Nobody Knows Anything

No cinema visits in the past fortnight, and evenings have been dominated by Euro 2008. With any luck, normal service will now be resumed after this midsummer break.

The Name of the Rose (1986)

Or a palimpsest of Umberto Eco’s novel. So what is a palimpsest anyway? Put simply, it’s a text written on top of another text, and, appropriately enough for a story principally concerned with the power of the written word, it dates back into the history of writing itself. It’s also the mot juste for that most vexed of cinema topics: is the book better than the film, or is the film better than the book? Or are they, as  more illuminated commentators have come to realise, entirely different entities, and questions of “better or not” are obfuscatory blurs particularly ill-suited to two opposing and contradictory media.

The classic quote on this from the writer’s point of view goes something like this: “There’s a tale about the writer who was asked how he felt about Hollywood ruining his books. His answer was to point to the bookshelf and note that the books were sitting right there and hadn’t actually been ruined at all.” I’ve seen this attributed to Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James M Cain, and lately even Stephen King. I’ve also seen it appropriated by other writers who’ve quoted it and applied it to their own work without acknowledging that it might be a quote with a history. It may even be an urban myth. Regardless, the point of view it expresses is a valid one, and rather than Raymond Chandler (whom I haven’t read enough), I’m going to use Stephen King for a few examples (of whom I’m a constant reader). But I could just as easily use John Grisham or James Ellroy, popular authors whose work has been filmed with varying degrees of success. (As a side note, it’s interesting to me that as John Grisham has become less formulaic and more interesting as a writer, the film adaptations of his work have more or less dried up.)

Stephen King has been particularly ill-served by Hollywood. Obviously, we know the Stephen King film adaptations that are any good: Carrie (1976), The Shining (1980), The Dead Zone (1983), Stand by Me (1987), Misery (1990), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Dolores Claiborne (1995) and The Mist (2007). There are a number of other adaptations that have their moments – Christine (1983) would fit into this camp – and then there are way too many absolute dogs like The Lawnmower Man (1992) and The Running Man (1987). Why is the writing of Stephen King so difficult to adapt successfully to cinema?

The principal problem is that although one of King’s strengths is narrative, and in film, for the most part, narrative is all, it isn’t his only strength. King is particularly strong in character, dialogue and tone, and tone is perhaps the most difficult to adapt to cinema. I’ve recently acquired Warner Bros’ R1 DVD release of The Maltese Falcon (1941), which handily includes the two earlier adaptations of Dashiell Hammett’s novel, a pre-Code version with the same title filmed in 1931 and a light comedy adaptation starring Bette Davis in 1936 called Satan Met a Lady (good title). And yet the only one to click with both the public and the critics and that has entered the pantheon of classic films is the 1941 version that a) got the tone absolutely spot on and b) has been successfully retrofitted by the French as a key entry in the film noir genre. I think this is the main reason that Frank Darabont has hit three for three with his Stephen King adaptations: he gets Stephen King’s tone, and has been able to reproduce it successfully on film.

Stephen King was so ticked off by what Stanley Kubrick did to The Shining (ie. made a modern masterpiece that, particularly in its longer American cut, continues to improve every time you see it, but which departs from King’s novel in many ways) that he was able to persuade an American TV network to readapt it under the aegis of Mick Garris in 1997 and so see a more faithful version of the story produced. Naturally enough, since no one seems to have much of a good word for it, I’ve avoided it like the plague. When you’ve got what Kubrick did, why would you want some second rate, allegedly more faithful, compromise produced for US TV? Writers can be particularly poor judges of the end result of film adaptations. King’s always struck me as a highly perceptive and insightful writer, but it does amuse me that he can’t appreciate how good Kubrick’s film is. So it goes.

Which more or less brings us back to The Name of the Rose. UK purchasers of the DVD have been irritatingly shortchanged by Warner Home Video, who elsewhere in Europe have issued the film as a 2 disc set with an excellent 2 hour interview in French (subtitled in English) with the articulate director of the film, Jean-Jacques Annaud, on disc 2. Among the gems of information Annaud lets slip is that both he and Eco didn’t want to cast Sean Connery (in what is one of his best roles), Christian Slater would only audition his love scene with Valentina Vargas and not the two other women also up for the part, and that Feodor Chaliapin Jr was struck by falling masonry during the filming of the climatic scenes in the library but was more concerned whether or not they got the shot than with being hurt.

I am now re-reading Eco’s original novel, and it’s interesting to see how bits and pieces of Eco’s prose made it into the film, sometimes from dialogue, but sometimes from descriptive passages. As just one example of the magic of adaptation, in the novel the library is on the top floor of the large tower in the monastery, and both the kitchen and the refectory are also located inside the tower; in the film, the implication is quite clear that the tower only contains the library – the kitchen and the refectory magically disappear. Eco also loads the novel with a ton of historical exposition, which Annaud and his four screenwriters have successfully filleted down to the bare minimum for the atmosphere of the time to be established.

There is one particularly odd outcrop of the film publicity machine that remains more than a little baffling: the novelisation. And surely, you say, Hollywood has never made a film from a book and then ended up with another book adapted from the film (or, as is more common, the film’s screenplay)? And you would be wrong. Before I was old enough to see it, I was quite proud to own the novelisation of David Cronenberg’s Scanners. But now? There is, quite literally, only one novelisation that is worth anyone’s time and that is Orson Scott Card’s adaptation of The Abyss, which was produced to such a tight deadline and in such close collaboration with James Cameron himself, that it more closely resembled what eventually became The Director’s Cut of The Abyss than the initial theatrical release it was meant to be promoting. There is one more: horror writer Dennis Etchison wrote a pretty neat version of Videodrome under the pseudonym of Jack Martin. Everything else novelisation wise is pretty much an ecological blight and a waste of trees.

A palimpsest on top of a palimpsest is a palimpsest too far.

I’ve been watching Euro 2008 all week and no movies. As the knockout phase starts, there will actually be days without football, and I can start squeezing films in again. In the meantime, I thought it might be interesting to offer a few words on the subject of football in the movies, and why there aren’t any good movies about football, because football is really popular, right, and movies are really popular, so why can’t a combination of the two put the boffo in box office?

Of course, I haven’t seen many of these movies about football (because I’m really interested in movies and not football, with the exceptions of major tournaments or big games), although I might have seen Escape to Victory (1981) in a moment of weakness when I was younger, but who can say? Sylvester Stallone is the goalkeeper, apparently, and it must have been all downhill from there. I haven’t seen either the most recent attempt at box office gold, Goal! (2005), though according to the imdb, for a $10 million budget, it pretty much made that sum back, which doesn’t make that movie a big hit. And I haven’t seen Zidane (2006), a total football documentary that follows Zinedine Zadine over the course of one game with multiple cameras, but in the cinema this was basically relegated to an arthouse release.

The audience for cinema and the audience for football are two different audiences, and it is hopeless to try and accommodate one audience because in doing so you will only alienate the other. One recent football film I have seen is Bend It Like Beckham (2002), though the football sequences were shot as quickfire editing montages, sometimes using an open shutter a la the opening beach combat scenes in Saving Private Ryan (1998). This successfully obscured an accurate assessment of the footballing talents of the actresses involved.

But as an attempt to show the game of football, I think quickfire editing is deadly, especially when so much of what is great about football is long passes through space allowing a player to break and pass to allow another player to score, or a defender to stop them. Football is oddly uncinematic and awfully difficult to film well, and breaking it down into short bursts does it no favours (because you can assume that what’s being obscured is the twenty takes when the actor didn’t pass the ball properly), but neither does allowing it to flow uninterrupted (as I’m assuming moments in Zidane were allowed to flow) because then it stops being cinema and starts becoming television (and who wants to go to the movies and watch television?).

What must be terribly annoying about football for film directors is that, as every football fan knows, there are moments (if not endless 20 minute periods) in which nothing much happens except the ball being knocked around the park. This can be a compelling midfield battle, or it can be timewasting dullness of the first order; either way, how can you film that and make it interesting? Much better to concentrate on the goals like all those endless montages that fill up football coverage before the game starts. We know what football looks like because we see so much of it on television, and as soon as you start to interfere with that by running slow motion replays and swishing things around on screen to make it more visually interesting, you end up missing the corner, because one of the teams has taken it quickly (something which Euro 2008 TV directors have been doing at least once every match). To break with that and turn football into over-edited cinema ends up denying what makes football great. Football happens in real time, and for the most part real time is something that cinema doesn’t do very well at all.

I don’t know how good a footballer Sean Bean is, but in When Saturday Comes (1996), I’d like to bet that a good deal of his part on the football field was created through editing. What Bend It Like Beckham (2002) got right though was that a sports movie really has to be about something else if it’s going to succeed at the box office and achieve the more long term goal of becoming a film that is valued after its time in theatres has gone and the passing of time has allowed a film to continue to be valued or not.

Although there are apparently fewer words designed to cause a movie executive to choke on their coffee more than “it’s set in the world of minor league baseball,” Bull Durham (1988) has become that kind of revered classic (I love it to bits, and it’s one of those movies I can turn to when I’m feeling a bit down and in need of cheering up). Although Bull Durham is set in the world of baseball, it’s really about any number of way more interesting, character-based themes such as aging, maturity, adulthood, childishness and so on, along with generous helpings of warm sexuality and goofball humour.

The good sports movie is a field in which writer/director Ron Shelton has succeeded because he understands the sports he makes movies about because he’s played the sports in the real world and knows that the machismo that fires a sportsman up is even more compelling (and/or ridiculous) when contrasted with the no-nonsense femininity of his romantic partner. I could be wrong, but I don’t think a professional footballer has ever directed a movie (and thank heavens for small mercies). The Americans have got the sports movie down much more successfully than we have in the UK because they understand that a sports movie has to be about more than just sports. Here we make Footballer’s Wives (2002) and it’s all a bit of a disaster area because it turns out that you can’t out-tabloid the bizarre reality of tabloid football coverage.

Is there a football movie that has achieved that classic status? I don’t think there is.

No cinema visits this week. It’s like I’m not even trying anymore. Actually, I’ve watched a lot of DVD extras, and next week Euro 2008 starts, so I may be watching even less films. Still, at least this week’s solitary movie is a doozie.

Ichi the Killer (2001)

Famously, the BBFC has been through some changes in the last few years. Films that would previously have been cut to ribbons have been passed uncut; controversial films that The Daily Mail hates but film buffs love have been passed uncut; and generally speaking the BBFC has approached the DVD era with a lot more success and interaction with the general public, now James Ferman is no longer running the place like his personal fiefdom, and in fact died in 2002. Films that had formerly been subject to BBFC cuts were reclassified and in a majority of cases, the phrase “all previous cuts waived” started appearing with a heartwarming regularity on its website.

But, somewhat inevitably, sooner or later, a filmmaker produced a film that tested the BBFC to its limits, and in 2001 that film was Ichi the Killer. The BBFC removed three minutes and fifteen seconds from this film at the height of its supposed great liberalisation period. Apparently, these cuts were required because of this: “Cuts required to scenes of mutilated, raped or savagely beaten women or of sexual pleasure from violence. Cuts required in line with the requirements set out in the BBFC Classification Guidelines.” So that makes it all right, doesn’t it? The BBFC has published its guidelines after consultation with the public, and if it follows them and censors films that contain scenes of sexual violence, then somehow, magically, rape will cease to exist and the world will become a nicer place. Right.

Bearing in mind the present mood of the BBFC, I look forward to the uncut release of Ichi the Killer in 2020, when someone at the BBFC acquires both a) a sense of humour and b) comes to the realisation that such a profound failure to comprehend the Japanese culture that produced Ichi the Killer is in urgent need of redress. For the record, I watched the uncut version of the film because I am a) not a fucking idiot that I’m going to buy a cut BBFC-censored version of the film and b) someone who has come to realise that Takashi Miike, a filmmaker who pushes at the boundaries of what is taboo in contemporary cinema, will always be an inherently more interesting filmmaker than someone like Brett Ratner, who can always be relied upon to deliver something that is exceptionally safe, and dull, and really rather boring.

Essentially, Takashi Miike has been punished for doing his job too well. What is interesting about the rape scenes the BBFC has such objection to is that they are difficult to watch, our sympathies are with the victims, and the actresses have been made up to look like men have been horribly and realistically abusing them for weeks on end. There is no sophisticated Straw Dogs (1971) style ‘is the victim enjoying the rape?’ complexity going on here. I should point out, somewhat respectfully, that obtaining sexual pleasure from violence is one of the driving forces in rape, and that depicting this in a film is more an act of honesty than it is an act of transgression. I am not saying from any point of view that this is a justification for sexual violence, because I find rape abhorrent, and a crime for which there is no defence. But you absolutely have to have the right to depict rape in film, even in a film as cartoonish as Ichi the Killer; in fact, especially in a cartoonish film like Ichi the Killer.

Generally speaking, somewhat in the vein of Morgan Freeman in Se7en (1995), I don’t think the world is a horrible place, clothed in darkness and evil, but I do think that there are horrible people in it, who will perform horrible acts at the drop of a hat if they think that they can get away with it. Or, and this is even more chilling, if they plain don’t care about the consequences of their evil. That is what Takashi Miike is telling us, and why it is a nonsense to dilute his message by cutting three minutes out of his work.

One cinema visit this week, marked with a *. Contains one Indy plot spoiler, but I guess you’ve seen the film now, right?

Trading Places (1983)

Denholm Elliott, who co-starred in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), turned up here in a role vaguely reminiscent of John Gielgud’s role in Arthur (1981). I still don’t understand commodities trading, and still don’t understand the film’s ending. Which is why I haven’t earned millions in the city and retired at forty.

The Fog (1979) 

Jamie Lee Curtis, who co-starred in Trading Places (1983), which includes a topless scene she now regrets (but we don’t), turned up here as the kind of happy-go-lucky hitchhiker that could only exist in a movie made in the 1970s. There are John Carpenter movies that are in a certain sense better movies than this (The Thing (1982) for one), but I think The Fog is my personal favourite of his work. It has the perfectly stripped down mechanics of a really creepy ghost story, is not let down by its low budget and creates the majority of its mood through atmosphere and Carpenter’s own haunting musical score. Apparently, some Hollywood assholes remade this recently; another one of those films I will never see; how can you remake perfection?

Quest for Fire (1981)

There are some films you just never get around to seeing, you miss them at the cinema, never quite catch the VHS release, find something else to watch on another channel when they turn up on TV in the wrong aspect ratio, and then finally a DVD appears with a decent amount of extras, you find it in the May Madness sale at Borders for £4.99 and suddenly you can watch it in a week when I had a 1980s thing going on. I was completely blown away by this, one of the few movies since the silent era to be almost totally devoid of intelligible dialogue, and instead reliant on the pure tools of visual storytelling, which, sad to say, not every film director is able to draw upon. It’s a very simple story (see the title), magnificently scored by Philippe Sarde, and deeply impressive in every area. And it took me 27 years to get around to watching it. Duh.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

Shia LaBeouf (show me the beef) is the Jar Jar Binks of Indiana Jones. Discuss. Or rather not. How on Earth does this guy get parts in films? He can’t even act. He’s like a less attractive Jason Mewes (and Jason Mewes, lest we forget, ain’t that pretty himself). Well, it’s been a long time coming, and at least it was better than Temple of Doom. Basically, the film is about the 1950s (Area 51, atomic bombs, witchhunts), but it also touches on just about every unexplained artefact of the uncanny from Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of… series from the 1970s: crystal skulls, Nazca lines and flying saucers. You name ‘em, it’s got ‘em. Considering that the fourth movie sequel in any modern movie franchise can be as rotten as all get-out (Lethal Weapon 4 (1998) anyone? thought not), we should instead be grateful that Crystal Skull is as good as it is, and that’s still pretty good. Yes it has flaws for internet fanboys to pick over endlessly, but you know what, the whole Indiana Jones thing was only ever meant to be barely better than an old Flash Gordon movie serial anyway, and thankfully, it’s much better than that.