Recently in Film Category
We put up those pics of some Blu pieces we snapped in Berlin, but check this. It's called 'Muto' (Mute).
A few minutes of film can capture the imaginations of people from all walks of life. If you skate, you’ll know about this already. If you don’t, then fall in love with the intro to Lakai’s new film, Fully Flared. The risks they took to shoot it were pretty substantial - using napalm to blow things up will always incur some kind of risk - but the results speak for themselves. It's beautiful.
“You can’t handle the truth!”... “I’ll never let go, Jack.”... “I love you honey bunny.”... “Say hello to my little friend!”... “I’m... kind of a big deal”... “Do the chickens have large talons?”
You could never quote from, say, an Italian Neorealist film of the 1940’s (unless in the right crowd) because it would transport you to Ubergeek status. Quoting films is about shared experience. ‘We both saw that film, we both liked that bit, and now we are connected by something.’
Sometimes though, a little soundbite won’t cut it, and not even the most talented impressionist can do justice to the quote, especially when it is intrinsically linked with the film’s music, cinematography and narrative. Lengthy monologues must be a really exciting and probably quite daunting thing for an actor to see when first reading the script; a chance to really impress himself on the character. A chance, even, to define the film.
A quote becomes a speech when it can only fully exist in its lengthy entirety. The one I’m thinking of has been borrowed by a second-rate football team (Plymouth Argyle, I think) when they were managerless for a short period, and they won every game using it as motivation. Undoubtedly thousands of over-excited American high school kids have embraced it as part of their sporting ritual, and there are those of us who just love it for what it is: The perfect speech at the perfect moment in a very good (as far as sports stories go) film.
Without further ado and with a healthy disregard for whether you like the film or not, this is a speech that those involved should be very proud of. Take a bow, Oliver Stone and of course, Al Pacino.
Alex Gibney’s father was a U.S. naval interrogator with experiences of Japanese prisoners during World War II. He and his fellow men learned that torture was an ineffective means of withdrawing information from enemy prisoners. Before his death, he begged his son to make a film about the U.S.’s use of torture on untried prisoners and, by definition, its disregard for the rules of democracy in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. So Alex Gibney made that film, and this year, after his last project Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005, the film won Best Documentary at The Oscars.
Taxi To The Darkside is a film about the systematic attempts made by the Bush administration to sidestep the laws laid down in the Geneva Convention to safeguard against the maltreatment of war prisoners. At its most essential, it’s an exposé of their hypocrisy in the loosely defined war on terror. What exactly is terror, though? Many things, of course, among them the demolition of commercial buildings in a foreign country, but equally the imprisonment of an innocent civilian, removed from the taxi he worked hard to acquire and thrust into a hostile prison complex where he is beaten, abused, stripped naked, deprived of sleep, chained to the ceiling and generally tortured until his body can take no more and he dies. That someone was a young Afghan civilian named Diliwar, and it’s his story that provides the framework for Gibney’s work.
From the Bagram facility in Afghanistan where young Diliwar was held through the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad from where those famous leaked photos of prisoners abused emerged, to Guantanamo and Washington D.C., it’s a deeply disturbing look into the military's use of torture on prisoners of war, sanctioned, the film reveals, by those at the very top: Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush. A ‘few bad apples’ was the somewhat flippant explanation they gave for the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, but that doesn’t stand up once you’ve seen the film. And you should, if only to fully understand quite what's been going on.
I shan’t go into the politics of it right here because the film takes care of all that and more. Suffice to say I left the first Film Knights event last night feeling like I finally understood the sheer gravity of it all. We wanted Gibney to introduce the film, but he proved impossible to track down. He must have quite a story. What does it take to create a film like this exactly? Courage, surely, but also faith, and lots of it:
“All I had was faith. You have to go in with a sense of faith that you’ll find something, and you keep digging and digging and digging until you get it.”
No doubt his father would be proud.
Taxi To The Dark Side is officially released in the UK on May 30th, 2008.
LWLies and SUSO are proud to announce the first in our series of Film Knights, a new monthly event created to tell the tales and celebrate the stories of the courageous individuals, both sung and unsung, behind the best and the brave in cinema. In honour of imagination, creativity and determination in film, we kick things off with a screening of Taxi To The Darkside, preceded by a brief introduction from a representative from Reprieve, at 6.45pm on Tuesday April 8th at Curzon Soho.
And it’s free. All you need to pay is attention.
The event is guest-listed on a first come first served basis. RSVP to filmknights@littlewhitelies.co.uk
What if you took a bunch of famous films, condensed them down into thirty seconds, and reenacted them with animated bunnies? Why, you’d get ANGRY ALIEN PRODUCTIONS.
Prepare to waste the rest of today. Favourites include The Exorcist, Titanic, Brokeback Mountain, Jaws, March of the Penguins - all of them dammit.
Beautiful Losers is a new feature documentary film, just premiered in the States, that celebrates the independent and DIY spirit that unified a loose-knit group of American artists who emerged from the underground youth subcultures of skateboarding, graffiti, punk rock and hip hop - the likes of Ed Templeton (above), Shepard Fairey (whose art was recently shown in London - see below), Harmony Korine and Mike Mills. Directed by Joshua Leonard, it explores the remarkable impact that this group of influential outcasts have had on contemporary culture. How, for instance, does a young guy learning to skate become an internationally renowned photographer? They are imaginative doers, people united by an artistic independence who have somehow gone from here to there without really knowing what happened in between. “The real magic lies not only in the fact that we were acknowledged, but that, really, none of us were supposed to get there,” says Aaron Rose. “This is art created by a group of individuals who, in the eyes of society, were considered outcasts. When we started making our work it was never even an option to think of having a career.”
Perhaps the one guy who best encapsulates the kind of artistic success no one could have predicted is Ed Templeton (above), the non-smoking, teetotaling, vegan “hippie who hates hippies.” One of the first to take skateboarding beyond the bowls and pipes and out into the real world (street skating to you and I), Templeton turned to photography early on and, inspired by the brutal realism of the likes of Larry Clark, began to document his own life, firstly in skating but later in a far wider context: “I realised I was missing out on all this great subject matter that I was living around.” The shackles were off. There was so much more to say beyond skateboarding: “Every free moment I’m walking around the streets shooting photos of life in general. But I don’t stop there, I keep going, into my house.” And into the bedroom if his series of nude pictures of his wife Deanna are anything to go by...
Templeton wonders if he’ll be remembered when he’s gone, but if he isn’t, then he’s determined to ensure that his work is. “The thing I dislike is art that seems to have no craft. It’s just a clever idea and you have to have gone to years of art school to understand why it means anything. A fabricated blue cube on the wall says nothing to me, but a painting made by hand about subject dear to the artist says a lot more. Seriously documenting a certain time or group of people - that has a chance of going down in history as interesting.” That’s exactly what Beautiful Losers seems to have done: celebrating the people who, both as individuals and as a group, embody the boundless creative spirit that will always transcend what lesser people see only as limitations.
CHECK OUT OUR RECENT PIECE ON LARRY CLARK, THE PHOTOGRAPHER AND FILMMAKER WHO INSPIRED ED TEMPLETON, RIGHT HERE, AND ALSO ANP, THE BEAUTIFUL FREE-OF-CHARGE, FREE-OF-ADVERTISING ART MAGAZINE THAT HE NOW EDITS. A JACK OF ALL TRADES IN THE TRUEST SENSE...
You could write a thesis on the influence and significance of street art. But why not use film to tell the story. Better than that, documentary film in its purest form - a locked-off camera edited into a time-lapse piece. For over an hour, Jeremy Gibbs stood across the street from fresh work by Banksy on Essex Road, London, and filmed people who stopped to look and take photos.
The great thing about the film is that it captures the diversity of the audience. This isn’t about grubby kids vandalising for its own sake. It's about a blank canvas, and an artist with the determination to make his voice heard. The not so great thing about the film - the music. Sorry about that.
Woody and Buzz set the tone. They kicked it all off. We fell to our knees so we might touch the cloak of this magnificent new thing: the Lord of animation; images of the mind rendered in three dimensions. Oh the possibilities. Oh the brilliance of it. But like any regime, we grew tired. The great paradigm shift was forgotten, and then the improvements became smaller and smaller, and we ceased to care quite so much. Okay, so it’s not quite as black and white as that, but new advances in CGI animation aren’t enough anymore. We are human beings. We crave stories, meaning, emotion, not technological advance, and these are the things that even the simplest animations can support. They bring static images to life and transcend the possibilities of the everyday. You can make the flimsiest drawing do what an actor could never do. There are no restrictions. With a pen, a piece of paper, a computer - whatever - it shouldn’t matter. The great animated films show that, where animation is concerned, the possibilities are endless.
And, by all accounts, Persepolis is one of those. While the American studios turn away their once treasured two dimensional friends and choose to dine with newer models - Disney closed down its 2D Florida studio in 2004 - a chaotic little Parisian studio was, under the guidance of Marjane Satrapi, busy putting together one of the film sensations of 2007. An assemblage of simple lines washed with greys and blacks, the lead protagonists in Persepolis don’t claim to go to infinity and beyond, and yet, according to the universally favourable reviews, they do.
The thing is, the latest Silicon Graphics machines and the greatest team of CAD wizards can only get you so far, but a little imagination, creativity and determination can take you anywhere you want - something Marjane Satrapi knows only too well:
“Animation is like the Wild West. Anything is possible. And when you come from the underground, lots of work doesn’t freak you out. That is what art should be about - you work because you like your work, not to get paid.”
Like those American studios then...
For an in-depth exploration of Persepolis, cinema and truth in movies, look out for this month’s LITTLE WHITE LIES, a cult film publication currently building a devoted following through its heartfelt editorial, stunning production, and unwavering commitment to the very best in film.
As a shark nerd, I’m surprised it’s taken me this long to mention here on Susology the death of Roy Scheider (above centre), the man best remembered for his role as Chief Brody in Jaws. It was very sad indeed. Growing up, the Chief played a big part in the formation of this peculiar fascination with marine predators. But this is no place for mourning. Instead, let’s celebrate his role in a project that no one believed would ever get finished, the extraordinary determination of its production team, and the unwavering vision of one man in particular: the young and eager to impress Steven Spielberg.
On May 2nd, 1974, filming for Jaws began. It would prove very, very hard. There were three mechanical sharks, all of them called Bruce: one full bodied, one to be shot from the left, and one from the right (see him thrashing about in the surf with his director above). But Bruce rarely worked. The production closed several times for repairs. Days went by without getting a single shot, and on top of that there were all the predictable problems of shooting on the open sea: wet cameras, wet team, the cold, low morale. The whole thing quickly went beyond the June 30th deadline. But Spielberg didn’t want to shoot it in a tank, something the producers were actively encouraging to keep costs down. He didn’t want some fake, half-arsed rehash of Moby Dick. He wanted reality:
“There are two categories, films and movies,” he told them. “I want to make films.”
Of course it would have been much easier to shoot Jaws in a tank. With the film quickly plunging into a director’s worst nightmare, Robert Shaw, who played the burly seafaring captain Quint, called the whole thing “a piece of shit”. Richard Dreyfuss, the nerdy oceanographer Hooper, predicted the “turkey of the year”. All in all, things were looking up for ‘Jaws The Movie’ in the summer of ’74....
Continue reading BRUCE ALMIGHTY.
