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Showing posts with label awesome. Show all posts
Showing posts with label awesome. Show all posts
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Thursday, September 12, 2013
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Being in The Drowned Man is like exploring a stranger's dream. This is less a theatrical production and more a slice of some weird alternative reality that’s collapsed into our own. I love immersive theatre: the demolition of the boundary between audience and action, leaving you to construct a personal narrative based on your own experiences.
The Drowned Man occupies an enormous ex-Post Office sorting depot right next to Paddington Station. Punchdrunk have transformed the interior of this unprepossessing building into a mausoleum to the Golden Age of Hollywood. This hallowed time and place occupies a very special place in the popular consciousness; a glitzy town full of 'man’s men' movie stars: Bogart, Peck, Cagney; Wayne; Cooper; Tracy. And the women! This was the age of true glamour, dotted with sequins, encircled in feather boas, dramatic lids seductively fluttering under perfectly coiffed locks. All of this wreathed in a haze of swirling cigarette smoke and washed down with neat whiskey.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
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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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| (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 5, 2013
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
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| SIRO-A |
It’s half past four on a lazy, overcast Sunday afternoon. Monday morning is just over the horizon and with it the ominous promise of work. Last’s night’s hangover is still gently squeezing your brain and right now a nice cup of tea would be just the ticket. The perfect time for a tripped-out electro-rave laser extravaganza!
SIRO-A are a six man performance group from Sendai, Japan who combine dance, mime, performance art and comedy with cutting edge technology, creating a series of optical illusions where the boundary between reality and video is distorted. Everything SIRO-A do is designed to push against this barrier, making us question whether what we’re seeing is a person or a projection of a person.
Aesthetically, the immediate point of reference for the audience are films like ‘Tron: Legacy’ streamlined, neon-bondage cyberpunk. More obscurely, I see straight visual and sonic quotes of the work of Tetsuya Mizuguchi, designer of the dance music/trip-out videogames ‘Rez’, ‘Lumines’ and ‘Child of Eden’. I absolutely adore this style, but rather than futuristic it feels slightly retro, with roots in the early 90s rave scene. As far as views of the ‘future’ go, it’s been superseded by boring old reality.
The music is similarly slightly retro, banging big beat electro tunes, the kind you’d expect to hear ringing out over the beaches of Ibiza in 1999. This atmosphere sends a little thrill of nostalgia down my spine, the kind of pleasure you get when you step into the Cyberdog shop in Camden Market, a reassurance that somewhere in the world is still plugged into the 1990s Matrixy-WilliamGibsony vision of the future.
This is very much up my street, and as pyramid headed robots stalk across the stage firing bright green lasers from their arms to thumping techno beats I had a huge grin on my face and was bobbing my head excitedly. Things calm down a bit after this intense introduction, switching to a more comedic tone, the performers get menaced by a plague of black dots in a sequence reminiscent of a Looney Tunes cartoon, or enter into a frankly surreal sequence about the life of one of the performers, Abe Toshinori.
This humour balances out the cooler-than-thou aesthetic, and also largely avoids the trap of laughing at Japan rather than with it. It also means that while the performers rarely speak we identify with them through laughter. Everyone on stage is effortlessly expressive, whether they’re playing a character or pretending to be a computer-generated robot man. Even more impressively, they make the illusion that they’re interacting with the videos absolutely seamless.
This interaction is something that looks perfectly natural but must be immensely difficult to get right. To take a simple example, there is a white screen with a black dot projected in the centre of it. One of the performers walks on stage, looks at the projection then ‘picks it up’ and throws it like a ball. These are the basics, the rest of the pieces rely on the performer being in the exact right pose in the exact right spot at the exact right time to get something projected on them in a certain way. They get it right over and over again. I found myself wondering what they can even see from their perspective on stage (probably not much) and it became even more impressive.
The PR makes much of the fact that you won’t be able to tell the difference between the performers and the projected images. This isn’t quite true, at all times its obvious which is which. What confused me at times was whether the performers were following the projection, or the projection was following the performer. In an outstandingly beautiful sequence someone dances across a stage as time-delayed rainbow images of himself move around him, creating a morphing kaleidoscope moving sinuously around the dancer. At this moment it’s impossible to tell who is following who, you’d think it’d be impossible to cartwheel the exact same way at every single performance, but if anyone has the strict discipline needed to get it right, SIRO-A do.
