LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Deap Vally at Dingwalls, Camden Lock, 27th February 2013

Wednesday, February 27, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

My love of badass bitches that play rock n roll like demons and don’t give a fuck is well documented. So perhaps it was inevitable that I’d very much enjoy a Deap Vally gig.. Hailing from sunny California, Deap Vally are Lindsey Troy and Julie Edwards who met, improbably, at a needlework class. Soon they discovered they had more in common besides a shared passion for decorative sewing and the textile arts: namely blasting out gritty, raw as hell, bluesy rock n roll.

Dingwalls was jammed to the rafters last night, and although I missed much of support bands Drenge and Death at Sea I wasn’t too bothered. While the venue was pretty full there wasn't a huge amount of liveliness about, but maybe it's because of the low stage - unless you’re in the front few rows you aren’t going to see much. Fortunately, after some snake-like wiggling I worked my way near the front, where I found myself surrounded by shrieking scene girls to my left, hooting drunks to the right and a slightly out of place looking guy in his 60s in front of me. A mixed crowd.

Deap Vally (picture by Rob Barton)

Musically, Deap Vally owe a huge debt to the White Stripes. This isn’t to say they’re ripping them off (can you really “rip off” a formula as simple as guitar and drums?), but in the stomping drums and distorted riffs there’s echoes of the unpretentious, raw musicality you hear on White Blood Cells. This is the kind of rock I want to see: short songs, powerful riffs, and, in the nicest possible way, uncomplicated. When I say that I want to make clear I’m not putting them down, but musically and lyrically Deap Vally aren’t the most complex band around. And thank god for that.

This is music to tumble around an poorly lit underground bar to, to feel the slight tug of the sticky booze-stained linoleum on your boots when you jump into the air. One highlight of the set was the awesome Gonna Make My Own Money. The song springs with the kind of buzzing energy that you hear in mid 90s riot grrl like Bikini Kill, and when Lindsey screws up her face in perfect punk rock angst, yowling the titular lyrics into the mic, it made me want to jump around like a big idiot.

Lindsey Troy (picture by Rob Barton)

With all this energy radiating from the stage it was disappointing that the audience was so damn static. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by the previous night’s Brooke Candy gig, but dammit, if there’s music like this playing I want to see greasy looking Camden teenagers shoving each other around. But for the vast majority of the gig the crowd just stood around as if they were waiting for a bus rather than at a gig. Things picked up a bit at the end of the set, with End of the World finally succeeding in kicking it up a notch, a transformative moment signalled by a sweaty girl unexpectedly landing on my head. Deap Vally’s music really seems to come alive when there’s people going bananas to it; pounding, metronomic booms that tickle the primitive reptilian areas of the brain. This short 3 or 4 minute burst of liveliness is the most fun I have in the gig, and from the grins and smiles on everyone else’s face, the most fun they do to.

Julie Edwards (picture by Rob Barton)

Between songs, both Lindsey and Julie are effortlessly comfortable on stage, looking pleased with both the reactions and size of the crowd. When the introduction to Raw Material, a new song, has a technical hitch resulting in a squeal of unpleasant feedback, they play it off as a technical issue and joke about it until it’s fixed. Later they crack a joke about Camden, pretty astutely commenting “didn’t this place used to be cool once?”. The only downside to the gig was some god-damn morons standing near the back yelling out “show us your tits” between songs. These gits need a fork in the eye, but fortunately the music drowned them out. If the band did hear them they're too classy to acknowledge their presence.

After End of the World Deap Vally left the stage to rapturous applause, yet ominously the house lights stay down and there’s still a faint thrum from the speakers. Sure enough, after just long enough for me to start doubting whether I’m hanging around pointlessly the two come back in stage, launching into a sleazy, grimey cover of I Put a Spell on You. They knock it out of the park hitting just the right combination of sleazy, sinister sexiness that the song needs. The perfect capper to the night.

(picture by Rob Barton)

Like I said, give me a stage of badass women rocking the fuck out and chances are I’ll have a whale of a time. Deap Vally kicked ass in a refreshingly straightforward manner. A streamlined gig that was cool as hell.

Deap Vally are playing across the UK until the 7th - details here. Big thanks to Rosie for the ticket!

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Brooke Candy supported by Jake Emlyn at Madame JoJo’s, 25th February 2013

Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

A chilly Monday night in February - could you ask for a nicer time to head out to an ultra-aggressive punk rock rap night in Soho? But I was in a good mood. I’ve been looking forward to seeing Brooke Candy for ages, her videos have just the kind of ultrasexual trash aesthetic that I love. The first thing that struck me walking down the stairs into the venue was just how well-dressed everyone was. I don’t really know much about Brooke Candy’s fanbase, but damn they’re a chic looking bunch. Everywhere I looked there were men and women who’d pushed the boat out, looking attractively vicious and aggressively slutty.

