Monthly Archives: May 2013

P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; } Akiro Kurosawa Samurai
Season at the Star and Shadow

The Seven Samurai, Hidden Fortress,
Yojimbo, Sanjuro shown between 5 May13 and 26 May 13

Ticket price for each screening: £5

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Mostly we see films piecemeal, drip fed
to us by the cinema release system. Of course that’s the way the
industry works, everyone wants to see the latest movie. But some
directors make us catch our breath: we may have clocked Darren
Aronofski, Sofia Coppola, George Romero, Alfred Hitchcock and
realised that these guys make films we like to see.
And seeing a number of films close
togather by the same director can take appreciation to another level.
Buying the box set and spinning the discs is sometimes the only
way. But the small screen can fail to do justice to some films, so
the best way to see retrospectives is at the cinema.
Today this is a rare treat. In
Newcastle, however, we are lucky enough to have cinemas that do
programme retrospectives.

With director retros, the pleasure lies
not just in viewing some good films but also having the chance to
understand the concerns, obsessions and beliefs that drive particular
directors to make the films they do. What method might lie in the
madness of movie making?
For Instance! I am intrigued by the
way Hitchcock’s films constitute a discrete mapping of his psycho
sexual disturbamce. His beautifully sublimated scenarios probe his
own repressed feelings: his need to rage against his mummy, to
control and mentally torture woman, his castration and his
inferiority complex.

Akiro Kurosawa, the Japanese director recently had a retrospective
season of his Samurai films at the Star and Shadow Cinema, curated by
Chritian Barron.

I went to see: the Seven Samurai,
Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo and Sanjuro and I wondered if the claim for
Kurosawa being a great director might extend beyond histechnical
prowess. Was some ulterior deeper vision in his output?

I was not disappointed.

As I watched his movies I became aware of an underlying concern
worked into the grain of these films. These Samurai movies are epic
in scale and handsomely photographed, the scene on the prison camp
steps in Hidden Fortress is jaw dropping. But what struck me most was
the intrinsicly Japanese quality of Kurosawa’s material. These films
in their imagery represent the quintessential the spirit of Japan.
This is Japan!

First and foremost Kurosawa’s sets. The dwellings with their screens,
shutters, lattice work, eaves, and opened rooms, these constitute a
full depiction of the traditional spaces that lie at the very heart
of Japanese life and identity. Yojimbo is outstanding in this
respect, and these sets also provide Kurosawa’s camera with stunning
opportunities both to frame and to light his shots.

The costumes also have a symbolicly essential Japanese quality all
made using traditional Japanese designs. These patterns on the
shirts and shifts worn both by peasant and the samurai most notably
in Sanjuro, refer back to and affirm ancient Japanese ornamental
traditions. And the erotic style in which the men’s garments are
worn, tucked up to reveal the flesh, signifies a culture that is not
ashamed of the body. By the way first in the roll of honour here is
Toshima Mifune whose bared bottochs and thighs, particularly in
Hidden Fortress, provide a feast for the eyes.

Factor in the role played by rice, by rain of tropical intensity, by
fire and finally by the people. The people Kurosawa depicts are men
of short stature. At times the screen is filled almost to bursting
with small bald headed little men. But they run – at full speed! It’s
as if Kurosawa is saying: “Yes! We are: little people, but we have
the energy!”

These expressive visuals extrude in imagary the essential symbols of
Japan: its soil, its culture its people, a representation of
traditional Japan that Kurosawa then proceeds to subvert.

Kurosawa was the son of a samurai, but knew the traditional order of
Japan had to change. In the mid twentieth century, Japan an
industrialised nation was still ruled by a Mediaeval militarised
power structure. This lag in social change led to the disaster of
Hiroshima, American occupation and the forced adaptation of an alien
culture and democratic political system.

Kurosawa determined to use his position
and ability as a film maker to support these democratic political
changes, which he saw as being necessary.

I imagine Kurosawa having an Eurika moment as he watched John Ford
movies and realised that Samurai could be transformed into a kind of
cowboy! Korosawa’s genius was to recreate the Samurai as a cowboy,
appropriating the form of the Hollywood Western, as a means of
recasting Japan’s past as mythe.
Over his symbolic elequent images of
old Japan, Kurosawa castes the shadow of the Samurai. The Samurai
represents the new man, epitomising the new values needed to remake
Japan: individualism, lack of repect for authority, the refusal to
accept fate, and In short Kurosawa’s Samurai got attitude big time,
and Toshiro Mifune was to Kurosawa what John Wayne was, to John
Ford, without of course the exposed thighs and bottocks, to John
Ford.

