: one of the secrets of film acting is the ability to just be real in front of the camera, and Bach and Anderson have no trouble with this.

They play two women, Nadine and Manu - both trapped in a desolate urban environment inhabited by male lowlifes, scumbags, drug dealers and rapists (that you hope was nothing like anybody’s real life, but you fear may well be), both are pushed to the limits by a roommate and a partner that they respectively kill. The two meet in a Métro station and recognise an indefinable quality in the other that draws them together in friendship and sets them off on an angry crime spree odyssey of for real sex and brutal violence that has tragic but weirdly symbolic consequences. I wonder whether Virginie and Coralie know that the seas and lakes that Nadine and Manu are drawn to are symbols of the feminine, symbols of the unconscious, symbols of the creation of life, symbols of the storms and chaos that lie beneath everyday reality, symbols of the feelings these characters have given vent to with such venom and enthusiasm. I like to think so. I like to think that these are deliberate choices. For ultimately, it isn’t the unsimulated sex and bloody violence that makes Baise-Moi my favourite of the films considered here, it’s this fascinating, almost spiritual layer that I find so rich and compelling.

Who mourns for Karine Bach? I do. She could genuinely act and inhabit a role like most porn stars can’t. But did she have ambitions to make it as a mainstream actress, or were her ambitions denied by a conservative filmmaking culture in France? Did she kill herself because she wasn’t  allowed out of the porn ghetto? Because the money was running out? Because she was addicted to drugs? Because she reached a point of despair in her life few of us will ever know?

I don’t know any of these things. All I know is that Karine Bach is dead by her own hand, and I mourn for her. Her death doesn’t seem right somehow. Strange, eh?

(Source: The extras on Universal’s UK DVD release of Baise-Moi)

In the wake of these films, the belief emerged that sooner or later an English-speaking film would attempt to incorporate scenes of unsimulated sex into a conventional narrative. In reality, it happened ahead of schedule with the release of Intimacy (2001), which featured one scene of onscreen fellatio between New Zealand actress, Kerry Fox, and Mark Rylance, who was at the time the Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London.

In the wake of this film, with the English language barrier breached, the belief emerged that sooner or later an English-speaking film made in America would attempt to incorporate scenes of unsimulated sex featuring established Hollywood actors into a conventional narrative. In reality, it happened ahead of schedule with the release of The Brown Bunny (2003), which featured one scene of onscreen fellatio between free-spirited New York actress, Chloë Sevigny, and Vincent Gallo, an irascible egotist who did everything on the film except make the tea, and he probably made that as well, though against his will and not in a good mood, which seems to be Gallo’s default setting.

In marked contrast to Traci Lords’ attempts to make it as a mainstream actress a dozen years earlier (Lords found herself relegated to walk-ons in mainstream studio pics like Cry-Baby (1990) and Blade (1998) and only allowed to play leads in B-movies and straight-to-DVD potboilers - the shame of it is that Lords can really act, but her notoreity frightens risk-averse Hollywood executives), The Brown Bunny had little or no effect on Sevigny’s career. Her agents at the time of the film decided they could no longer represent her, but she found new agents quickly and delivered a terrific performance in David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), amongst others. This is the first time that participation in an unsimulated sex scene by an American actress (arthouse or pornography) has had no long term ill effects, and its importance should not be underestimated. I’ve no desire to see The Brown Bunny, because on all accounts, it is a poor, one man band vanity project with a for-real sex scene towards the end and little else; how strange that it may turn out to be of some wider cultural significance while being void of any artistic value.

All through this time, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) was undergoing a process of change and reassessment in the wake of the departure of James Ferman in 1999. The Board started to take a more reasonable stance in regard to scenes of unsimulated sex and the boundaries of what could be passed uncut with an 18 certificate slowly began to be relaxed after years of rigidity and a secretive lack of clarity. Thus we come to the question of male ejaculation. A scene containing this unsimulated act was cut from the French film, Le Pornographe (2001), much to the disgust of the film’s UK distrbutor, Hamish McAlpine, whose response was to issue the film cut by 11 seconds on DVD but uncut as a R18 video which could only be sold in licensed sex shops. It would appear that the BBFC needed a line to draw in the sand between acceptable and unacceptable with an 18 certificate, and male ejaculation was it. It was somewhat of a surprise then when 3 years later, Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs (2004) was released with its male ejaculation scene intact. It’s in a discreet long shot, but it wasn’t that discreet projected on a large cinema screen. The BBFC had changed its mind and redrawn the line in the sand.

9 Songs (2004)

At the time of the film’s release, critic Mark Kermode speculated that porn producers would soon be packing their bags for colder climes to film moody snowscapes or setting off to the nearest festival to shoot some live band footage with the intention of integrating this material into their run of the mill hardcore footage so as to be able to get the end product passed as 18 by the BBFC rather than having to accept a R18 and ghettoisation in licensed sex shops. As far as I know, this has not happened. The reason it hasn’t happened should be obvious: hanging out on Norwegian glaciers or at Glastonbury is going to be horrendously expensive and eat into the profits a porn film producer can make from filming people having sex for real, a venture that by comparison is relatively inexpensive. And besides, would such a transparent strategy fool anyone at the BBFC? Not likely.