First on the bill was Jake Emlyn, who was introduced slightly dodgily by warning us not to “tell him he looks like a girl” or he’d attack us. It wasn’t a great start, at this night of all nights at this place of all places I seriously doubt anyone is going to be particularly bothered by a bit of minor genderbending and anyway, what's so offensive about looking like a girl? Fortunately, he turned it round right away - walking out on the stage in the fabulous coat you see below.

As I’m sure you’ll agree, he looks pretty damn cool. I particularly liked the All Quiet on the Western Front medallion he had around his neck, a nice touch. Jake Emlyn starts as he means to go on, spitting out machinegun lyrics so impressively fast that it’s difficult to keep up. But there’s a hint of defensiveness to a lot of what he does, like he’s answering back to some imagined slights. He’s cutting a pretty awesome figure fashion-wise, which means it's disappointing that he seems so concerned about demonstrating both his masculinity and his heterosexuality. Songs like Honky Bitch are competent streams of over-the-top angry invective, but it after a a few songs it begins to seem a bit samey. Additionally, there seemed like a direct correlation between how many pieces of his outfit he removed and how much I enjoyed his set.

This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy Jake Emlyn, he’s an impressive performer, but before too long I was peeking at the set list near his feet to try and work out how much longer he was going to be on stage. But despite this, it’s nice to see a rapper subverting cliched masculinity at least in looks, if not in lyrics.

A crush began forming at the front of the stage after this. People were bouncing off each other excitedly trying to get the best view. And, as the thumping beats of the last song died down, Brooke Candy, dressed in chrome armour, stalked across the stage, looking like she’d wandered into our world from the cover of a science fiction novel. She moves aggressively - and somehow serpentine-y - every gesture and action brimming with self assurance.

It’s a bit easy (and obvious) to compare her to other musicians, but what’s impressive to me is the way she synthesises so much of what I like in music into a cohesive whole. I love kickass women that don’t give a fuck, and Brooke Candy certainly is that. She's occupying extremes of fashion and sexuality, weaponising femininity with her chrome armour and combative attitude. When you're singing lyrics like: "You ain't shit boy / got you pussywhipped boy / lickin' up the clit / make you savour every drip boy" you can't half ass it. On stage it's got to be all out or it's going to fail. The result is that there's a proper punk atmosphere; she’s visibly enthused about the mosh pit developed in front of the stage yelling: “I wanna see people getting punched in the face!” That’s the kind of attitude I want to see! Far better than some lamely stuttered plea for people to calm down and treat each other in a civilised manner.

Everyone here seems to be on the same page as Brooke, she bends down and snarls lyrics straight into the gallery of cameraphones aimed up at her, only breaking to pose like a futuristic Hindu deity as she repeatedly exclaims “Man I’m so next level”. It’s easy to believe her, and it’s easy to be slightly in awe of her fearlessness in everything she does on stage.

The only slight problem with all this is that she doesn’t actually have that many songs. I know her from three excellent videos (which I’ve listened to numerous times) on YouTube, but I had assumed she’d have a bit more content live. It’s a bit telling that mid-way through the set she invites fans up on stage for a twerkin contest. Fair play to the people who got on stage, they seem like pretty good dancers, but this isn’t what I want to watch. Sure this creates a pleasant little bond between her and us, but it goes on about five minutes too long. Additionally, at the end of her set she just sort of stops and says “that’s it, I’m done” - a bit of an anticlimax. Tickets for this night were about a tenner, and though I easily got a tenners worth out of enjoyment out of the evening, the night did feel a bit truncated.

Despite this, when Brooke Candy is in full swing it is goddamn amazing. During Everybody Does and I Wanna Fuck Right Now the club went absolutely bananas. People were hurling themselves across the dance floor, skidding through pools of spilt beer on the floor and fleshily banging into each other. Meanwhile, Brooke Candy is standing on stage miming jerking off the microphone and flicking cum onto the audience. As the set goes on, people begin throwing underwear and wigs at her, with a number of bras and a few pairs of knickers ending up on stage. Late in the gig (to her apparent surprise), someone handed up a pre-rolled joint to her which seems like an incredibly sweet gesture.

What made the gig feel a little special was just how much Brooke Candy seemed to be enjoying herself. She said “London is the best place to play!”, and yeah she probably says that everywhere she goes, but even so, this was a particularly responsive, enthusiastic and energetic crowd, especially for a dreary, drizzly Monday night. Next time I see Brooke Candy I’m sure it’s going to be in front of a bigger crowd and she’s probably going to have a more elaborate show, but there was something powerfully intimate going on last night between performer and audience. I had a fucking great time.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

‘Fire in the Blood’ (2012) directed by Dylan Mohan Gray

Thursday, February 21, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Fire in the Blood exposes some unsettling truths about the consequences of Western economic dominance. It’s a catalogue of injustice and cruelty perpetuated without hate or malice, but, with a beady, utilitarian eye on maximisation of profits. What we see in this film are the blunt and bloody consequences of capitalism: desperate people gasping their last breaths in a hospital bed, bodies thrown onto an enormous pile millions of corpses high: a sacrifice to the almighty free market.