And the music! Kurosawa uses
traditional Japanese music to good effect, but at the most dynamic
moments, particularly in the Seven Samurai he cuts to jazz, an
uncompromisingly modern sound created by black of slaves and released
into the world as everyone’s music. It’s the sound that liberates
the action from the past.

So that’s it. I think the four Samurai films were intended as a
project conceived to resolve the innate Japanese tensions between her
traditions and her need to develop democratic social relations. As
if Kurosawa was saying that Japan should always be grounded in her
traditions, but never in such a way that she be hostage to this past.

I think Kurosawa’s claim to be a great
film maker rests on one key insight: cinema creates mythes and in
making his Samurai movies he stays constant to this realisation.

Of course the ultimate fate of these films was to be reimported back
into the tradition of making Westerns, this time to Italy and Sergio
Leone and the man who has no name. But there again we never catch
sight of Clint Eastwoods naked buttocks or thighs.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Great Gatsby Baz Luhrmann (USA
2013) Leonado Di Caprio; Carry Mulligan; Tobey Maguire

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 20 May 13;
ticket price £10.25 (£1:75 3D supplement)
Drowning in the shallows

Before going to see Baz Luhrman’s
current Hollywood offering, The Great Gatsby, I did something a
little naughty, I reread the book. I wanted check it out again,
this after all, is one of the great American novels.

Of course few films actually deliver
the impact of their literary credentials (excepted in my view are the
David Lean adaptations of Dickens); most book / film transpositions
end up either as insubstantial homage or mis-shapen unhappy
compromises characterised by inept direction .
The Great Gatsby is a wonderfully
observed novel written, from the first person perspective by the
persona of Nick Carraway (a literary stand-in for Fitzgerald
himself). It is a tragedy that tells of the fall of House of Gatsby.
Essentially it’s a chamber piece for four players: Gatsby, Nick
himself and Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Its setting against the broad
canvas of the Jazz Age, gives relevance and poignancy to the human
relations. It has an almost Chekhovian level of intensity, as the
narrator strives to understand the forces of desire that are
channeled in and lived out through his characters,

So how would the Great Gatsby as film
stack up? Baz Luhrmann as director / script writer of Gatsby was
not a good omen. From the little I had seen of his work, Moulin
Rouge, he looked like a man best at home at the circus, filming the
wonders of the carnival: scantily dressed girls, trapeze artists and
clowns. And to boot, Gatsby was shot for 3D and I was going to see
the 3D version.

The answer is that in the best
American/Hollywood tradition, technology replaces ideas. Luhrmann’s
Gatsby a tech fix. He opts to film a roaring 20’s mega party, goes
for the wow factor; never mind human relations- sex up the image –
it’s a 3D fest.

This is a Gatsby defined by and
dedicated to spectacle and delivered in 3D if you want to wear the
glasses. It’s difficult to see how to justify delivering a chamber
piece like Gatsby in 3D unless you want it to look like an endless
parade of competing images. The problem is that Gatsby is so wrapped
up in the spectacle of itself that it struggles to unwrap its own
story. Instead of depth of character, personal motivation and the
vigour of relations, this Gatsby is filmed using shots that comprise
multi plane depth of field. My feelings were that 3D gives a
spurious depth to the Great Gatsby that not only fails to engage with
the theme but actually works against Fitzgerald’s ideas.
In the traditional method of filming
interaction between two characters, directors take the shot using a
shallow depth of field, so that backgrounds are blurred and offer
nothing to distract the eye’s attention from the characters. In 3D
the shots comprise a number of discrete visual planes, all in focus,
each of which makes a demand for our attention. Our eyes are
enchanted by multiple distractions, and the intensity of our
involvement with dialogue and interaction is thereby diluted and
diminished. And Gatsby suffers consequently in this respect from a
lack of engagement and involvement with its characters.
In the large set piece party sequences,
which dominate the first half of the film, Gatsby’s displays of
ostentation and conspicuous consumption exist simply for their own
sake. Seen in 3 D this emphasis on spectacle undermines and works
against the narrative, because the main characters are not part of
the spectacle. Gatsby is written in the first person; from the
point of view of Nick, the outsider. The point is that he observes.
He isn’t a full participant, he witnesses. But the way Gatsby’s
week-end parties are shot is intended to provide an immersive
experience for the audience, undercutting Nick’s point of view rather
than supporting it, alienating the audience from the tidal ebb of
his narrative. It looks sexy; its a riotous pop promo; but it
doesn’t work.