The only downside to all this is, unfortunately, the venue. The Leicester Square Theatre is a small place with a low ceiling and a relatively small stage. It’s perfect for stand-up, but a full-on audio-visual experience like this feels a little restricted. I’d cheated before going to this, looking up a video of the band on YouTube. They were playing with a huge projection screen, and the rainbow images above took up a huge amount of space. Not here. The image looks like it’s been chopped off at the top. The smaller screen also prevents us from becoming properly immersed in the music and lights. The music makes me want to get up and dance but I’m stapled to my seat!
Ideally I’d have liked to have seen this late on stage in the Brixton Academy, somewhere where there’s actually room to dance a bit, where the projections can really tower over you, overpowering your senses. The show is on twice a day, at 16:30 and 19:00, both of which seem like way too early for this kind of thing. It’d be fantastic to see this in the ‘right’ state of mind to fully appreciate a room full of laser beams, dry ice, flashing colours and pounding pounding techno music.
Still, I’ll take what I can get. SIRO-A is like nothing else on in London at the moment, a perfect fusion of cybernetic fashion, laser cool and visual oveload. I had a big silly grin on my face the whole way through and can’t think of many more enjoyable ways for a person to spend an hour of their time.
SIRO-A are performing at the Leicester Square Theatre from the 1st February – 22nd April 2013.
Saturday, January 5, 2013
Saturday, January 5, 2013
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'Gangster Squad' is not a film to take seriously. It's got all the trappings of a sober exploration of how organised crime can seep into every crack of a city, the drastic lengths to which a police force goes to wipe it out and the consequences for those who stand up to evil and say 'no'. But you've seen all that rubbish before, in 'Gangster Squad' the 'big themes' are just a peg to hang an utterly bonkers story about some very silly men running around blowing stuff up in late 40s Los Angeles. And it's brilliant, hilarious fun.
Something that first looks like it's going to follow in the footsteps of 'L.A. Confidential' actually shares more cinematic DNA with Robert Rodriguez' 'Sin City' (2005) or even Warren Beatty's 'Dick Tracy' (1990). We open to Sean Penn as MegaGangster 'Mickey Cohen'. He's grubbily beating the crap out of a punching bag in slow motion as slow, ponderous dialogue tells us about the nature of violence. Every rope-like muscle squeezes and strains as he beats the bag. It's over-the-top, ridiculous. At this point the film hangs on a knife edge; if it's going to be this kind of cod-philosophical twaddle for two hours this is going to be rough watching.
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| Sean Penn as Mickey Cohen |
Then, finally, Penn's face hones into view next to the punching bag. I do a double-take, what the hell have they done to him? He looks like a leather handbag stuffed full of snooker balls. Penn is playing a man that's just stepped off the pages of a 4 colour pulp crime comic book. I'd recently watched 'Cloud Atlas' which featured a lot of talented actors struggling to act their way through heavy prosthetic makeup so I was a little wary of the look, but Penn acts his pants off. Moral complexity is left at the door, Cohen is a power-hungry, greedy, sadistic and cruel man, his monstrous personality amply mirrored in his twisted appearance.
L.A. is danger of being utterly corrupted by this man, so who are you gonna call? We're introduced to our hero, Sgt. John O'Mara in a sequence that ends with him brutalising some seedy gangsters who kidnap an innocent young ingenue. He busts down the door and gets busy thwacking gangsters before saving the dame and strolling off into the sunset. Played stonily by Josh Brolin, he's the flip side of Penn's madmen gangster, though both share pulp origins. Though Brolin doesn't have the crazy prosthetics that Penn has, his face is similarly mask-like. He's got a lantern jaw, an old fashioned face that has obviously seen a lot of serious shit. Brolin plays him as an impregnable human statue, a veteran who is still fighting World War II in his head.
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| Josh Brolin as O'Mara. Now that's a face you can set your watch to. |
The only hints we get of genuine humanity in O'Mara are the scenes with his long-suffering pregnant wife Connie (Mireille Evans). At first you think she's going to fit into the thankless role of the disapproving wife; it's no fun playing the one who's actively trying to prevent the exciting gangster action scenes the audience is craving. Fortunately, after some mild rumbles of disapproval, she seems to realise what kind of film she's in, and figures if her boneheaded husband is going to take down the most powerful gangster in L.A. then she's going to help him pick the best damn team for the job.
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| THE GANGSTER SQUAD left to right - Giovanni Ribisi (the smart guy), Josh Brolin (the leader), Ryan Gosling (the sexy one), Anthony Mackie (the knife guy), Michael Pena (the kid) and Robert Patrick (the gunslinger) |
And boy, what a team! I do love a good genre flick, and I always love a good 'getting the gang together' montage, particularly when we're introduced to one awesome character actor after another. Even better, they all have their own particular special skills. So we meet the guy that's good with knives (Anthony Mackie), the guy that's good with guns and his hungry young sidekick (Robert Patrick and Michael Peña) and the smart one 'Giovanni Ribisi'. We also get the reluctant one joining soon enough, the excellently named Sgt. Jerry Wooters, as played by the inestimably awesome Ryan Gosling.
Oh, Ryan Gosling. You could be peeling potatoes and still be utterly entrancing in a way that smokes damn near everyone else off the screen. There's just something about the way he looks at people, keeping mostly expressionless but somehow smiling beatifically with just his eyes. It's the damndest thing. In a film populated by wild caricatures he stands out as a recognisable human being, carrying much of the emotional heft that the film just about needs to keep us caring about our heroes.
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| Ryan Gosling as Wooters..... (’-’*) |
There isn't much room for women in this tale of vicious beatings and exploding cars, but the genre calls for a femme fatale and so we meet Grace Faraday (Emma Stone), girlfriend of both Mickey Cohen and Gosling's Sgt Wooter. She's introduced slinking her way across a nightclub wearing a bright red dress. That pretty much tells you all you need to know about her: she's trouble. Unfortunately she never quite lives up to her femme fatale image. Stone gives a perfectly competent performance, but I like my 40s gangster molls with bite and danger rather than bewildered confusion and fear. She's almost reduced to the status of an object for men to fight over, something the film notes, but calling attention to it doesn't quite excuse it.
The L.A. that this film takes place in is a heightened reality, a distillation of genre pictures. The streets teem with familiar archetypes, from our leads right down to the smart-mouthed young bootblack that charmingly grifts people outside Cohen's extravagantly detailed nightclub 'Slapsy Maxie's'. From the pools of neon light that fill the downtown areas to the gently sundappled suburbia, everything has been constructed in a way that pounds relentlessly on our sense of nostalgia created through classic films.
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| Emma Stone as Grace Faraday. |
Though 'Gangster Squad' has an keenly observed retro sensibility, Fleischer doesn't hesitate to use cutting edge technology to tell his story. Stand out moments include a perfectly constructed car chase scene that uses a roving CG camera to seamlessly show us both the wider geography of the chase and the character moments taking place within each vehicle. Another brilliant sequence involves a character walking suicidally into a nightclub with the intention of blowing away our villain. I think it's shot using a SnorriCam rig; a camera attached to the chest of the actor. The music becomes muffled, everything slows down a bit, we're locked onto their face as they walk forwards. It's a short moment in the film, but stands out as a great marriage of an actor's performance and confident use of technology to elevate the moment. The only slightly misjudged moment is a 'bullet time' sequence late in the film that goes on far too long. It takes a lot for me to get tired of stuff exploding in beautiful slow motion, but by this point in the film you're aching for some dramatic resolution.
'Gangster Squad' takes a lot of cues from genres other than the crime drama it overtly models itself upon. There's strong thematic elements of the Western running through it, Robert Patrick in particular could literally walk into an 1880s saloon and you wouldn't bat an eyelid. Slightly more subtly Western is the unshakably implicit moral divide between our heroes and villains. It's a real white hats v black hats scenario, our leads mow down scarred, ugly looking gangsters by the dozen.