This documentary is about the supply of antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) to HIV/AIDS sufferers, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. In 1995, millions of people across Africa had no future to look forward to a slow and painful death. Suddenly through this gloom shot a ray of hope - a new course of treatment with results that seemed nothing short of miraculous. Skeletal, bedridden patients when administered ARVs began rapidly improving in health, a condition the doctors began to call “The Lazarus Effect”. In Fire in the Blood we see South African High Court Judge Edwin Cameron's life transformed from utter misery to competing in a long-distance cycle race entirely through the effects of ARVs. It’s not a cure, but ARVs make living with HIV/AIDS possible, to allow them to be able to work, exercise and appreciate life again. In these sub-Saharan countries, with vast swathes of populace stricken with HIV/AIDS this was a light at the end of a very long, very dark tunnel.

But there's a problem. Though the drugs cost peanuts to produce, the price was strictly controlled by enormous, avaricious drug companies. Treatment cost $15,000 dollars per year, a sum impossibly out of reach for the poor with HIV/AIDS. The message from the developed West from companies like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline is clear - if you haven’t got the money then get ready to embrace death, sucker. The resulting genocide of 10 million Africans is almost incomprehensibly horrific - men, women and children who died as a result of not having access to medicine that costs a few cents to make.

Much of Fire in the Blood is an impeccably and methodically researched argument explaining precisely why the price is so high and the moral contortions big pharma twists itself into to justify having the blood of millions on their hands. We come to learn that the reason these drug companies behave like this isn’t because the individuals running them are monstrously evil, it’s because they are entirely beholden to a system of maximising profit. Their reasoning was that if they lowered the price of ARVs in Africa, then they risk their US customers - their most profitable market - turning against them. If they allow generic ARVs (chemically identical to the patent version at a fraction of the price) to be imported, they run the risk of setting a legal precedent against their patents, potentially lowering the worth of their intellecual property. If profits dip from the stratospheric to the slightly less stratospheric, shareholders will get antsy and the board will be held accountable. The upshot is that on an accounting spreadsheet in an air-conditioned New York skyscraper, numbers are moved from one column to another. As a result in Uganda, hundreds of thousands of people die needlessly.

It’s easy to see how people buy into the drug company’s rhetoric - at first they seem to have some good points, but Fire in the Blood systematically demolishes them. These arguments range from the practical and vaguely plausible: "the reason these companies need to charge so much is to recoup what they spend in research and development". The implication being that if they sell these particular ARVs at a low price, then future R&D will be affected adversely. Gray shows us that far from these companies leading the way in development, they tend to gobble up smaller companies that have developed drugs using public funds. According to the film, they’re responsible for only 12% of R&d research worldwide.

The other end of the scale in the argument that poor Africans should be denied these life-saving drugs is far more insidious, dipping into outright racism. Spurious arguments are made that Africans can’t be trusted to follow a course of drugs (it eventually turns out they can - better than Western patients) with reasons ranging from some kind of innate laziness, to not being able to comprehend the idea of a clock - “they tell time by looking at the sun!” bleats one particularly gormless looking US senator. Even among HIV sufferers in developed countries there’s a fear that providing ARVs to poor Africans might lead to a drug-resistant strain of HIV/AIDS evolving, so, really it’s in everyone’s best interests if these Africans would just crawl off and die as quietly as possible, preferably without making too much fuss. As they say: “fuck you, got mine”.

So we’re presented with a situation where, as Professor Peter Mugyenyi, specialist in the field of HIV/AIDS simply puts it, “‘the disease is where the drugs are not”. To illustrate this we see cartoons of a skeletal man in a hospital bed reaching vainly towards a giant, locked pill bottle. Fortunately there are those who stood up against the drug industry, working both within and outside the law to get the ARVs where they’re needed most. The highlights are the Indian manufacturers of generic ARVs who devise a way to provide the medication for less than a dollar a day to HIV/AIDS sufferers - a yearly course costing just $350 rather than $15,000. We meet committed political activists who risk their own lives and liberty, like Zackie Ahmet, co-founder of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) in South Africa who personally sacrificed his health in a boycott of ARVs until they could be provided for everyone. The above mentioned Professor Peter Mugyenyi ordered low-cost generic ARVs from India, defying Uganda’s patent laws and challenging authorities to arrest him until the drugs were allowed into the country - an action which opened the floodgates of low-cost generic ARVS into Africa. Some of the ‘good guys’ end up being quite surprising - for example it’s a pretty unique experience to think for a second “hey, maybe George Bush Jr wasn’t all bad...”.

Fire in the Blood is one of the clearest political arguments I've seen in a long time, but thankfully it works as a piece of cinema too. It’s frequently quite beautiful, the African scenery popping with colour and framed with an expertly artistic eye. There are some very clever cuts subtly linking ideas, like cutting from the grave of an AIDS victim in Uganda to the US Capitol Building in Washington DC. We never dip too much into the abstract, and Gray's confidence in the importance of his material shines through - he always lets his interviewees speak rather than bombarding us with a blizzard of quick cut visuals. Perhaps the only slightly disappointing aspect are some aspects of the score, which is a bit heavy-handed: long ominous bass tones when they’re telling us about terrible things, light orchestral triumphant pieces when something good has happened. Perhaps this is simply the nature of the beast in documentaries, but it’s a tiny bit frustrating to be emotionally prodded rather than trusted to react to the material in a humanistic way.

Fire in the Blood is a sober and eye-opening look at a topic so terrible, wide-ranging and complicated that many prefer to regard HIV/AIDS in Africa as “just one of those things”. Gray has created a film that breaks the situation down into easily digestible chunks, building his case against the drug companies piece by piece into an incredibly compelling whole. Apart from the central narrative, it becomes a searing indictment of free market capitalism. The frantic race towards maximising profits literally leads to mountains of corpses, the deaths of millions justified as a necessary evil in protecting someone's bottom line. A person that profits from restricting the supply of generic life-saving drugs to the world's poor should be on trial for crimes against humanity - they have consciously and coldly committed genocide for financial gain. Before watching the film I assumed the title Fire in the Blood referred to HIV/AIDS. It is, but it's also appropriate for the anger you'll feel when you learn about this senseless waste of life.

*****/*****

'Fire in the Blood' is playing at the Prince Charles Cinema on 22 February and across the country on the 25th of February.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

'Mama’ (2013) directed by Andrés Muschietti

Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

"Presented by" code for "Didn't have much to do with" I bet.

Nervous, scared laughter is my favourite reaction from a cinema audience. Mama, which I saw in a packed screening last night, fills the screening room with frightened yelps and relieved chuckles. It’s unashamed in using classic scare techniques. So for example, when someone is nervously wandering around a remote, abandoned cabin at night and their torch starts flickering you know their goose is not only cooked, but more or less how it’s going to be served. And, as the poor victim staggers around in the dark with weird swooshing evil sounds moving around him, you start to giggle in anticipation of the big shock that’s about to come. Don’t get me wrong, Mama isn’t groundbreaking or even particularly memorable, but it is an scary and well constructed horror film.

The premise is solid; Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Annabel (Jessica Chastain) are a cool young couple. He’s an artist of some kind, and she’s the bass player in a punk band. Five years ago Lucas’ twin brother Jeffrey snapped, killing his wife and running away with their two young children, 3 year old Victoria, and 1 year old Lilly. They were never seen again. Lucas has been searching for them ever since, and has almost given up hope when his team find a cabin out in the woods with signs of life.. Miraculously the children have survived five years in the wilderness, regressing to a feral state, running on all fours and snarling viciously. Their childish drawings on the walls of the cabin and the hospital show them being protected by a sinister looking figure they call ‘Mama’. Lucas and Annabel adopt the children, moving into a big, shadowy house to reacclimatise them to society... but has something followed them from the woods?

AHHHH!

Much of what makes Mama work is when it sticks to the principle that your imagination is much more horrifying than whatever a 3D graphics package can produce. There are some incredibly spooky scenes where we realise with a chill that something horrible must be just out of shot. Your mind races trying to fill in the blanks. The environment helps a lot, our characters being transplanted from their hipstery cluttered flat into an austere and dark detached house, the previous tenant apparently having been a big fan of very low watt lightbulbs.

This environment is so obviously spooky that, in a perverse way it all seems oddly familiar. Andres Muschietti isn’t showing off a huge deal of originality in the imagery he uses here, but it’s impressive how well he’s managed to synthesise many different nods to classic horror into a coherent whole. The dolls composed of twigs and leaves the children play with might have fallen out of The Blair Witch Project. The monster moves like Giger’s Alien. The black rotting stains on the walls recall Polanski’s Repulsion. The themes of loss, revenge and corrupted maternity ring through Japanese horror like Shimizu’s Ju-on series or Nakata’s Ring.

AHHHHHHHHHHHH!

That's not to say that Muschietti doesn’t have his own moments of directorial brilliance. There’s an absolutely brilliant dream sequence midway through the film that seamlessly fills in much of the backstory. Shot from a first person perspective it’s interestingly digitally textured and coupled with the framerate being overcranked it gives us an intensely claustrophobic sequence that left me holding my breath with tension. Other highlights are a Sam Raimi style active camera, walking us into places we don't want the characters or ourselves to go. The classic example being a character being scared to open a door, they reach for it and begin to open it, and then we cut to a shot from inside the room. It's in Mama, it's in Evil Dead II and probably a thousand other shockers. This puts us in the action as much as the characters, with the monster popping up to scare us as much as the characters in the film.