Even Baz Luhrman’s film structure is
tired: he uses the old hackneyed formulaic stand by of the
psychiatric interview to frame Nick’s telling of the story. And the
manner in which he introduces the flashbacks to Gatsby’s youth are
clumsy and crudely worked into the flow of the movie, with the effect
that they slow the film down making it feel overlong and tedious.
The actors, doomed to compete with technology, struggle to maintain
the tensions implicit in the plots psychic and social interweaving.
In the end poor souls, their fate is to become coat hangers; walking
talking wire frames draped with a pleasing succession of period
costumes.

The one element in this Gatsby that had
value was Luhrman’s development of Fitzgerald’s idea

that Gatsby was not just a victim of a
failed obsessional illusion but that he was running out of road. The
pursuit of Gatsby by the forces that are the source of his wealth is
suggested by Fitzgerald. There is deep inner corruption of Gatsby.
And this feeling of the encroachment of evil into the core of the
plot’s relations is something film can accomplish economically and
powerfully; but whilst Baz Luhrman develops this theme a little, he
left me with the feeling that more was possible, but mostly left
undone.

I left the cinema wondering why
Hollywood makes films like this. What did Baz Luhrman imagine he was
doing? Are such films a symptom of a film culture where there is
nothing really left to say, where the only goal is to attract a new
generation of audiences into the cinema with 3D and keep the industry
and its workers ticking over on borrowed time? Was it Godard who
said “Cinema has nothing left to do other than to reproduce
itself…”?
Anyway I was glad to have had a reason
to re-read the book.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; } Iron Man 3 Shane Black (USA 2013) Robert Downey Gwynith Paltrow Viewed Empire Cinema Newcastle upon Tyne Ticket: £3.75 Spontanious Human Bullshit All I can remember about Iron Man One was that it was full of commercial product placements and as I didn’t use these sort of products, I didn’t go to see Iron Man 2, but I thought I’d check into Iron Man 3. As 3 D makes me feel sick this review is from 2 D land, so I didn’t get the full on CGI show; but I can report that in Iron Man 3, there wasn’t a pack shot in sight. The camera turns its lens away from commercial products like a vestal virgin averting her eyes from the naked statue of Heracles at Helicarnassus. So what did I see in Iron Man 3. The writers of Iron Man 3, Drew Pierce and Shane Black, seem to have been sensitised, perhaps at an early and impressionable stage in their writing careers to the creative possibilities of Spontaneous Human Combustion. Spontaneous Human Combustion (or SHC) is the idea that human beings without warning, can spontaniously burst into flames, catch fire inside themselves and burn themselves out from within like a candle ,before being reduced to small sad pile of ashes. The heat produced in cases of SHC is intense enough to consume all flesh and bone of the unfortunate deceased. Dickens used SHC in Bleak House to dispose of one of his characters, interstingly an alcoholic. The writers of Iron man of course take the idea put a few nobs on it and give it the mad scientist treatment in the character of Aldrich. An experiment by Aldrich – the ‘Bad Guy’ – to induce extreme internal heat to cure drug addicts and alcoholics (?) goes badly wrong. The unfortunate subjects of the experiment burn out and blow everyone up. However in this disaster Aldrich sees – opportunity – as he says: Failure is the fog through which success is glimpsed. So he develops his heat treatment, not to give people a nice tanned look, but to turn people into his personal army of red hot soldiers – litterally. To the casual gaze these hot rods look just like you and me, but at the command of Aldrich they use their internal heat to unleash fire brimstone and death upon his enemies. It’s an idea that didn’t occur to the more prosaic Dickens, but this take on SHC by the scriptwriters provides the movie with an army of formidable enemies for Iron Man to biff and Iron Man likes nothing better than biffing a few bad guys. And they are well met: Iron Man spends a lot of time bolted into his metal exoskeleton, and Aldrich’s hot rod soldiers do their best to make things hot for him inside the suit. The plot if you can call it that, its not so much a plot, more a couple of sets of book ends that serve to keep the unruly meandering set pieces in some sort of time line. After an opening cod philosophical quote of the kind that Terrence Malik has a lot to answer for (the film opens with the portentous voice of Iron Man intoning for our instruction and edification, the sentence: ‘We create our own demons.’) Indeed we do. Anyway after this first Terrence Malik moment, we are whisked off to a scientific convention: Berne 1999 It’s an opening sequence in which Iron Man gives Aldrich – the bad guy – the cold shoulder. He stands him up, forgetting to meet him on the roof on the convention hotel. You see Iron man has the hots for a fruity lady scientist and more interesting