Another slightly more unexpected influence on the film are videogames. Once the plot gets going, the film shifts into showing us a series of set-pieces that feel an awful lot like levels from a game. We get the obligatory stealth level, where our characters must sneak stealthily around a mansion swarming with guards, there's little minibosses to defeat that stand out purely because of their unusual choice in weapons. This all comes to a head in the final sequences, which are shot in a way that echoes modern cover shooters like the popular 'Uncharted' or 'Gears of War' series. More directly it quotes Rockstar's 'L.A. Noire', a comparison its hard to shake as our characters move from cover to cover, popping up to shoot gangsters pouring out of every corner of the screen.
Saying something looks like a videogame is generally a term of derision when it comes to film criticism, but not here. Visually the film repeatedly quotes pulp literature; the digital colour grading setting out to reproduce the covers of lurid, violent noir fiction. If you're looking for a bloodthirsty, exploitative modern equivalent to this, then you could do a lot worse than by looking at videogames, which entertain you with a neverending stream of two-dimensional bad guys to satisfyingly mow down.
'Gangster Squad' is a fantastic film, it's conscious of what it is and successful at what it wants to be. It's incredibly violent, but manages to be hilariously deadpan right through. Just little shot choices leave the audience giggling at the audacity of what we're seeing. It's a shame the film had such a torturous gestation period, (its release delayed and sequences reshot after US shootings) but the final product is an utterly compelling, thrilling experience and deserves to be a box office hit.
****/*****
****/*****
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
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‘Samsara’ is pure cinema. It achieves transcendence in a way that can only be achieved by film. It’s an answer to the query as to what cinema can do that literature and theatre can’t. The vast majority of all films released could be adapted into books, or cut down in some form on stage and remain recognisable. These adaptations would be different experiences to the film, but the conceptual thrust would remain the same. ‘Samsara’ can only ever exist as a film; a procession of moving images and sound that gets neurons sparking off each other like nothing else I’ve seen lately.
Ron Fricke has been carving out this niche in cinema for thirty years now. After working as director of photography on Godfrey Reggio’s ‘Koyaanisqatsi’ (1982), he directed ‘Baraka’ (1992) and ‘Samsara’ is a direct continuation of this filmic tradition. All of these films share common cinematic DNA; long shots of landscapes, contrasts between ‘natural’ and ‘urban’, closeups of individuals, time lapse photography and a lack of narrative.
‘Samsara’ takes in some jaw-dropping scenery, highlights being temples dotting a green and pastoral landscape at sunset, waterfalls cascading through rainforests, flights over neon cities at night and an amazing view of the Kaaba at Mecca during the Hajj. These landscapes are contrasted with portraits of people from a huge variety of cultures. We see young Hindu dancers, Buddhist monks, gun-toting Americans, nomadic African tribes and Thai ladyboys. Conceptually the film is divided into chapters, sex, guns, poverty, the natural world and so on, although they’re never delineated and the sections flow into one another organically.
Films like this are perhaps unique in cinema in that they allow the viewer almost complete autonomy to decide what the film's about. Rather than being presented with a clear message or symbolic intent, we’re just invited to think about what we’re seeing. This sounds deceptively simple. The only thing the film asks of us is that we analyse the visuals, and how these sequences might interrelate. The film is overtly meditative, and the images it presents are shot coolly and dispassionately.
This openness seems to confuse and bewilder some people. A number of negative reviews of the film criticise it on the basis that the film doesn’t explain where and what you’re looking at. I don’t think it matters whether or not you know you’re looking at, say, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, or a Ghanian funeral. What’s important in the film is the image that’s on screen at that moment, not any outside context you wish to apply to it. In trying to decipher a coherent meaning, I think it’s interesting to consider whose viewpoint we are seeing these images from. We experience this film unbounded by time and space, ethereally moving around the landscape, observing and never interacting. Time and motion become malleable and fluid, we observe the stars and sun spinning dizzily over the desert as days and nights fly past us. The film places the audience in the role of an omniscient god-figure, able to travel anywhere and see anything. One aspect of these films that I appreciate is that we never feel like what we are seeing is being done for our benefit. The impression given of these images and events is that they not only would have happened anyway with or without our observation, but that they are ongoing processes – something happening in the here and now.
I see this ‘god’s eye view’ as a tool that’s being used to expand our consciousness, to force us to re-examine our perceptions. One theme I identified running through the film is the illusion of the self. There are many huge crowds moving as one in this film, as well as people moving in a highly regimented fashion, be it for military, fitness or religious purposes (among others). It is hard not to be awed by the sheer amount of humanity on display, particularly in the Hajj sequence at Mecca where millions swirl around the Kaaba like a human whirlpool. When confronted with a depersonalised crowd this large, the film asks us to consider our own place in humanity. From our god’s eye viewpoint the individuals in the crowd melt into one another; the notion of the individual seems ridiculous. When the film does focus on individuals, it shows us a vast spectrum of human life and behaviour. Can we discern anything of ourselves in the eyes of a nomadic tribal leader? Is it possible for us to empathise with a Japanese Geisha, or a cellful of Filipino prisoners?
The answer is always yes. ‘Samsara’ demonstrates that there are myriad ways to be ‘human’. From the conventionally beautiful to the horrifically scarred to the heavily self modified we are asked to consider them as individual facets of a shared humanity. The way Fricke shoots these portraits of people recalls similar shots in his previous films – the subjects stare, emotionless into the camera lens. Rarely are we shown somebody whose thought processes we can immediately comprehend. These blank expressions have the effect of gently nudging us towards wondering what they are thinking. If we’re doing this, then we’re being empathetic, and this empathy goes a long way towards involving us in the images we’re being shown. The upshot of this is a blurring of the line between self and not-self. The word ‘samsara’ is a Sanskrit word defined as the neverending flow of births, lives, deaths and rebirths that constitute humanity. This is a cycle without end, and ‘Samsara’ allows us to consider our place in it in relation to the rest of humanity.
Another line that the film blurs is between what is considered ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’. We see shots of beautiful landscapes untouched by human hands contrasted with vast, shining cityscapes. Fricke makes no judgments as to which is the more worthy and both are equally stunning in their own ways. Coupled with this are shots of environments where the line between civilisation and nature isn't so clear. We see houses filled with sand, doors pushed open by an intruding earth, cracked and dried mud covering every surface of a school. This boundary is further eroded by a view of a prehistoric looking town built into a cliff face. Moonlight shines through slits in one of the rooftops, creating a pattern of vertical silver that passes eerily over the interior. All of this instils not only an empathy for our fellow human beings, but a profound connection to the entirety of nature.
Another line that the film blurs is between what is considered ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’. We see shots of beautiful landscapes untouched by human hands contrasted with vast, shining cityscapes. Fricke makes no judgments as to which is the more worthy and both are equally stunning in their own ways. Coupled with this are shots of environments where the line between civilisation and nature isn't so clear. We see houses filled with sand, doors pushed open by an intruding earth, cracked and dried mud covering every surface of a school. This boundary is further eroded by a view of a prehistoric looking town built into a cliff face. Moonlight shines through slits in one of the rooftops, creating a pattern of vertical silver that passes eerily over the interior. All of this instils not only an empathy for our fellow human beings, but a profound connection to the entirety of nature.
A more obvious and disturbing perversion of the samsaric cycle are the slaughterhouse sequences. We see chickens, pigs and cows just prior to slaughter, being manipulated like objects on a production line. The contrast here is between the frantic and confused flapping of the chickens, and the implacable, cold machines that usher them towards the killing device. For me the most affecting shot in this sequence was that of piglets suckling on their mother. The mother was lying down in a stainless steel box, unable to get up or do anything other than lie there. Watching these piglets fight for milk struck me as depressingly pointless. Why should they expend so much energy trying to survive? They're soon going to be gristle for the machine whatever they do. It's interesting how sterile these sequences are, everything is clean metal and plastic, everything is steam-washed to remove any trace of contamination. There's a slow sense of horror in watching the wheels of mechanised death inexorably turning, the industrialised slaughter making a mockery of the balance we see elsewhere in the film.
Of course, this is just my personal, humanist interpretation of the film. The beauty of 'Samsara' is that it'll mean something different to everyone that watches it. A film without language, without narrative or characters is truly universal. Stripped of cultural conventions, Fricke makes films not for a Western audience but for humanity as a whole.
I'd highly recommend seeing this in cinemas if at all possible. It's amazing even on a purely technical level, with one of the best digital transfers I've ever seen. It benefits hugely from watching the whole thing in one go too. This film casts a spell, and if you were able to pause and rewind at will I fear that spell would be broken.
'Samsara' is on limited release now.
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