Better filmmakers make the scenes between the sex work as well as the sex. And Michael Winterbottom is a better filmmaker than any porn film producer will ever be. His motive for the film was “Why not?” Margo Stilley’s motivation to act in the film was, “I thought it needed to be done.” In these joint aims can be detected the intentions of Nagisa Oshima in 1976.

9 Songs chronicles a relationship that’s been over for months but instead of following that relationship as it falls apart and focusing on the emotional trauma that results [recent example: Revolutionary Road (2008)], it only chronicles the relationship through sex and concert visits, only hinting at why the relationship ended, perhaps suggesting that it was doomed from the start, suggesting that though the relationship had sex, what it lacked was intimacy, and when Margo Stilley’s character began to reach orgasm without her partner (and not attending concerts!), she was already mentally packing her bags to head back to the States.

Video gives the filmmakers flexibility and freedom, but that unlit look is also a dour look, and though the participants sound as if they’re enjoying themselves, they don’t sound like they’re having fun.

(Source: The extras on Optimum’s UK DVD release of 9 Songs)

It may have been at about this time that there emerged criticism of the arthouse unsimulated sex movement (if such a movement can be so discerned) that a lot of this sexual activity seemed joyless, gloomy, desperate, uncomfortable, and decidedly not fun. Fortunately, American filmmaker John Cameron Mitchell, who’d had some minor success with the fun transgender rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), had recognised this as well and spent three years in production before turning up with Shortbus (2006), an English language film shot in America, a comedy in the style of Woody Allen (70s model) that returns to the quest of Deep Throat (1972), the search for the female orgasm.

Shortbus (2006)

“It’s just like the 60s, only with less hope.”
Justin Bond, Shortbus (2006)

Who knew that there was a yoga position a man could adopt that would allow him to ejaculate on his own face? (It’s a symbol of the self-loathing and sexual confusion of this character as a result of his refusal to be penetrated by his male lover.) Who knew that there was an actor willing to adopt that yoga position and then allow himself to be filmed ejaculating on his own face? And that it required several attempts over a number of months because the lighting wasn’t sufficiently revealing of the semen?

Well I know now, and thankfully I didn’t buy this film by mistake in a 4 for £20 deal at HMV thinking it was another light-hearted romantic comedy, though I’m sure someone will. Aren’t they in for a surprise? And aren’t we all, because Shortbus is a light-hearted romantic comedy but with added unsimulated sex. Following the lead of the opening 20 minutes of Moulin Rouge (2000), which basically says to the audience this is what this film is going to be like so if you don’t want to take the ride, now would be a good time to leave the theatre, Shortbus takes a similar route. The opening 10 minutes are all about the sex, throwing down the gauntlet and announcing itself with authority. There’s a particularly good joke at the expense of Jackson Pollock’s contribution to Abstract Expressionism which I shall not spoil by revealing here, but I bet you can guess what it is, can’t you? That’s right.

Sofia is a sex therapist who’s never had an orgasm, Jamie and James are feeling the need to open up their relationship to a third party, and Severin is a dominatrix who can’t connect emotionally with anyone (possibly because she spends her working life beating people with whips and leading them around on a chain). They have a place in common, though, the Shortbus salon of the title presided over by Justin Bond, where neurotic intellectual self-obsessed New York liberals meet to see films, drink, eat, socialise and have sex with each other. This is one of those films that Woody Allen never quite got around to making, and a lot of it is awfully funny, especially the Star Spangled Banner sequence that is beyond my ability to describe.

The couplings in Shortbus are also deliberately well-lit. Writer-director John Cameron Mitchell refuses to cloak the sex in darkness and uses the sex positively rather than portraying it in a negative light. As the film goes on, it retreats from its opening salvo of genitalia and becomes more intimate, concentrating on the emotional connections between people’s faces rather than between their legs. It also draws from real life events and uses the power brownouts that followed in the wake of 9./11 to recreate the sense of community in New York that was rekindled when the lights went out. Naturally enough, the lights return when Sofia has her first orgasm; in her dedication to the cause, actress Sook-Yin Lee was locked in a cupboard with a camera and brought herself to orgasm many times over.

(Source: The extras on Universal’s UK DVD release of Shortbus)

One of the strategies employed by these disparate filmmakers is to make their movies genre movies instead of pornographic movies. Ai No Corrida is a historical drama, Baise-Moi is a crime thriller, 9 Songs is a musical, and Shortbus is a romantic comedy. And they are these things first and foremost, they just also happen to contain scenes of unsimulated sex.

This then is where we are in 2009: there are now so many of these films that they constitute a genre all by themselves, something fresh and new that has not existed in film before, and nobody knows where it will lead.