Monthly Archives: October 2013

  • Filth Jon S Baird (2013 Scot Ger Swe )

    Filth Jon S Baird (2013 Scot Ger Swe ) James McAvoy

    Viewed Empire Cinema newcastle upon Tyne 17 Oct 13 ticket: £6.40
    Now here’s a funny thing: when I left the cinema after seeing
    Filth, protagonist Bruce Robertson’s catch phrase: Same rules apply
    – kept on ringing about in my head. Whenever Robertson did the
    dirty on some poor sap who crossed his path, he would quip: ‘Same
    rules apply’ Although I didn’t quite get it at first, the phrase got
    me thinking about Rules which I presume is what both Director Jon
    Baird and writer Irvine Welsh, who wrote the novel, intended.

    The opening sequences of Filth introduce two locations : the
    bedroom and the police station, settings which provide much of the
    film’s action. Bottoms up and bottoms down you might say; sex and
    power lie at the heart of the film’s concern. In the opening
    sequence of Filth we see a sexy woman provocatively dressing and
    talking about power being the ultimate turn on and how she keeps hold
    of her policeman husband by playing the tease. The scene providies a
    significant cue that sex as a power tool would play hard ball in this
    scenario.

    The second sequence of shots introduces the protagonist Bruce
    Robertson of the Edinburgh CID as, during a breifing for a murder
    case, he leeringly appraises and evaluates his rivals for promotion.

    In the screen tradition of Touch of Evil, LA Confidential and Joe
    Orton’s Loot, I had thought that Filth would feature police
    corruption in its narrative. But in the same way that at a given
    level Welsh’s Trainspotting is not about drug dealing, so Filth is
    not about police corruption. It’s not even about the police.
    Although its key setting might be the Edinburgh CID, this is not
    central to the situation that Baird set ups and develops. The plot
    hinges on the manipulations and gambits made by Bruce Robertson in
    his attempt to secure promotion to the rank of Detective Inspector.
    As a promotion competition the plot could be set inside any corporate
    body: Amazon, BA Systems, Ford or some large Council.

    Filth is grounded not so much in particiulars as in universals.
    Same rules apply. Filth is not concerned with the particular
    relations and practices engendered by the police in their role as the
    interface between Society and the Law. Filth’s focus of concern is
    raw competition; the battle between men for scare resources: the
    battle for Promotion. An indivisible prize only one man or woman can
    win.
    In Filth. Baird probes the state of our society in a manner that
    might be philisophically grounded in the writings of Thomas Hobbes,
    the 17th century political philosopher. Although Hobbes
    was writing to justify the state, his ideas can be transposed to any
    level of catastrophic social disintegration. In the 20th
    and 21st centuries Welsh and Baird realise that it is the
    break down at the micro level of social ordering which is leading to
    chaotic social conditions. The disappearance of collective
    institutions, with their values and structures, in the face of
    attack by sociopathic individualism. A collapsed social situation
    that is well summed up by Hobbes: “it is manifest
    that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all
    in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such a
    war as is of every man against every man.”
    The moral consequences of this break down of social order provides
    the framework for Filth. In vacuum caused by break down of the moral
    order, the sociopath fills the gap. In persuit of promotion Bruce
    Robertson is at war with everyone, and as war has become the default
    state: same rules apply.
    As is the case in the bedroom where sex is persued both as a war
    strategy and as a basis of personal identity. With sex and power
    linked, sexual relations also become located within the chaotic
    conditions of the war of all against all and become the centre of a
    dysfunctional self identity. Like drugs sex can be both adictive and
    subject to what Bill Boroughs calls the bitch of tolerance: you
    always need more of a substance to get the same effect.

    As Filth develops Bruce needs more sex. Detached from feeling,
    his power play sex becomes an increasingly isolated masturbatory
    ritual . Sex drives Bruce into a kind of blindness, a black hole
    through which light neither enters nor leaves.

    As constructed by Baird and Welsh Filth is a dystopian fable
    grounded in the breakdown of the micro order. interesting
    that at the beginning of the film the audience were laughing at the
    slightest sugestion of a smutty joke or risque reference; at the end
    of the movie, there was not much laughter. Hobbes is worth
    quoting again as he summerises human life in relation to the
    conditions of the war of all against all: (quote) ‘ in this condition
    the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
    short.’ Which is a accurate desciption how Baird and Welsh have
    mapped the moral career of Bruce Robertson.

    So: Same rules apply….what does it mean? It’s
    telling you there are ‘no rules’. So watch out.
    Adrin Neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  • Blue Jasmine Woody Allen (Usa 2013)

    Blue Jasmine Woody Allen (USA 2013)
    Cate Blanchette
    Viewed Tyneside Cinema 2nd
    Oct 2013 Ticket £8.20

    Blue Jasmine got me thinking about
    clowns.