things to do than keep an assignation with a geeky young inventor. Now some people might think forgetting an appointment was just one of those things that happen. Shit happens. But not your man Aldrich. No! This event dominates his life and he takes out a vow of revenge on the whole world, the whole cosmos for Iron Man’s unforgivable slight. In the nineteenth century Aldrich would have sent his seconds round to ask Iron Man for satisfaction. In the twenty first century that’s not enough: he has to destroy the world and every one in it to get his own back. That’s it really ! In a way the movie is a computer game scenario based on the ‘Quest’ idea. Stark aka as Iron Man has to find and nullify Aldrich before he ends the world as we know it and the American way of life become history. The script exploits a number of well know game characters: the wise child, the warrior woman, the buddie, the fool, the bad guy, to cue a series of CGI set pieces of graphic intensity. You know the kind of thing: an army of CGI technicians, thousands of them, lackies chained to computers, produce a series of extrordianry images and effects even seen in 2D: explosions on land sea and air, everything you see blows up, there’s fire, the earth quakes people dieing horribly by the bucket load. And another CGI effect also impresses: whenever he needs to fight the good fight, Stark simply whistles up his exoskeleton and piece by piece, it hurtles through space and time and bolts itself onto him, transforming him into a Medieval looking warrior A knight in armour going forth to save damsels and do good. Stark is also fashionably scripted with anxiety attacks and doubt, but protected, in the script, not by the word of God, but by Terrence Malick type gnomic utterances. The other plot device of note is supplied by Ben Kingsley as the Mandarin. The scenario initially creates the impression that the mayhem and destruction abroad in the world is being orchestrated by a comic book Bin Laden look alike, called the Mandarin. The film in exploiting the physical similarities of the Mandarin and Bin Laden walks a tricky line from the point of view of setting up Jihad as plot driver. Undiscriminating audiences may take the suggestion implicit in the image of the Mandarin and connect it with Jihad. And they may not be sophisticated enough to uncouple Jihadists and mainstream Islam. For the film to connect Islam and the annihilation of the USA is to move into criminally culpable zone of incitement. But Iron Man 3 resolves the device of the Mandarin half way through the movie. It is revealed that the Mandarin is a spoof. He is in fact only an actor called Trevor. The Mandarin, the Bin Laden look alike is simply a hapless frontman for the real evil presence, the dread Aldrich, the clean white boy who was slighted all those years ago by Iron Man and is now exacting his terrible revenge. The problem with revelation that the Mandarin is in fact only a stooge is that this leaves an implausible gap in the film’s motivational mechanism. Is revenge for being stood up by Iron Man a sufficiently strong reason to explain why the world has tobe destroyed? Is there perhaps some homerotic undertone at work? Is all this terrible destruction a simple psychic statement, Aldrich’s way of telling Iron Man that he really loves him? This is possible. But might there be some other purpose lurking within the film’s concoction? Why have all these CGI compositors and artists been put to work to make this film? Was it only to indulge the audience’s need to gaze on the detailed mechanics of the annihilation of the world? Or is there something else at work in the script? I thought about this and it occurred to me that perhaps the whole film was an allegory? I wondered if it was an allegory connected to scientology? I mean Hollywood is full of scientologists these days….. OK I agree the world can do without another conspiracy theory… …but the more I think about it….Iron Man somehow epitomises the idea of the superior being evolving out of the limitations of the human species. This proximates to the Scientology myth that homo sapiens is not the fully evolved article; he needs to be further developed by technology. With his exoskeleton Iron Man is the fusion of technology and flesh that is the promise of Scientology which belives we were once superior life forms called Thetans who have since degenerated. So The Scientology proposition is that we have to evolve and reclaim out Thetan identity; or we, as a race, will perish because of our evil our pusillanimity and weakness. Iron Man is a prototype operating Thetan, an advanced technological type who like Ron Hobbard opens the doors to others who are ready: the child the woman the man, enabling them to realise their true techie identity. In so doing Iron Man defeats evil and helps those who can to develop their Thetan identities. Far fetched perhaps. If you looking for high tech effects that roll down over you off the screen and flatten you, then go see Iron Man 3. If you crave meaning from Iron Man then it’ll have to be a do-it-yourself job. Thetans or bust. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk