a log of links, thoughts, notes and scribbles
Category: films
Star Wars was one of the very first films I saw in a cinema. As a child in 1970s America, I have vague memories of this classic 1977 Star Wars film poster.
Tom Jung‘s iconic design is one of my favourites. I bought a poster of it recently and it now hangs on my wall.
I also picked up a smaller picture of the Empire Strikes Back film poster from 1980.
Saw Superman Returns the other day.
It’s a big-screen extravaganza of the classic comic book tale.
A huge budget production, rich in special effects and riding an out-of-this-world fantasy storyline.
Brandon Routh bears an uncanny resemblance to Christopher Reeve, the Superman I remember.
All the familiar characters were there, just updated for the 21st-century audience. Superman’s ‘mother’ in her prairies farmhouse; Louis Lane, the determined reporter (a modern, feminist reinterpretation); Perry White the ebullient newspaperman and Jimmy White the bow-tied junior hack.
Clark Kent is the socially awkward office geek. Clumsily tripping over things and stammering through conversations. But, with that famous cape and boots he takes to the skies as the ultimate super-hero.
This is a uniquely American story.
At one point Superman is even depicted patrolling the skies over New York, in an eerie echo of the fighter jets over the city on 9/11.
Had America only had Superman and the reassuring certainties of his world that day, everything might, just might, have been alright…
Watched Downfall the other night. A German dramatisation of the last days of Hitler. Traudl Junge, a young staff typist, is our witness to the Führer’s final days and suicide. Deep under Berlin Hitler and his generals face the Russian advance and their imminent defeat.
Bruno Gantz gives a terrific performance as Adolf Hitler. The Führer is portrayed as a withered, grey old man. Bent double, shuffling with one hand shaking uncontrollably. A broken dictator.
Hitler is fanatical to the end, screaming wildly at his generals. Issuing deluded commands and conjuring up phantom regiments to defend the city. Hitler demands a decisive counterattack while condemning his commanders for their cowardice and treachery. The terrible reality is the army is broken and Germany defeated.
The bunker is cut off from the world. Insulated from the terrible battles raging above. They are a strange, isolated community existing in a concrete underground of sterile corridors and reinforced steel doors. Many of the bunker scenes are remarkable for their domesticity. Hitler takes lunch with his staff in a purpose built dining room. They eat off china plates and exchange pleasantries, commenting on the food.
The claustrophobic atmosphere of the bunker juxtaposes sharply with the terrible shelling and chaos in the city above. Children desperately man the guns as the adults turn on each other amid the chaos. Brutal execution squads roam the city hunting collaborators. They kill at will, hanging suspects in the street. The death squads insist ‘order must be restored’ and adorn their victims with makeshift signs declaring, “I sided with the red beasts”.
Denial is a constant theme. People are drunk and despairing at the hopelessness of their situation and imminent arrival of the Red army. Eva Braun is depicted as a self-obsessed hedonist, indulging in wild dancing and open drunkenness. No one can face the future. The defeat and humiliation, the moment Germans must account for Nazism.
The fanaticism of the young is shocking. A nurse collapses hysterically on seeing a broken and dishevelled Führer. Young officers declare their loyalty to Hitler and vow to fight and die rather than surrender. They blindly cling to the oath of allegiance and many commit suicide rather than fall to the Russians.
In a pathetic scene, a reproduction of Hitler’s last appearance on camera, the Führer decorates a line of bewildered child soldiers for defending Berlin.
Goebbels is depicted as a sinister figure, gaunt and limping. Fanatical to the end and devoted to Hitler and Nazism. In a terrible scene, Frau Goebbels is seen coldly administering poison to her own children. Finally having to force a reluctant Helga to drink it. Somehow it comes to symbolise the cold barbarism of the Nazis. The Goebbels then kill themselves.
As the final hours approach, Hitler is seen earnestly discussing the effectiveness of various poisons with a visiting surgeon. He instructs an aide to burn his corpse to prevent it from falling into Russian hands. Hitler and Eva Braun marry in a pathetic ceremony and retreat to their rooms to end their lives.
Leading Nazis record their final testaments and Goebbels dictates a rambling diatribe to Nazism and what could have been.
A German general tries to negotiate a desperate peace with the advancing Russians. His approach is rejected outright. Unconditional surrender is the only offer.
At the end, Hitler is dead and his generals drink and argue as the bunker staff flee.
Defeat and suicide are recurring themes. Nazism and it’s murderous ideology are defeated as Hitler and the leading Nazis commit suicide. The proud German army is beaten. As the last defenders are pushed back to within a few yards of the bunker, men kill themselves rather than surrender.
The suffering of the German people is portrayed in harrowing detail. Germany is ruined, it’s citizens left to beg in her shattered cities. The price for Nazism is paid.
As Germany’s surrender is announced, people emerge, dazed and uncertain from the ruins.
The film is about witness. Dramatising the accounts of survivors. Characters are picked out and their stories come to life through the film’s narrative. It’s important the film is made by Germans and the dialogue is in German. It lends it authenticity and makes its witness more meaningful.
The film ends with Traudl Junge’s escape from the bunker, Berlin and the war. Our witness must survive. Children are among the first to adapt to life in the ruins and a resourceful boy leads her through the Russian lines to safety.
They pull a bicycle from a river and cycle through the countryside to freedom. The boy represents a future of hope and renewal. The journey is symbolic of a new, reconstructed, democratic German nation.
As the credits roll, eerie snapshots reveal what happened to the bunker staff after the war. Many died in Russian prison camps while others survived, living to old age.
The final few minutes show Traudl Junge today, looking back and reflecting on her life and time in Hitler’s bunker. She concludes that being young was no excuse and finding things out was always possible.
Managed to catch Super Size Me the other night.
Basically, Morgan Spurlock does a Michael Moore on the American fast food industry.
He sets himself the task of eating McDonald’s 3 times a day for a month, and super sizes every meal when offered while taking a critical look at America’s culture of obesity.
In America, and elsewhere, there is an obesity crisis. People are simply so fat that it damages their health. Legions of overweight consumers munch through vast portions of sugary, fatty food.
The outrage is that while some in the world starve others die from chronic overfeeding.
Go to an average McDonald’s restaurant and you’ll be offered small, medium, large and super-size portions.
The fast food drinks are huge and are often sold in buckets. The ‘double gulp’, not from McDonald’s, holds an astounding half gallon of soda containing a staggering 48 teaspoons of sugar.
Within a few days, Morgan Spurlock is complaining of what he calls McTummy, the McStomach ache, the McSweats and the McStomach brick.
The huge portions of junk food are making him feel awful. At one point he vomits out of the car window before he can finish his super-size meal.
You soon start to feel for him as he chews his way through 3 squares a day of McDonald’s.
After only 9 days, the menu inevitably gets boring and he suffers depression and finds it really hard going. The thought of McDonald’s morning, noon and night for a month does not appeal !
McDonald’s lure in kids by providing playgrounds, children’s birthday parties and happy meals.
Their marketing emphasises fun at McDonald’s restaurants and their motif is a very recognisable clown.
They target children.
I remember as a child growing up in America in the 70s, a trip to McDonald’s was a special treat. We lived just outside Washington DC and my parents would drive out to the local mall on the Leesburg Turnpike. I remember the McDonald’s there. It had a strange ornamental statue surrounded by thin wires with flowing droplets of oil. Thinking back it was a bit weird. But, hey, it was the 70s !
We would happily tuck into burgers and fries and pester Mum and Dad for more. The golden arches were etched in my young mind as a place of food and fun.
Interestingly, Morgan Spurlock interviews some marketing guru who describes something called ‘brand imprinting for actuation later in life’.
Basically, introduce the brand to children as fun and happy to ensure the logo and brand values stick in their mind. The same ideas as candy cigarettes ! The theory goes that a child who eats candy cigarettes will be more likely to smoke as an adult.
Evil stuff. But it seems to work.
So, McD’s are looking to give kids such a good time that they become lifelong customers.
The impact of all this fast food and super-sized culture is a doubling of obesity in children and adolescents in America in the last 20 years.
This leads to a whole host of diseases and medical conditions including liver problems and diabetes. Basically, too much fast food makes you ill.
Too many fat teenagers and obese children face serious threats to their health by eating junk food. As one contributor put it, ‘you can’t deny these links’.
The programme continues with a look at processed food and Mcdonalds’ ceaseless marketing drive.
McNuggets are termed ‘McFrankenstein’ creations of salt, fat, sugar and processed meat. What goes into them is unclear. But they are manufactured and processed beyond belief.
America has been McDonaldised out and franchised to death. Everywhere you look the golden arches have a ubiquitous presence. McDonald’s is everywhere.
The average US child sees 19,000 food adverts a year. Convenience food and fast food chains are being promoted like never before. It’s big business.
In 2001, McDonald’s alone spent $1.4billion on direct advertising worldwide. Think of all the t-shirts, coupons, kids toys, promotions, TV ads and posters. The McDonald’s brand seems omnipresent.