The monster itself is also well worth the price of admission, although predictably, the more you see of it, the less interesting and scary it is. Muschietti pulls an incredibly smart trick in letting us repeatedly see the children’s crude pictures of Mama. You’re never able to quite get a handle on her but you know she’s spindly, black and tall, with long clutching arms. You sense the influence of producer Guillermo Del Toro in her movement. She moves like she's broken some pretty important bones in her body. As she comes for our heroes she flops and staggers awkwardly, but suddenly it’s as if she finds a rhythm and can move terrifyingly fast (usually right at the camera accompanied by a sudden violin sting). She’s obviously fantastical, but Mama makes a strange physical sense - you might not understand what she is, but you get an idea of how she works. It gives fantasy a slightly indefinable realism and plausibility, reminding me of the Faun or the Pale Man from Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. To add a pleasant bit of complexity, this is a maternal monster motivated by love and loss rather than pure hatred and evil, which muddies the waters a bit, the film encouraging us to sympathise with the darkness lurking in the shadows.

AHHHH.... oh. Uh cool t-shirt.

Jessica Chastain isn’t exactly stretched here, but she gives the film a decent dramatic weight as she inadvertently becomes a mother figure herself. Also, on a purely superficial level, she looks great in thick eyeliner, a black bob haircut and tattoos Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (of Game of Thrones fame) is good enough, but has slightly less to do and spends most of the film incapacitated. The two young girls, Megan Carpenter and Isabelle Nélisse, are both excellent, especially Nelisse as the more feral of the two. When she scuttles around on all fours it’s genuinely freaky to watch.

Mama is a competently and professionally put together film that’s been put together by a director who clearly knows his way around the horror genre. The CG infused ending sequence is a bit crap, and perhaps too many people end up wandering around the woods at night with a malfunctioning torch, but on the whole Mama is a nicely thrilling piece of unpretentious horror cinema.

***/*****

'Mama' is on general release from 22nd February 2013

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

‘The Paperboy’ (2012) directed by Lee Daniels

Tuesday, February 19, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

It's 1969 and temperatures run high in Florida. Nicole Kidman is a trashed up nymphomaniac obsessed with mega-sleazy swamp pervert John Cusack. Matthew McConaughey is a gay masochist with a nasty habit of having his face mutilated. David Oyelowo is a smart talking, snappily dressed Londoner who refuses to take any shit. Zac Efron is muscular, young and spends an unfeasible amount of time in his underwear. It’s a red-hot tale of out-of-control libidos shot in faux Kodachrome and riddled with queasily gross imagery of death, decomposition and disembowelment. There’s already a notorious scene where Nicole Kidman pisses all over Zac Efron! On paper this sounds great. On film? Kind of dull.

That a film with so much strangeness in it becomes rapidly uninteresting is strange. It’s certainly not because of lack of visual flair, Daniels textures the film with surrealistic flashbacks, dreams and fantasies, and the slightly blown out colour palette gives the film a appropriately lurid sheen. It’s not because of the performances either; many of these actors, (especially Kidman) go for broke, slamming the pedal to the floor and making a beeline for the outer limits of believability.

Nicole Kidman as Charlotte Bless

The plot concerns two journalists, Ward Jensen (Matthew McConaughey) and Yardley Acheman (David Oyelowo) who are setting out to exonerate Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack). He's a man on death row for the crime of gutting a corrupt local sheriff. This is a homecoming trip for Ward, and so he employs his younger brother Jack (Zac Efron) as driver and general gofer. Thrown into the mix is the unpredictable Charlotte Bless (Nicole Kidman), who's fallen in love with Van Wetter despite never having met him. The four seek to prove Van Wetter’s innocence before his execution can be carried out.

That’s the skeleton of the plot, and from that description it seems pretty straightforward where the drama is going to lie - whether our heroes can free this man from prison. The problem is that no-one in the film seems to care. Perhaps the constant beating down of the sun has sapped the energy from them, but they doze around lethargically, sweating and having minor flare-ups with each other. Not even the condemned man seems particularly bothered about his situation, being more concerned with how Charlotte is dressed than his innocence or guilt.

Matthew McConaughy as Ward and Zac Efron as Jack

If the characters don’t seem to care, then why should I? The lack of urgency wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if our characters were compelling, but they’re essentially a collection of tawdry quirks rather than believable human beings. Only Nicole Kidman impresses as the trash-queen extraordinaire Charlotte and I suspect her success is largely down to the fact that she’s playing against her glamorous real-life reputation. The other cast members seem a little lost at sea, either hitting one successful note over and over until the character becomes stale like Oyelowo or retreating into makeup in lieu of character development like McConaughey. Particularly miscast are John Cusack and Zac Efron. John Cusack never looks comfortable or believable playing a weirdo par excellence swamp hillbilly. He manages mere eccentricity rather than the balls to the wall bonkersness the role deserves (Nicholas Cage could have knocked this out of the park). As for Efron, here he always seems out of his depth, even while playing a naive, mimboish, horny Ken doll.

The biggest problem with the film is that it doesn’t have the guts to be full bore weird. Aesthetically it references the kitsch Americana that John Waters takes such joy in, but you sense a restrictive hand on the shoulder of the director. I usually ignore BBFC ratings, but it’s notable that this is a 15 rated film. While the characters work themselves up into an erotic fever it’s all strangely antiseptic, even with the sweat surrounding them. For all that’s suggested in the film the characters remain fully clothed throughout, with nary a tit nor cock to be seen.