    In the Music Halls when disaster struck
    the cry would go up: “Bring on the clowns!” The idea being that
    clowns would divert the audience’s attention from whatever it was,
    that had gone wrong. Treating the funny men and women as a
    distraction does less than justice to their artistry and genius. In
    particular those who have dominated cinema such as Chaplin and
    Keaton, whose ranks also include Woody Allen.
    But Cinema today has less space for the
    wise fool. They are crowded out by films that exploit either
    spectacle or emotions or desires.
    Films of course are signs of the times.
    They say something about the states of mind and psychic moods that
    underlie the social matrix. The tsunami of apocalyptic films
    flooding over our cinema screens attests to the insecurities and
    fears that characterise our world.
    And then there’s films like Woody
    Allen’s latest movie Blue Jasmine. It doesn’t really seem to know
    what it is. Perhaps appropriate in that it mirrors a society where
    many people don’t know who they are. Also, like many of us, it is a
    film that would like to be taken seriously. Indeed the final shot of
    it’s A list star Cate Blachette sitting in a public place without her
    make up and showing her age, stakes out Blue Jasmine’s claim to be a
    drama, perhaps even a tragedy. But the problem is that the preceding
    hour and a half of its footage have made any such claims ridiculous.
    Comparisons have been made between the
    plot line of Tennessee Williams’ Street Car named Desire and Blue
    Jasmine. Comparisons have been made between butter and margarine.
    Time usually sorts these things out; and as with butter and
    margarine, any comparison between Blue Jasmine and Street Car is a
    case of at best an errant judgement; at worst a cynical marketing
    ploy.

    Williams play, filmed in 1951, is a
    testosterone soaked wake up call to America about the dangers of the
    delusional states of sentimentality pedalled by Hollywood and Madison
    Avenue. Tennessee Williams pitched Streetcar at post war audiences
    who had not yet totally embraced the consumerist ethos. The
    collective psyche was at a turning point and audiences were prepared
    to hear out Williams play. But whatever understanding you had of
    Streetcar, it was not an advert. Williams was not selling anything.
    It was a moral statement.

    In contrast Blue Jasmine looks and
    feels like a life style advertisement; and it is assembled in a
    similar way to those adverts for glossy consumer products that
    preceded it on the screen. Like a advert or a cake for that matter
    Blue Jasmine is an assemblage of a number of key ingredients. The
    Hollywood recipe says: mix into the script one good looking lead
    actress on whom to hang the story; add sexy locations – New York San
    Francisco; fold in moody music in the form of a sultry jazz sound
    track, and sprinkle with products flaunting a pantheon of desirable
    consumer goodies: BMW Dior Versace etc. Blue Jasmine is a product
    of a mass communication industry where material desire is now the
    bed rock of an audience’s expectations.

    Blue Jasmine is styled like a
    commercial so how does it work dramatically? It’s flashback
    structure, which seems de rigour for lazy film-makers at the moment,
    is flabby and delivers little tension as it builds up to the big
    revelation that Jasmine it was who shopped No pun intended) her
    husband to the Feds. As a wannabe tragedy Blue Jasmine poses as a
    morality fable based on the Bernie Madoff story, (Jasmine’s husband
    Hal even has a passing resemblance to Bernie and I wonder if Woody
    lost a bundle of money in Bernie’s Ponzi swindle). But the ethical
    posturing of Blue Jasmine is not strong enough to overcome its
    stylistic provenance. That last shot, onto which so much is staked,
    the naked face of the A lister, is supposed to flag that Cate’s
    character, Jasmine is paying the price for her collusive badness, as
    she descends into alcohol fuelled madness. But her wretched
    condition doesn’t seem to be the result of any personal moral crisis,
    any moment of confronting the truth about herself. Her downfall is
    not the consequence of her self condemnation. Her madness is the
    result of her loss of her enviable life style and a failure of her
    make-over as she tried to pass herself off as an innocent. The
    lesson of Blue Jasmine is that if you collude in your husband’s
    criminality, even if you find out he’s cheating on you, don’t shop
    him to the cops,or you’ll lose everything.

    Ok so Blue Jasmine is a drawn out life
    style promo which is unconvincing as a drama. But none of this would
    matter very much if it were funny. Blue Jasmine is not very funny.
    The issue of its unfunniness goes right to the core of the assembly
    of the film. Cait Blanchette has all the qualities needed to sell
    the movie. But she is not a clown. And Woody Allen’s scripts
    usually demand a clown, as the lead roles are alter egos of Woody
    himself, and and without a clown they don’t work: it’s like Hamlet
    without the Prince.

    Woody Allen as a performer was a
    natural clown, and the clown corresponds to a certain sort of
    archetype. The clown courts disaster without meaning to and always
    find themselves in the shit; clowns always falls flat on their face
    because they think they can do something very very well, but can’t do
    it at all; and clowns fail to understand the situation they are in.
    The clown’s face mirrors their mental state: alert idiocy,
    irrepressible optimism, and well meaning if occasional malicious
    incompetence. Allen and Diane Keaton were funny because they were
    clowns who knew how to work the clown material. Cate Blanchette
    lacks this gift. In consequence her relations in the film with Ginger
    and her boyfriends lack bathos; the running gags about her work and
    relationships as a dental receptionist are clumsy and vacuous.
    Without the clown persona Blue Jasmine
    is reduced to being a plodding stylised comedy of manners, a genre
    which it doesn’t fit. I say “Bring back the the clowns!”

    adrin neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk