LONDON CITY NIGHTS: 2013

Friday, January 3, 2014

'Exposed: Beyond Burlesque' (2013) directed by Beth B

Friday, January 3, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Beth B's Exposed: Beyond Burlesque totally demolishes the notion of burlesque as merely 'stripping that's acceptable in the middle classes'. The performers here spend their lives at the extreme end of the burlesque spectrum, their acts a heady cocktail of thrashed genitalia, fake blood and overt surrealism topped off with stiff middle fingers and a cheeky wink. But this isn't just shock for the sake of it, the film explores the compulsions that drive these performers on stage; digging deep under the makeup and glitter to find out why they do the things they do. This is fertile ground for a documentarian and Beth B is clearly on the same page as her subjects, all of whom are open, friendly and relaxed - feeling able to confide in her and by extension, us. Though the director is an invisible presence we're constantly aware of her, viewing this eccentric and alien world through the eyes of someone on the inside.

The performers showcased here neatly subvert expectations as to what burlesque 'should be': everyone here appears to have a clear manifesto as to what they'd like to achieve on stage. One of the most complex and illustrative is The World Famous *BoB*, who ran away from home to shack up with a crew of drag queens. Her aim was to become a drag queen herself, but paradoxically actually being born a woman is more problematic than you might think. To successfully pull off the drag aesthetic, *BoB* needed to become a woman impersonating a man impersonating a woman; embodying a unique genderqueer ouroboros that you don't generally get to see in cinema.

*BoB* detonates a bomb under traditional notions of gender, as does Rose Wood, a transgender performance artist working at the extreme end of the spectrum, even for this documentary. Over the course of the production of the documentary we see her undergoing breast augmentation surgery. When we first meet her she has a taut body that echoes the mental and physical discipline of an expert martial artist. By the end of the film she has impressively bountiful breasts that somehow make her more physically intimidating, fiercely challenging anyone that interacts with her to confront her physical appearance.

Wood describes herself as "trans-aggressive", explaining that she's had to develop a tough carapace to put up with the daily bullshit of stares, catcalls and insults that come with a life lived as performance. She's open and charismatic in interview, imparting conspiratorial nuggets of inside drag-knowledge. This persona segues smoothly into her act which, in the most shocking footage of the film, involves a performance called Serial Killer in which she drags a woman into a bathtub, stabs her with lashes of fake blood, staples her scrotum into faux-labia and then staples a bloody rubber pussy onto her groin. Fun for all the family.

Suffusing the film is a soupy, gloopy mixture of greasepaint, blood and glitter - yet even through all this theatricality the humanity of the performers shines through. The most immediately affecting story is Mat Fraser, born a thalidomide baby with 'flipper' arms. He's a disabled rights activist, performing at the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2012 Paralympic Games and being lauded by the Queen herself. It's fun to think what Lizzie might make of his act, which showcases his disability in a beautifully concise manner - one segment featuring him shedding prosthetic arms and another showcasing upfront disabled sexuality.

Fraser could sustain an entire documentary by himself and the most affectingly honest moments in the film are the interviews where he charts his progression from being bullied at school and trying to conceal his disability, to his punk awakening and decision to embrace his body. We learn later that he's married the bombshell burlesque trash-queen Julie Atlas Muz whose performances (in particular one involved a severed hand) are both imaginative and technically marvellous. You get the warm fuzzies in tender pillow talk sequences as the couple are interviewed intertwined with each other, two people in perfect ease with each other - practically finishing each other's sentences.

Fraser dares us to stare, seizing the exploitative iconography of the PT Barnum freakshow and subverting it into a pro-disability statement of intent. Large portions of the documentary are shot in Coney Island, the warped wood, distorted paintings and downmarket carnie glamour creating an atmosphere similar to Tod Browning's Freaks - complete with the intense camaraderie that develops between people who exist physically and mentally on the fringes of what polite society deems 'acceptable'.

Exposed is consistently interesting, though much of this is borne on the backs of the performers rather than any particular impressive cinematic tricks. Though largely competently constructed there's the odd spot of editing that works against the film; a heartfelt explanation of the artistic joy and self-fulfilment of burlesque that immediately cuts to a woman dancing around in a lobster costume doing a buttery autocannibal striptease. This disconnect a funny, but arguably undermines a bit of the heartfelt sincerity.

Somewhat more egregious is the technical quality of the recordings. The performances are shot on handheld DV cams, so in the darkened rooms of the burlesque clubs the film quality grainy and indistinct. Similarly, the soundtrack occasionally devolves into slightly cheap sounding MIDI muzak - presumably where the budget couldn't accommodate royalties for whatever song was originally being played. Fortunately this DIY aesthetic just about fits the material, the technical shortcomings appropriately bringing to mind John Waters' Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble.

For all these flaws, a film exploring a subculture this smart, charismatic and extroverted can't help but succeed, powering through any flaws with bravado: deploying shocking imagery in a pleasantly casual way - as if daring us to find this offensive. Anyone with a taste for sexual extremes, who enjoys being shocked and playfully transgressing all manner of taboos will enjoy this. For 71 minutes you find yourself hanging out with fascinating friends, awakening that old desire to poke boundaries previously thought unpokeable.

★★★★

Exposed: Beyond Burlesque is at the ICA from 7-16th January 2014. Tickets available here.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

'Free Birds' (2013) directed by Jimmy Hayward ★★

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

Free Birds is an animated film about talking time travelling turkeys, something that at the very least is a relatively high-concept idea. In terms of animated films we're just at the end of the Pixar renaissance; their unbroken streak of classics through the 2000s terminated by the run of Cars 2, Brave and Monsters University. Thankfully there's some interesting stuff being made in response; animation companies realising that if they can't compete with Pixar's emotional heft, they can at least be funnier, to play the Bugs Bunny role to Pixar's Mickey Mouse.

We follow the tale of scrawny misfit turkey Reggie (Owen Wilson), ostracised from his flock for trying to convince people that they're being fattened up to be eaten. Fortunately he's saved from being killed by the intervention of the President, whose daughter selects Reggie as the one turkey to be pardoned at Thanksgiving. Reggie then wallows in luxury until one day he's kidnapped by Jake (Woody Harrelson), an insane warrior turkey. Jake's plan is to steal an experimental time machine (voiced by George Takei), travel back in time to the first Thanksgiving and get turkey off the menu, thus preventing an annual turkey massacre and saving turkeykind.

Marketing a Thanksgiving film outside the USA is a difficult task as these film tend to rely on the audience's emotional memory of their own family Thanksgivings. So it's a clever choice that for the most part, Free Birds portrays the holiday from the turkey's point of view - an outsider's perspective. I guess technically by the end of the holiday it'll have developed a literal insider's perspective, but by that point it'll be a pile of bones and cartilage so unlikely to have much insight.

The film has an interesting pedigree; director Jimmy Hayward has a 3D animation resume second-to-none, directing the first episodes of pioneering CG animated show ReBoot, before moving on to work on Toy Story, Monsters Inc and Finding Nemo. Writer Scott Mosier comes from the Kevin Smith clique; producing and collaborating on every Kevin Smith movie from Clerks to Zack and Miri Make a Porno. The two (who share credit for the script) have gelled well, settling for an irreverent tone that suits the absurd subject matter.

The problem is that this irreverent tone is pretty much the exact same irreverent tone and the exact same kinds of jokes that you see in practically every animated feature. The high-mark of absurdist 3D animation is the excellent Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, which Free Birds suffers in comparison to. Both movies have a pleasingly cavalier attitude to science and general sanity, as well as a preoccupation with food. What harms Free Birds is its narrative rigidity, firmly sticking to some pretty bland time travel conventions.

It's frustrating really: the film has the potential to take some interesting swerves but never does. The central conceit of time travel is unimaginatively realised, you'd assume a film about altering the past would result in some imaginative impact on the future - but there's nothing. More egregiously Free Birds says next to nothing about the ethics of eating meat (which considering the film is about finding an alternative to killing turkeys for Thanksgiving) feels rather cowardly.

Free Birds opens with an excellent shot of a Thanksgiving dinner table with a succulent stuffed and roasted bird as the centrepiece. The camera then pans upwards to see the horrified face of a turkey as he realises his destiny. This is promising stuff - a mainstream children's film equating a likeable talking animal with dinner is relatively bold subject material for a children's film. These opening scenes recall memories of Aardman Animation's excellent Chicken Run, and whet the appetite for a film that's not only funny, but might actually have something to say.

Unfortunately it quickly transpires Free Birds is absolutely terrified of actually having any message at all. The idea of our lead characters being killed, cooked and eaten quickly devolves into an abstract notion rather than a real danger. This robs the characters of any real motivation and ever-so-slowly anything unique drains away to be replaced with the same samey, sludgy morass you could find in any number of identikit children's animation. What remains is a tired old Ferngully rip-off where the turkeys play vaguely offensive, dated Native American stereotypes as they wage warfare against the first settlers.

For all that there's nothing technically ruinous about the film, the voice-over cast do a largely professional job (George Takei as the time machine is probably the funniest thing in the film) and the animation is broadly competent in a by-the-numbers sort of way but won't show you anything haven't seen in a hundred other movies. As a side note, many of the character designs look created capitalise on the success of Angry Birds, which is a rather cynical way to promote your movie. The one highlight is chief villain Myles Standish, who benefits from an interesting, well-animated design and being voiced by everyone's favourite grumpy Irishman Colm Meaney.

It's not that this is a particularly awful film, and I'm sure its target audience of children will gobble it up (no pun intended). Unfortunately children are stupid and tasteless and will happily watch anything if it's got talking CG animals in it. It's the adults that'll have to see this with their children that I feel vaguely sorry for. On their good days Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks and so on can put out films that appeal to everyone under the sun. Judging by Free Birds there's no technical reason this studio can't aspire to this same level, the only thing holding them back is the cowardly desire to dumb things down and play it safe.

★★

Free Birds is on general release from 29th November 2013

Friday, October 4, 2013

I Play with the Phrase Each Other (2013) directed by Jay Alvarez

Friday, October 4, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

John Donne famously wrote, “No man is an island”. Jay Alvarez thinks otherwise. In his debut film, I Play With the Phrase Each Other, a gang of interconnected characters live in a self-imposed technological solitude, communicating only through mobile phone conversations. Alvarez says:

“This is an announcement of youngness. The movie screams our modern nausea, our florescent [sic] nightmare. It speaks for the first time all of the grinding lives spent on one end of electronic data transfer."

To create a film where the characters only communicate over the phone is a brave cinematic choice; a purposeful excision of interpersonal dynamics; a reduction of humanity to a chorus of tinny voices that bounce endlessly from antenna to antenna.

‘Zero Dark Thirty’ (2013) directed by Kathryn Bigelow, 6th February 2013

Saturday, February 9, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

O cherished torturess, steely eyes glinting in a filthy room, the professional set of your jaw!

O venerated torturess, LCD-lit flawless porcelain skin, ultra-clean ultra-smart trouser suit!

O sweet torturess, flaxen hair falling cinematically across your mirrored shades, will your chariot bear his corpse?

O noble torturess, sacrificing youth and life to keep us safe, doing “what must be done”!

I’ll stop this bullshit right here. And if you're wondering, yes, Zero Dark Thirty is every bit as reprehensible as you’ve heard. Kathryn Bigelow has created a film where we sympathise with torturers. Our heroes are men and women who practise dark arts like placing people in stress positions for prolonged periods, putting collars on people and leading them around like dogs, shoving prisoners into tiny wooden boxes, sexual humiliation, waterboarding and just plain old fashioned punching them in the face over and over again. It’s a moral car crash of a movie, one where absolution for war crimes comes in the form of a teary close-up where we see just. what. the. personal. toll. has. been.

Jessica Chastain as Maya.

Bollocks to your "personal toll", Bigelow. I couldn’t give a tuppenny fuck about the conflicted internal lives of your dead-eyed gang of war criminals. The old joke rings true; a man sits miserably in the corner of a pub mumbling:

“This pub, this very pub we're just sitting in. I built it, with my own hands! But do they call me the Pubmaker? No! See the wall over there, that protects our town? I built it, with my own hands! But do they call me the Wallmaker? And the bridge, you know, that crosses our river, I built it, with my own hands! But do they call me the Bridgemaker? But I tell you man. You fuck one goat….”

The heroes of Zero Dark Thirty are these goatfuckers, irrevocably stained by their crimes against humanity. It’s easy to be suckered into seeing the film as a moral swamp which no-one comes out of cleanly, but this is having your cake and eating it. Zero Dark Thirty has pretensions towards journalism rather than entertainment, every cinematic choice is made with an eye to grounding the action, everything is muted, coldly realistic, oozing a confidence gained through meticulous research. It’s one of those films that has the gumption to be a bit dull and difficult to follow because “this is how it went”.

These cinematic and aesthetic tools are deployed with precision accuracy by Bigelow in a way that adds up to a moral justification of torture. Now, I don’t believe Bigelow hungers to see prisoners humiliated and brutalised, I take her at her word when she says:

“(I’m) a lifelong pacifist, I support all protests against the use of torture, and, quite simply, inhumane treatment of any kind.”

But despite this she's directed a brilliant piece of PR for the CIA, a film that makes a crusading heroine out of a vicious torturer. She argues that “depiction is not endorsement”, yet the structure of the film she’s created inevitably nudges its audience towards acceptance of torture as a necessary evil.

This process begins from the opening moments. The panicked screams of those dying in the burning World Trade Centre are played over a jet black screen. In terms of propaganda, this is a “Why We Fight” sequence. It sets the stakes, justifying almost every action that our heroes will take. As far as the structure of the film goes, this makes the emotional case for revenge before we see a single photographed frame of the movie. When we cut it’s to a CIA black site, with a terrified detainee being menaced by men in black balaclavas. A link is thus made in our minds. This sweaty, panicked man is responsible for the deaths we’ve just been forced to listen to. It's crass and exploitative; the dead of 9/11 pressed into service as emotional shock troops to excuse the barbarism we’re about to see.

Real life butts into the film whenever events begin to become a bit sterile. The action was almost literally brought home for me during the recreation of the 7/7 London bombings when the doomed bus drove past the end of my street. The hunt has gotten a little esoteric by this point and Bigelow wants to reinforce who the ‘bad guys’ are, reminding us that the increasingly dry intelligence tactics we see actually have a purpose.

Unfortunately, using 7/7 to show the importance of our CIA heroes’ quest is a critically flawed move. The conclusion of the official inquiry into 7/7 found that the bombers acted independently: there was no connection with al-Qaeda and certainly none with Osama Bin Laden himself. “The London attacks were a modest, simple affair by four seemingly normal men using the internet”. So, not content with exploiting the final words of 9/11 victims, Bigelow now moves on to using our memories of the 52 victims of 7/7 to add emotional impact to the film. In fact, there’s arguably more chance that the images of torture that emerged from Abu Ghraib prison and the reports of CIA “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” influenced the bombers.

This all helps underline the importance and urgency of our hero's actions. Zero Dark Thirty is complex and methodical film that requires you to pay attention or risk losing the thread of what’s going on, but in some regards it’s also an extremely simple one. It’s a film about "THE GREATEST MANHUNT IN HISTORY", one noble woman’s quest to catch the bad guy of bad guys.

One of the common arguments I've seen to defend this film is to claim that Maya (Jessica Chastain) isn't a hero in the traditional sense. This is disingenuous. Firstly no-one can reasonably claim that she isn't the audience identification character. In the opening scenes of the film she is as visibly shocked and disturbed by the torture happening in front of her as we presumably are. As she toughens up and learns the simple pleasure of beating the shit out of restrained prisoners of war so, apparently must we. We are dragged along with her on her path to moral degradation.

As disturbing as it is to see someone becoming accustomed to sadism and consumed by obsession, I can't deny that Jessica Chastain does a damn good job in the role. She's like Agent Scully gone bad, someone who's allowed herself to become chewed up from the inside out, as if working for the CIA hollows the humanity out of you. Her sensible,ultra professional trouser suits betray no personality whatsoever, the fluorescent lighting she's under for much of the film accentuating her bony body. Even the sunglasses she wears tend to make her head look disturbingly skull-like. Maya becomes death. The destroyer of worlds.

But for all the death imagery that swarms around her, Maya is the hero of the film. At the mid-way point she's sliding neatly into the archetype of the rogue cop, she's a maverick, but she gets the job done. She's inhabiting her narrative heroism fully when she's scrawling numbers on her boss's door ("she gets results you stupid chief!"). Maya, inevitably, becomes the one person who sees things clearly, confidently saying she's 100% sure that Bin Laden is in his compound when everyone else is waffling through a series of bureaucratic cliches. By the time she's standing on a runway her hair whipping around cinematically as she awaits the delivery of Bin Laden's carcass she may as well be the reincarnation of Sarah Connor.

Maya Sarah Connor

That Zero Dark Thirty uses this archetype is partly what exposes the lie that it doesn't endorse torture. If Maya so clearly occupies the heroic narrative space, then her target Osama Bin Laden (though never seen) becomes a straightforward narrative villain. With the story viewed as Maya's heroic ascension, the torture in the first half of the film becomes retroactively justified. So what of the final shot of the film, her weeping as she realises she's sacrificed so much to capture this man? This reaction is the weight of her crimes preying upon her. Her entire adult life has been devoted to catching this man, and now that she's stared into his dead eyes she has and is nothing. Maya looks down at the corpse of Bin Laden, and Bin Laden stares right back up at the corpse of Maya. But though she may have sacrificed everything, the screams of those trapped within the World Trade Centre still echo in the film. Maya's self-sacrifice becomes noble. This was a shitty job, but someone had to do it. By any means.

That Zero Dark Thirty endorses torture makes it, for all its considerable technical and cinematic charms, a truly vile film. It excuses the crimes of the CIA, allows us to view torture as a viable means of extracting information and begins to normalise it in popular culture. This normalisation is probably the most distressing consequence of all, huge swathes of the audience walking out of the cinema tutting in liberal angst at what they've seen, but on some level accepting that it was a necessary evil.

Cinema is one of the most powerful and wide-reaching forms of media in our culture. History and war become defined in the popular consciousness largely by how they're depicted in popular film. Zero Dark Thirty wears its disguise of journalistic pretension so well that it's destined to become the popular version of events. When future generations look back on the War on Terror, how Western civilisation reacted to the physical and psychological trauma of 9/11 and specifically the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty will be what they watch. What will they see? A culture that deifies torturers; that casually inflicts pain upon the desperate; that believes that the end justifies the means, no matter how horrible. Is this what we want to be?

Thursday, February 7, 2013

‘Django Unchained’ (2012) directed by Quentin Tarantino, 4th February 2013

Thursday, February 7, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 1 Comment

‘Django Unchained’ is a fantastic film that should be seen by anyone with the remotest interest in cinema. It's a patchwork of cinematic references and musical cues swiped from other films, but though he may cast his net far and wide for inspiration, the true genius of Tarantino is the way he synthesises a hundred disparate elements into a seamless package. Every character in the film is a work of genius, every performance sharpened to a razor edge. ‘Django Unchained’ radiates confidence from every frame. If you haven’t seen it, go and see it.

This film has been out for a while, so I’m going to be free and easy with spoilers for the plot. If you haven’t seen the film, stop here, watch it and then come back.

Tarantino gets a lot of stick for obsessing over surface ‘cool’. Films like ‘Pulp Fiction’ and both ‘Kill Bills’ are criticised as being examples of style over substance. Sure, the dialogue may be sparkling, the direction utterly entertaining and every single piece of casting might be perfect, but, these monsters of cinema say, where is the heart? Why is style over substance such a bad thing anyway? Given the choice between a film with big dollops of visual and verbal panache and something drearily important boringly eking its way to a moralistic conclusion I’ll take the thrill ride nine of ten times. Cinema is an audiovisual medium, and as far as I’m concerned it’s perfectly valid to enjoy a film that's gunning for my reptile brain as much as one that wants to massage my frontal lobe.

But, I hear you say, why not have both style and substance? You’re right, but both here and in ‘Inglourious Basterds’ that’s exactly what Tarantino is doing. The climax of ‘Basterds’ has a cinema full of Nazis thoroughly enjoying seeing one of their own gunning down Allied troops, a twisted reflection of the thrill that we’re getting from seeing Brad Pitt carving swastikas into Nazi’s foreheads. ‘Django Unchained’ uses violence in a similarly intelligent way, arguing that the only honest way to view true horror and brutality of slavery is through a fountain of blood.

King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) and Django (Jaime Foxx)

The film pointedly introduces itself as taking place “2 years before the Civil War”. Right now this makes the film a sibling to Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln’. While ‘Lincoln’ is about the importance of co-operation and diplomacy in trying to put a broken country back together, the violence of ‘Django Unchained’ demonstrates to us exactly why it was necessary to break the country in the first place.

‘Django Unchained’ sets out its stall when we see Django hesitating over shooting a wanted man ploughing a field with his son. Schultz explains what he’s done to deserve getting shot, then tells Django to “quit your pussyfootin’ and shoot him.” This is the moment where Tarantino properly shows his cards. Slavery is so abhorrent, so intrinsically violent, corruptive and venal that approaching the issue in a tasteful and restrained way is disingenuous. So when Tarantino applies grindhouse cinematic techniques he’s not trivialising slavery, he’s using cinematic language to explain to a switched on, culturally literate audience exactly how barbaric it was. The idealism and dealmaking of ‘Lincoln’ will have to come later. Blood needs to be spilled as an overture to the Civil War to come. Bluntly and honestly, these slaving motherfuckers need to die.

The avenging angel meting out this violence is Django, who Tarantino takes pains to depict as a self made man. His development over the course of the film from hunched, monosyllabic slave to invincible gunman is perfect, we see a man consciously creating his own mythology, transforming himself from man to legend. This identity - the super-cool slave bent on revenge against those who’ve wronged him is constructed within the narrative by Django and his partner, King Schultz, and by Tarantino as writer/director of the film.

Tarantino is nothing if not self-aware, realising that a story about a white man liberating a black slave and ‘civilising’ him would raise some eyebrows. Fortunately, Schultz avoids these pitfalls by allowing Django free rein to construct his own identity. Within the film Django gets to choose his own outfits and to try on different roles as he and Schultz concoct plans to collect bounties. While Schultz impresses roles upon Django (the servant, the black slaver etc) these function as a space for our protagonist to concoct an identity of his own. But these are still restrictions or chains placed on Django by another, and for these reasons it’s necessary that the film kill off Schultz before the final act.

It’s only in the final act of the film that Django is truly unchained. Throughout the majority of the film, Schultz has constructed sets of fertile fictions within which he can decide who he is and what he wants. Before the last act, these fictions are swept away. Django is once more in chains, naked, sent back to square one. But things have changed, Django cunningly talks his way out of his bondage, displaying an wit we haven't seen him have a chance to display. As Django rides a white horse through the plantation fields, rifle raised in the air he realises his identity as an iconic force of nature, an avatar of the righteous fury of the black diaspora. He effortlessly toys with his tormentors, passing violent judgment upon them. It’s interesting to note that in this process, Django even kabooms the white man that’s been extratextually ordering him about, Tarantino himself.

As interesting as Django is, the character is necessarily slightly restricted by having him to so perfectly embody heroic vengeance. The other two characters of note are Calvin Candie, the owner of the horrific ‘Candieland’ plantation and King Schultz, Django’s mentor. Both men represent different aspects of civilisation, Schultz embodying an outsider’s European idealism and Candie representing a hypocritical ‘Southern hospitality'. For all their differences, both utilise the mechanics of slavery to get what they want out of life. Schultz may deplore cruelty, but is still sure to get a legal bill of sale when he ‘buys’ Django and later Broomhilda.

Much has been made of the seemingly random, reckless decision of Schultz to shoot Candie through the heart rather than shake his hand. It’s a surprise twist, the man who has epitomised patience and logic blows away the owner of a plantation in front of his entire staff. On reflection its not so random after all, for the first half of the film Schultz is to some degree insulated from the true horror of slavery. He’s unfailingly polite to slave owners, using his verbal dexterity to talk them round. It’s only when he dons the disguise of pretending to be interesting in ‘Mandingo’ fighting in Mississippi that his demeanour begins to change. Firstly we see him visibly disgusted at the fight to the death in Candie’s ‘Cleopatra Club’ and then almost brought to breaking point on witnessing a slave being torn apart by dogs at Candie’s command. So, when his ruse has been rumbled and the tables have been turned he ends up looking into a mirror, seeing a confident, fancily dressed man with European affectations offering his hand. Shaking it would seal his complicity with Candie’s barbarism. He’s reached the point where he’s disgusted by his own twisted reflection and “can’t resist” blowing him away.

It's also interesting that Schultz is a sly inversion of the ‘magical negro’ archetype. If you haven’t come across the term before, it refers to a cliche in American fiction to have a wise, generally old black character whose sage advice and innate spirituality are used to help the white protagonist in their struggle. Schultz turns this upside down, acting as the ‘magical’ German to Django. Brilliantly, even there’s a scene where, sitting around a campfire, Schultz tells Django ‘a story of his people’; the story of Siegfried’s rescue of Brunhilde.

Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio)

Calvin Candie is a great villain, his sliminess and stupidity putting paid to the repellent myth of Southern hospitality. Generosity and kindness across the scarred backs of slaves is a thin veneer of civilisation on top of sheer barbarism. It’s important to understand that Candie isn’t naïve, in the “three dimples” speech he wonders why the slaves don’t just rise up and kill his family, prooof that he knows the immorality of slavery. All of this adds up to a subtle but powerful argument against Southern slave-owners having any moral justification for their actions; even the defence of ignorance is exposed as lacking.

Fascinatingly, Tarantino even has time to force us to identify with him. There is a lot of violence in Tarantino's films, but few scenes as viscerally unpleasant as the Mandingo fight we watch Candie enjoy. We instinctively condemn Candie's gladiatorial bloodlust, but the camera positions us behind the sofa with him, identifying us with the audience watching the fight rather than with the fighters themselves, rarely showing their faces. This goes a long way to defusing the argument that he's exploiting slavery for entertainment value. Throughout 'Django Unchained' we are sitting in comfy cinema chairs watching black slaves tear each other apart for our entertainment as we munch popcorn and sip soft drinks. We can learn from what Tarantino is showing us, but this scene urges us to recognise the problems with being entertained by it.

Stephen (Samuel L Jackson) and Broomhilda (Kerry Washington)

Possibly the most complex character to unpick is Stephen, Candie’s “house nigger”. He’s a tightly wound ball of self-loathing and rage, a man who’s worked to get to the highest position of authority he can within a corrupt system. While Stephen is vile in his obsequiousness and cunning, we know deep down that he’s consciously taken on this role to survive and prosper as best he can in a system designed to grind him underfoot. Both he and Django have gained freedom and privileges, yet Stephen exists within the system of oppression and Django outside. It's difficult to put yourself within Stephen’s shoes, but on a certain level his anger and disgust when he sees Django sitting at his master’s table is understandable. If a black man is allowed to behave as if he is white, it's a clear threat to the power that Stephen has clawed for himself.

Ultimately, even though we may feel sympathy for Stephen it’s fleeting. When we see Django tormenting him in the film’s finale he's utterly justified. An interesting thread in Tarantino’s recent work is the moral judgment he makes on those that aid and abet oppression and evil as opposed to those that front it. While Candie gets off relatively lightly with a single shot to the heart, Stephen gets shot in both kneecaps and left watching a dynamite fuse slowly burn down. A similar scenario happens with the Brittle brothers in the first half of the film, the man who does the whipping of slaves is summarily executed, while the man who ties up the slaves and salaciously watches gets viciously whipped by Django before being shot repeatedly. Tarantino reserves a large portion of his disgust for people that aid evil while trying to avoid taking any responsibility for it. I can see echoes of this in the final scenes of ‘Inglourious Basterds’, with the solidly bourgeois men and women in the cinema getting mown down with as much righteousness as a platoon of uniformed SS officers.

Perhaps the funniest example is Django’s carefree execution of Lara Candie, the widowed sister of Calvin. Although she never commits any overt evil during the film, it’s people like her who are willing to smile politely and ignore inhumanity without raising objections that allow systems like slavery to perpetuate themselves. When Django shoots her, she’s hilariously yanked off stage at an almost 90 degree angle, her death comical and at the same time utterly justified no matter how ‘nice’ she may be.

By the time Django turns to us, smiling as the wreckage of the Candie plantation burns behind him we feel a powerful catharsis. Tarantino and Django have carved their way through slavery with gusto, creating a new mythology in their wakes. The grindhouse and blaxploitation films that Tarantino pillages are part of the bedrock of our shared cultural experience, the style that he's criticised for is the substance his critics are seeking. By using these familiar techniques and archetypes Tarantino has created a pop mythology of retribution, he's taken modern culture, fashioned a missile out of it and fired it into the past. Everything from the whip-pans to the 2pac song on the soundtrack makes the past pop with life and relevance, highlighting the evil of 1858 through the prism of 2013.

That's why Tarantino is one of the few film-makers that successfully marries style and substance. He's a creature of cinema, unashamedly standing on the shoulders of greats, forging new meaning out of the universal cultural experience. That's why as far as I'm concerned 'Django Unchained' is a Great Film.

*****/*****

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

‘SIRO-A’ at the Leicester Square Theatre, 3rd February 2013

Tuesday, February 5, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

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.

Monday, February 4, 2013

School of Design Work-in-Progress Show, Royal College of Art, 3rd February 2013

Monday, February 4, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

I love speculative futures. Seeing how people in the past imagined the future gives you some great insights into how they viewed themselves. This exhibition is in that vein, albeit looking at a more immediate future. A work in progress show, this is a collection of new designs ranging from the sensible and practical to the surreal, created by students from the School of Design. There was an enormous wealth of stuff on show, too much to comprehensively talk about, but there were a few pieces that stood out to me for various reasons.

Though not part of the Work-In-Progress show, there was a very eye-catching display of concept cars; ‘The Natural Audi Project’, which asks first year vehicle and textile design students to design a car with inspiration from the natural world. I’m not much interested in cars, but I can certainly appreciate nice aesthetics. All of these concepts were achingly beautiful, and for want of a better word; cool. They’re all sleekly curved and forward thinking, the design briefs reading like science fiction.

My favourite was Edward Starkey's, “Audi A0” that seeks to emulate flocking behaviour in animals, using “bio-mimicry principles”. It’s fitted with biomechanical sensors that would allow cars moving along a busy road to behave like a school of fish or a flock of birds, hopefully relieving congestion. Sure it’d be an absolute nightmare for pedestrians, but the image of a flock of cars winding their way around each other on a motorway is a novel and exciting one.

The Audi A0 by Edward Starkey

I was here to see the ‘Design Products Programme’, a project divided into seven separate groups known as ‘platforms’. Walking around you see material and technology used in fascinating ways; wallets that tell you how much money is in them; vases made from thousands of crushed rose petals, bell jars of fat impregnated with smells and vacuum sealed bouquets. At every turn you find diverse materials re-purposed, often with a sly element of humour.

The fact that so much on display seems friendly helps elevate the work from the realm of the coldly conceptual towards something more human. There was one display of handles that you can attach to surfaces to create monkey bars along office ceilings allowing workers to swing their away down corridors by their arms, or do ‘kung-fu’ kicks around corners. There’s the odd but fun eroticism of malleable doorknobs, and the innate ridiculousness of overly complex ‘apology’ forms to hand out to people you’ve wronged.

It’s fortunate that most of the work is so friendly, because there were some few pieces that had vanished up their own arses:

“Skeuomorphism or kitsch it raises questions [sic] about the values we associate with forms and materials and the inertia of our ability to understand the changing elements of our landscape.”

This is a description of a packet of rice. And not even a very interesting packet of rice. But, thankfully, rubbish like this is in a minority. A few pieces up from this are pieces made from charcoal which the artist, Taehun Ko pleasantly tells was inspired by watching ‘Jurassic Park’. Now that’s the kind of artistic inspiration I can get behind.

A wallet that tells you how much is in it!

There’s a disappointing aspect to many of these pieces: they don’t work. The work has strong tendency to practicality, actually seeing the objects functioning adds a lot. But as you walk around, eagerly interacting with some of the displays you’re frequently disappointed. There’s a table of deconstructed remote control ‘toys’, and all of them are out of batteries, sitting motionless on the table. You excitedly pick up the remote control for, say, a window cleaning robot, but nothing happens. The same kind of non-functionality extends to a portrait that’s intended to be weeping, a religious miracle reduced to crystal clear materialism. Which would be great - if it was actually weeping and not just a photo with some tubes attached to the back. Granted, this was the last day of the show, but considering it was only four days long it feels lazy to have a lot of stuff out of order so quickly.

The exhibits that were working had their share of thrills among them though. I particularly enjoyed Markos Ioannides’ ‘Hidden Data’. It’s a darkened room that looks plain and boring under regular light. You’re instructed to turn off the light, and then switch on a UV torch, and you see that the walls are painted with bright streaks of UV paint. This is all interesting enough stuff, it’s great ‘playing detective’ and finding the hidden messages. But the most interesting thing in the room is the full length mirror which allows you to view yourself under UV light. Holding it up to your face makes your teeth glow aquamarine and reveals invisible freckles over your face. It’s a disconcerting effect seeing things all over you that you had no idea were there, a neat, real shift in perception.

A Barbie in some kind of wind machine to blow her hair about.

There seems to be a focus on stimulating all your sense, touch, taste, smell, hearing and seeing. It’s great fun to put on a pair of headphones and walk across various surfaces, hearing the amplified beat of your footsteps change as you tap across metal and wood. But my favourite was ‘Sweet 25’, a sweet that’s been designed to melt in the mouth over the course of 25 minutes, changing flavours to warn you about how long has passed.

Feeling a little bit like Violet Beauregarde I looked around to make sure no-one was watching and popped the experimental art sweet into my mouth. When else am I going to get to eat a futuristic piece of chocolate? Worryingly, the first sensation was an acrid, unpleasant soapy taste. Had I made a big mistake? What a way to go, poisoned by eating a piece of conceptual design. Fortunately the soapy taste soon wore off, leaving me with the slightly awkward situation of having a large block of sugar in my mouth for about 20 minutes. It's a novelty keeping to track of time by sweet, and the size of it meant that I couldn't talk during it. Adding to this was a slight paranoia that a security guard was going to slap a hand on my shoulder for eating my way through the art. Eventually, the sugary substance broke away, leaving a sweet peanutty centre. Not bad at all.

A pretty damn fun afternoon all things considered. If the future looks anything like the imaginations of students at the School of Design, it's going to be a neat place to be.