John Cusack as Hilary Van Wetter

The result is a film obsessed with sexuality, yet one that's slightly puritan, lots of titillation yet unable to actually show us anything. There’s a violent sex scene late in the film in which Kidman’s character is bent over a washing machine, Daniels intercuts this with footage of dead animals, blood dripping from their noses. In any other film this would be a neat bit of exploitation cinema, but I see this film as a very, very distant cousin of something like Pink Flamingos. Viewed in this light, it all becomes a bit tame. Similarly, in the sequences where we meet the hillbilly swamp dwellers, I want Harmony Korine style Gummo grotesques rather than the very mild freakiness we get here.

The Paperboy disappoints on two counts. It’s neither interesting enough for us to invest in its story, nor weird enough to keep us wondering what they’re going to do next. The characters inconsequentially float through the plot, the dream sequences and fantasies become increasingly desperate in trying to keep our attention. I suspect it’s all but impossible to both create a bizarre midnight movie cult film AND have Nicole Kidman star in it, if you cast such big names you attract studio attention - the death of a cult movie. It’s clear that The Paperboy really really wants to be surrealistic and trashy, but it ends up at a neutered, slightly cowardly kind of trash and therefore, sadly, is pretty pointless.

**/*****

'The Paperboy' is on general release from 15 March 2013

Monday, February 18, 2013

‘Once Upon a Time... When We Were Colored’ (1995) directed by Tim Reid

Monday, February 18, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Once Upon a Time... When We Were Colored shows us pleasant, dreamy rural life. The film paints us a picture of a friendly, open community where everybody is a trusted neighbour, working and praying together. It’s idyllic, which is a little surprising as this film is about a segregated black community in the 40s and 50s, the ‘colored town’ of Glen Allan, Mississippi. Through the eyes of the town’s residents, we follow the progress of the civil rights movement, which seems a distant concern to this community deep in the heart of apartheid America.

The film, an adaptation of Clifton Taulbert’s book of the same name, tells the story of the author's life. We begin with his birth, which appropriately enough takes place in the cotton fields his mother works in. She’s young, and the father wants nothing to do with the baby so he ends up being raised by his grandparents, Ma Pearl (Paula Kelly) and Poppa (Al Freeman Jr). The film is episodic, examining key events in Cliff’s life as he grows up in the community, with a voiceover provided by an older Cliff that explains how his experiences informed the man he became.

Charles Earl Taylor Jr as Cliff (5 years old).

I attended a screening at the BFI, as part of their ‘African Odysseys’ season, and we were fortunate enough to have the director, Tim Reid, in attendance to both introduce the film and answer questions about it. He was a fascinating speaker, explaining why he doesn’t think a film like Once Upon a Time... could be made anymore. The film was shot on a relatively low budget, with many of the actors in the film appearing for below their normal wage. Things were run so austerely that apparently the last shot cuts away because the camera ran out of film!

What I found most interesting was that Reid repeatedly defines his artistic output as propaganda. He doesn’t shy away from the negative connotations of the word, but considers it the most honest way to define what he wants to do: put worthwhile ideas out into the world. He that with the advent of globalisation it’s important for artists and entertainers to understand just how far the reach of US popular culture spreads. To illustrate his point, Reid explains how he visited a tribal society living in mud huts in Africa and saw a young boy wearing a “thug life” t-shirt. So, a worthwhile question to ask is: what exactly is Once Upon a Time... propaganda for?

The film isn't black and white by the way, these are just the publicity shots.

Unfortunately the answer isn’t particularly straightforward, which arguably means that the film has failed at being propaganda at the first hurdle. If you have to puzzle out what message the film is trying to tell you, then it’s not communicating an idea or philosophy very well. This, ultimately, is the problem with Once Upon a Time.... Reid, who was attracted to the project because it reflected his own childhood growing up in a ‘colored town’ is at pains to emphasise that the “good old days” weren’t good at all. For the most part though, the film shows life in Glen Allan as rural bliss. An austere and dusty kind of bliss perhaps, but the tables are always overflowing with delicious looking food; the neighbours are always caring and attentive; the elderly are always wise and ready with some homespun advice. These do very much look like the ‘good old days’.

Easily the best scenes are those when characters leave the protective bubble of Glen Allan. It’s here that the film has more of an edge, where we sense the social vise that our characters are in. The finest scene in the film shows the young Clifton and Poppa heading out into town and enjoying an ice-cream. There’s a Ku Klux Klan march processing through the town, and the two stand silently watching it. One of the klan members notices them, and marches over, angrily spitting invective, calling Poppa ‘uppity’. Al Freeman Jr has never looked more dignified than he does here, his composed and noble expression a perfect counterpoint to the blankness of the klan hood, two eyes screwed up with rage visible through the holes. The klan member threatens to ‘get’ Poppa, and warns him to watch himself. As the klan member stalks away the camera cuts to an ice cream cone in Poppa’s hand, he’s unconsciously made a fist, crushing the cone, white ice cream oozing down over his hand. As a concise visual representation of his suppressed fury it’s hard to beat.

This scene seems to be leading up some kind of conflict, events appear to be looming that’ll disturb the pleasant tranquillity of Glen Allan. But nothing particularly bad happens in the film, and Glen Allan rumbles along at its own pace, relatively undisturbed by the outside world for the entirety of the film’s running time. If I was being uncharitable I’d suggest that at least to some degree, Once Upon a Time... romanticises segregation. I don’t want to think it’s that simple though, after all, both the author of the book and director of film lived this story so this is their first-hand experience, and presenting an authentic account of history like this is important.

Al Freeman Jr as Poppa

In a purely educational sense the film is a success. I’d never heard of Deep South ‘colored town’ communities like Glen Allan before seeing this film. The attention to detail in the set design and costuming gives the place an authentic feel, which goes a long way towards showing you how people lived their lives under segregation. Somewhat depressingly it’s also a rare depiction in media of a black community that’s not beset by crime and corruption, one that generally avoids easy stereotypes and stock characters. One of the biggest feathers in the film’s hat is that it never shows the characters as victims; these are people that intelligently recognise the injustice of their oppression and seek to change things whilst creating a close and supportive community.

As a piece of cinema it’s slightly less successful. It’s difficult to criticise a film on technical grounds, especially when it’s preaching such a worthwhile message with a limited budget, but certain aspects of it seem slightly off. The score in particular is extremely heavy handed, with musical stings that feel right out of silent cinema. There’s a scene in a raucous bar that raises faint giggles in the audience at how blatantly the score telegraphs the action. Additionally, the episodic nature of the plot hurts any sense of narrative progression. In one extended sequence we stop following Cliff’s story for about 15 or 20 minutes to concentrate on his cousin Melvin who’s returned to visit home after leaving for Detroit. These digressions mean the plot meanders along with no real urgency, which does wonders in creating a dreamy atmosphere, but is a dreamy, relaxed atmosphere appropriate for a film dramatising part of the civil rights movement?

In one sense it's refreshing to see a narrative that examines the less dramatic elements of the civil rights movement; no scenes of dogs being set on peaceful marchers or water cannons here, this is a look at how the process affects a quiet backwoods rural community. But despite this, there is a degree of complexity: we see members of the community speaking out against sending a delegate to an NAACP convention, claiming that they don’t want to stir up trouble. But while Poppa makes a great speech decrying them, within the context and environment of the film you can see why these characters might think like this. Things seem relatively pleasant - why rock the boat?

So this is a bit of a mixed bag. It's worth watching because it presents an untold story in cinema, with the implication that there must be a wealth of untold stories out there as fascinating as this that’ll go unmade purely because studios don’t see films like this as profitable. It’s got a number of fantastic performances in it, the highlights being the magnetic Al Freeman Jr, Richard Roundtree playing against type and a resolutely unglamorous yet rock solid turn from Paula Kelly. But though in many ways Once Upon a Time... has an embarrassment of riches, I found myself itching for it to fully sink its teeth into the social issues that remain tantalisingly and frustratingly just outside its dramatic sphere.

Thanks to The Africa Channel for the tickets.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

'LUPA 16' behind James Campbell House, 15th February 2013

Sunday, February 17, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Jordan McKenzie and Kate Mahony introducing LUPA 16.

Another month, another LUPA. It's always nice to get to the back of James Campbell house - every time I go I seem to run into a few more familiar and friendly faces. Thankfully things had warmed up a bit since the last icily cold LUPA, and although the crowd looked slightly smaller than last time that's not such a bad thing as it's easier to get a better view. I was particularly eager to get there on time this week because Cluster Bomb Collective were first up. I've seen them performing at ]performance s p a c e [ in October, and having very much enjoyed that was looking forward to seeing what they'd come up with for LUPA.

Their performance began with Sebastian Hau-Walker standing in a pile of tyres, spraying his head with what smelt like (and maybe actually have been) WD-40. After this he popped on a copper wig, smearily applied some lipstick and began to throw the tyres around the performance area. Like some weird self-constructing army assault course he hopped slightly awkwardly from tyre to tyre. As he made his way around audience members had to hop out of the way to avoid the tyres being haphazardly tossed in their direction.

After his near circumnavigation of the space, he ended up standing next to the garage. The front of it had been covered in a white sheet, with a car faintly visible behind it. Faintly visible projections were playing across the white sheet. Soon we heard the engine of the car rumble into life, and then *vroom* the car burst through the sheet at a surprisingly quick speed into the performance area.

*VROOOOOM!*

I always enjoy performances with a dangerous edge to them. It struck me on seeing this that this car pouncing out of the garage, if not driven perfectly, might well have pancaked a load of bohemian looking arty types in the audience. Seeing a perfectly normal looking car appear like this added a surprisingly surreal element to it. It seems obvious really, but using the LUPA garage as an actual garage is neatly and smartly funny considering that the rest of the time it's home for experimental art shows.

After making such a dramatic entrance, the car seemed as if it was enjoying the attention lavished upon it. Artists began to emerge one by one from it, climbing up and onto the roof, arranging bottles along the top of the LUPA garage. As Sebastian climbed up on the roof, two performers sat on the roof with a brown briefcase. It was filled with soil, and they began to throw handfuls of it over the car, the tiny rocks making a tinkling metallic noise as they pitter-pattered over the bonnet and windows.

Sebastian Hau-Walker

Meanwhile, on the roof Sebastian seemed to be assembling himself into some kind of totemic, shaman-like car warrior. Clutching a length of rusty exhaust pipe in his hand, he began pouring wine into it. These ritualistic ceremonies gave everything else they did importance, the soil and the wine acting like a kind of baptism. Meanwhile, on the car, one of the other performers was rubbing some dried grass between her legs and the other was holding a bottle of wine against his crotch as it if were a glass cock. The contrast between the organic nature of the grass stuffed between a performers legs, the soil they were thrashing around in on the car and the wine now being tossed upon them from an exhaust pipe gave it connotations of some fucked up car-fertility rite.

I was later told that the inspiration for this piece was J. G. Ballard's book 'Crash'. As Ballard said:

"A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status — all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing)."

This seems to fit pretty well in what I've just seen. The performance made me think of tribal cultures with animist religions; the veneration of spiritual essences within animals, plants and inanimate objects. If there were a modern animism then surely it'd make more sense to worship the spirit of things we actually have connections with like the smartphone, the internet or, indeed the car rather than abstractions like wolves, deer and eagles. This is one of those performances that I enjoy the more I think about it. From my perspective I saw the transformation of a bog-standard hatchback from a utilitarian tool for getting from A to B into a fetishistic religious object, a being worthy of sacrifice, to be feared and loved in equal measure.

That was great, so it's a pity that the following three performances weren't quite up to scratch. The second performance was by Eugene Watson, who read a short prose piece about his body mutating in strange ways. This was done wearing a luchador mask. At the end of the piece, two other men in luchador masks taped a picture to the door of the garage.

Eugene Watson

This piece on body horror, coupled with the 'Crash' inspired themes of the first performance began to give the night a rather Cronenbergy atmosphere. My problem with this piece wasn't with the prose, which from what I could hear sounded quite well written, it's that I don't think that the luchador masks added anything thematically, and the piece of art they put up was very underwhelming.

But this seemed like a white-knuckle rollercoaster ride compared to Sylwester Piasecki's performance. He stood on a stack of free London newspapers and gradually picked them up and put them in another pile on top of the garage. I suppose there's something here about the way the information in these newspapers are processed through a person, but goddamn this was tedious to watch. On and on it went, the only silver lining being that we had a pretty good idea when it was going to finish. When it did finish he tipped the pile of newspapers onto himself. I breathed a sigh of relief that it was finally over.

Exactly as interesting as it looks.

Far more fun was Rosa Farber's piece. She took us on a little walk around the LUPA garage, telling us a little story of her life. The idea fuelling it was how she always felt on the 'left' rather on the 'right'. The way she tells it, her popular, confident friends always seemed to be moving in one way, and her in another slightly different way. Being on the 'right' is to socially fit in, and to be on the 'left' is to be a misfit. As we followed Rosa around, taking a series of left turns she took us through her life, up to studying art now, and how she's felt through these different stages.

Rosa Farber mid-story

I quite enjoyed this, and Rosa is certainly charismatic and interesting to listen to. But it ended quite abruptly for my tastes. She'd built a pretty interesting narrative, and without any clear ending the performance seemed a little unfinished. But then, I guess this is her life story, and that obviously isn't over. Also, on a purely practical level, if you were near the back of the group following Rose, you wouldn't get to hear anything at all. But then if you drag your feet you deserve all you get.

A mysterious box.

Thankfully the final piece by Ipek Köprülü was a lot more interesting. A large box with a video screen on top was carried out. We gathered around the box to have a look what was on it. It seemed to be showing closeup pictures of fish. Shots of their milky flesh, the silvery scales of the skin and so on. After a few minute of this the box moved. Slowly, gradually a black rubberised hand creeped out of it. Soon, a gimp-masked head poked out, eventually revealed a black, rubber mermaid, who lay on the asphalt preening herself and posing for the cameras.

I haven't got the faintest idea what this meant, but damn it looked cool. The lack of any identifying features on the mergimp really added up to a sense of the alien. The way everyone crowded around to have a close look reminded me of being in a zoo, or perhaps a freak show. But she had such tight control of her body language and was so utterly confident that even when wrapped in tight black rubber, she still carried herself with dignity. As she was carried off back to the depths of the garage we applauded.

Not the best LUPA I've seen, but like always definitely worth coming to. Even the stuff that's not so great is at least interesting, and very worthwhile watching. Looking forward to LUPA 17 in March!

As usual, if I've gotten the names mixed up please let me know in the comments.