I’m loving it ! Not.
Any investigation into the diet of American kids has to include school lunches. Here Morgan Spurlock gets close to what Jamie Oliver did to British school dinners.
Both are horrified at the terrible state of the food served up to our school children. School kids are served reheated, reconstituted, packaged foods. Most of which is provided by huge industrial catering companies like Sodexho.
Both Jamie Oliver and Morgan Spurlock discover that diet effects classroom behaviour. In Appleton, Wisconsin, a special needs school serves up fresh ingredients with no frying. No candy or soda is available and the staff are amazed by the changes in behaviour. The kids are more focussed and better behaved. Exactly what Jamie Oliver discovered with his new fresh menus served in Greenwich schools.
Morgan Spurlock takes medical advice and had a full check up before starting out on his McDonald’s eatathon. He soon discovers that his new diet is providing over 200% of his actual nutritional needs. In only 12 days he’s gained a staggering 17lbs. He is soon feeling sick and unhappy as the effects of his high fat diet kick in. His blood pressure reaches 150 over 90 and he starts to talk about a strange addiction to McDonald’s food. His mood goes up and down, but once he starts eating his depression seems to lift. At one point he wakes suddenly at 2am, short of breath suffering heart palpitations.
His medical advisors start to warn his endeavour is rapidly turning into a dangerous experiment. They advise him to stop and warn of the risk of gout, kidney stones and a pickled liver.
Essentially, his liver is deteriorating into pâté. One even advises him to call an ambulance if he starts to feel bad.
His team calls over 100 nutritionists and 95% confirm that junk food is a major contributor to the current obesity epidemic. However, the American food industry is protected by powerful lobby groups in Washington which ensure a favourable Congress. They have enormous power and influence over votes and policy.
By the end of the month Morgan Spurlock has gained 24.5lb and consumed a total of 30lb of sugar and 12lb of fat.
It’s easy to see McDonald’s customers simply as dumb consumers of cheap mass produced burgers and fries. Addicted to huge portions of sugary, fatty food which makes them obese.
In McDonald’s defence, they have dropped the super size option, added salads and healthier options to their menus and publish full nutritional information. Even though it’s sometimes hard to find in their restaurants.
No one is forced to eat McDonald’s and no one really eats it 3 times a day, every day. Too much of anything will make you sick.
However, Morgan Spurlock’s experiment highlights a real problem in a dramatic way. The fast food restaurants are serving up vast portions of cheap, fatty food which is causing obesity and illness among their customers.
Channel hopping last night I stumbled across Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 film, ‘Triumph of the Will‘ on BBC4.
It’s Nazi propaganda at its most mesmerising. A masterpiece of imagery.
Riefenstahl produced and directed the film about the 1934 Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg.
Hitler is the star and the film consciously builds him up as god-like Fuhrer.
Technically it’s brilliant for its time. Her hypnotic shots of marching troops are truly compelling. The crowds seem wild with admiration as they salute Hitler and the Third Reich.
The film ends with Hitler’s speech to the troops at Nuremberg. I must say his speech, captioned in English, didn’t make much sense and seemed more random sentences than a coherent call to arms.
The overwhelming message of the film is that Hitler and the Nazi movement are the living symbol of the reborn German nation.
It’s un-equalled cinematic propaganda and now very chilling to watch. We know what is going to happen and it’s disturbing to see so many people swept up in the euphoria. Their blind compliance and worship of Hitler is genuinely frightening to witness.
Even today, 70 years on, Riefenstahl’s skilful deployment of cinematic tricks and epic scenery portrays the terrible magnetism of Hitler and the Nazi party.
His persona and the martial power of the Third Reich seem strangely captivating. Like an irresistible drug, the viewer is compelled to believe the propagandist’s illusion.
Surely, no one watching this film in 1930s Europe could conclude Hitler might be appeased. The film shows the Fuhrer presiding over a fanatic war machine. Negotiation and agreement with Hitler must have seemed futile.
Spielberg is teaming up with Tom Cruise to bring us a remake of HG Wells’ classic War of Worlds. Here’s the preview trailer…one to watch !
Saw ‘Saw’ last night at the Vue Cinema West End.
Scary stuff.
Two guys wake up chained at opposite ends of an industrial washroom.
Between them is a decomposing corpse.
One has to kill the other or face a terrible death before time runs out. A series of macabre clues lead them to concealed hacksaws – to their horror they realise the only way out is to cut through their ankles…
The story unfolds through a series of carefully managed flashbacks. We discover they’re the victim of a sadistic psycho called ‘The Jigsaw Killer’ who traps his victims and forces them to make gruesome life-or-death choices to escape.
It’s a chilling psycho-horror that turns on the desperate plight of the two characters, played by Cary Elwes and Leigh Whannell.
They are trapped.
Trapped by the chains, trapped by the serial killer, and trapped by their mistrust of each other. The sense of claustrophobic, no-way-out horror is cleverly developed and unnerving to watch.
Elwes hams it up a bit, but it’s an intriguingly dark horror film and well worth seeing.
Before seeing the film we shopped on Oxford Street in the driving rain. Huddled under a windswept brolly fighting off the worst the British weather could hurl at us. Darting in and out of shops trying not to get utterly soaked.
After a warm up at Costa coffee and a browse through the department stores we hit the cinema.
We rounded off the evening with a lovely meal at the Thai Pot, Covent Garden and a late train ride home with all the pissed up party goers.
Two lads opposite were hilarious – faking sleep, somewhat obviously, whenever the ticket collector came by… !
Saw Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar last night. A thought-provoking film about a woman who returns to Taliban run Afghanistan in search of her sister.
It was filmed before 9/11 and gives a taste of life under the Taliban. The film opens with a surreal scene. Prosthetic limbs are dropped by parachute to a wind blown field hospital for land mine victims. Limbless men engage in a desperate race across the desert on their crutches to reach the falling parachutes.
Women have to wear the burka and are not permitted to travel alone. Nafas, the central character, is an Afghani-Canadian who has to rely on the kindness and curiosity of strangers to find her way to Kandahar. Along the way she is helped by a young boy and an American doctor with a strange false beard.
Afghanistan’s mountainous scenery and haunting desert landscapes provide the backdrop. The setting is strangely resonant of the opening desert scenes of Star Wars and some of the incidents are just as alien.
We encounter a schoolroom full of young boys fanatically reciting the Koran under the watchful gaze of a taliban mullah. One boy is expelled for copying the rhythm of the chant rather than learning the words.
Women are veiled in the burka and we rarely see their faces. Some even conceal brightly polished red fingernails beneath their heavy clothing.
In tracing Nafas’ journey, the film unveils a stifling atmosphere of religious oppression. People are forced to struggle to get by and live as best they can.
I loved the first Jaws film. Spielberg’s suspense and the DA-DA, DA-DA sound track was a winning combination. There’s something truly frightening about a ruthless killer shark lurking beneath the waves. The fin powering towards its victim and the terrible thought of being grabbed and pulled under…
Well, we have a new killer shark flick that’s just come out. Jaws for the 21st century generation. It’s based on a true story too. A couple on a diving holiday were accidentally left behind in shark infested water… It’s called Open Water, one to watch methinks !
Saw Spiderman II last night. Great film. Alfred Molina was excellent as the demented Doc Ock and Tobey Maguire played a convincingly geeky Peter Parker.
The story was a little convoluted, but soon stabilised into a classic doubting superhero beats the baddie and gets the girl flick.
Peter Parker is a geek. Weedy, always late, overlooked, under-performing and a low achiever. But, pull on the Spiderman mask and he’s a superhero. Rescuing children from speeding trucks, catching bad guys and saving the city.
A cod-science nuclear accident turns the preening Dr Otto Octavius into a tentacled monster who’s out to get our hero. A superhuman battle rages across the city as the two fight it out.
On one level the film is a comic-strip superhero romp. A piece of fantasy fun. The film also manages to touch on the secrets people keep, and the masks people wear. We all fulfill different roles, each with a different public mask. Peter Parker is a nerd whose secret is that he’s spiderman. Put on a webbed body suit and a spider mask and he’s miraculously transformed into a superhero.
There’s a classic scene where spidey stops a runaway city train. He spins his webs of steel and, while straining to halt the catastrophe, loses his Spiderman hood. Peter Parker, the boy behind the mask is revealed. He wakes, surrounded by astonished passengers. He’s immediately overtaken by self-consciousness and is horrified to be exposed. It drains his superhuman powers.
The assembled crowd reassured him that it’s OK, and they unanimously agree, ‘not to tell anyone’ before returning his discarded mask. This re-energises him and he dashes off to track down his evil foe.
The subtext, albeit a little obvious, is it’s Ok to be yourself. There’s no need to wear masks, keep destructive secrets or assume disguises.
It’s OK to be you.
Spiderman is ‘outed’ as Peter Parker and it’s just fine !
After all he’s a superhero with a job to do and a city to save….
So yeah... 