PARTHURBLOG

Absurdist. Disturbing. Brilliant – review of “Dogtooth”, a family film that’s certainly not family-friendly.

The family: the hope for those who believe that Britain is broken, and that salvation will come from happy marriages providing  protection and place of safety for the next generation.

There’s much to be said for the idea.

I grew up in just such a context; an extended network of aunts and uncles, cousins and interlopers – some of whom stayed the course, many who didn’t. (There’s nothing harder to join than a genetic club). It was a truly fortunate upbringing, based on mutual support and , dare one say, love.

All tribes have foibles. Step into someone else’s rules – watch how they relate to their parents, listen to conversations in the car, witness the disciplining of their children – it’s easy to see that we are all creating micro-worlds with specific boundaries, behaviours and expectations.

Dogtooth sets out this premise, and follows it to an illogical conclusion. The film’s ‘Father’ and ‘Mother’   completely protect their (now adult) children from the dangers of the modern world. They live in a comfortable, well-to-do house, with a high fence running its entire perimeter, and have never been outside. Ever.

The film opens with the three offspring listening to a home-made language tape with common words like ‘motorway’ being redefined to fit into the mythic structure that the parents have created. “Motorway: a type of shirt. As in ‘You are wearing a bright motorway today’”.

(Dogtooth is not a great advertisement for home education.)

So from the first scene, director Giorgos Lanthimos establishes that language is the most potent weapon of control. Language and story.

For example,  given that the parents have told their children that the world is a toxic place, how to explain the aircraft that occasionally fly over the house? ‘Father’ places a small toy ‘plane in the garden, because “it has fallen out of the sky”. It is a creature, like a bird, that has died mid-flight. Look how small it is; it fits in your hand. It could not possibly carry people.

It is a bizarre, bleak, absurdist view of how the family structure can at once protect and suffocate. How the stories we create – as pass down generations – shape our view of the world.

Philip Larkin was right.

Taken at face value, Dogtooth is an extreme view of the abuse of trust in a domestic setting. Taken as an allegory of political control, it’s a much wider film.

In interview, Lanthimos has said that the film’s origin came from thinking about how people understand the world in which they live. That includes institutions. It’s not a huge leap from the Father’s explanation of why only he can leave the garden each day in his car, to the received wisdom about… well, take your pick: Weapons of Mass Destruction? The War on Terror?

Stories which become increasingly bizarre to maintain the status quo.

It’s tempting, from a liberal, democratic viewpoint, to see the Dogtooth family behind its fence as (say) Eastern Europeans, being told about Western decadence. But Lanthimos’ world isn’t about them; it’s about us. And how our stories are so pervasive and ingrained that we are not even aware that they define us.

At the climax of the film, one of the characters senses it is time to leave, yet even then the stories that have been woven are so much part of children’s understanding of ‘reality’ that extreme measures have to be taken in accordance with the rules of those stories.

Simply stepping of of the front door isn’t an option.

Dogtooth is not a film for a fun night out; it is sexually explicit (there were walk-outs from the screening I attended), has moments of genuinely shocking violence, and challenges taboos head-on. At the same time, it is a work of true originality, obsidian humour and some of the most disturbing relationships seen on screen.

A week after viewing, I still don’t know if the end is hopeful or hopeless. But 8 months into 2010, I am confident that it is my film of the year.

Popularity: 8% [?]

DVD OF THE MONTH

For the past two months, every week night, I have been attending therapy.

That’s to say, I have watched Dr Paul Weston explore the fears, regrets, guilt and uncertainties of five people who have their fare share of the dark side of the human condition.

I’ve been watching Season One of In Treatment, the HBO series that has broken another mould in TV scheduling: a 30-minute programme, originally broadcast Monday through Friday, each episode focusing on a client at a particular time slot in Weston’s diary.

So Monday 10:00am is Laura’s day, Tuesday Alex and so on. On Friday, Weston (played by the brilliant Gabriel Byrne) goes to see his own therapist. Even the most experienced therapists have supervisors.

It’s a very compressed drama, extremely intense, very frank and occasionally heart-aching. Laura uses sex as a way of avoiding commitment; Alex is an swaggering fighter pilot who has recently bombed a school in Iraq; Sophie is a gymnast who tried to take her own life; Amy and Jake are a couple in a marriage that’s falling apart.

Whatever your view of the therapeutic process, In Treatment is gripping, utterly compelling drama. This is partly due to the writing (adapted from an Israeli series called Be’Tipul) and partly due to the acting. Two people in a room, with camera on close-up – if acting is reacting, it’s a master class on the control of the human face.

Gabriel Byrne is present in every episode, switching from a Buddha-like non-judgment, to anger, resentment, love and understanding.

What’s most noticeable in his performance is the variety and nuance he brings to each patient – beautifully illustrating that it takes two to form a therapeutic relationship.

I was recently told that in a therapy session, “there should be two frightened people in the room” – and Weston is certainly one half of that partnership. He and his wife are becoming increasingly estranged as his world becomes more and more defined by his consulting office. So he takes this to a long-standing supervisor (a very matriarchal Dianne Wiest)to gain clarity.

But even here, there’s more baggage than at an airport terminal. Beneath the respect and affection are heaving waves of professional jealousies and personal recriminations.

It’s not a series of happy endings or easy resolutions. More than anything else, it presents a mirror in which we can examine some of our own prejudices and beliefs.

If you like great acting, superb writing, and direction that is not afraid of silence on a TV screen, you’d do well to spend a few weeks on the couch watching Dr Weston.

He’s listening.

MOVIE OF THE MONTH

By coincidence (more likely, by subconscious choice) my Movie of the Month is also about the workings of the mind. Inception is the latest offering of ideas from Christopher Nolan, the director who first made his name with Memento (the amnesia murder mystery played in reverse) who has been playing with big ideas and movie conventions ever since (The Prestige, The Dark Knight).

This time, Nolan’s premise is that in the near future it will be possible to steal ideas from inside someone’s head. Specialist consultants will invade the subject’s dreams and collect commercially sensitive infomation. Central characters Cobb and Arthur (Leonardo DiCaprio and Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are two of the finest in the business.

In the world of Inception, stealing ideas is normal. The greater challenge is to insert an idea, so that the recipient thinks it is their own.

So, at surface level, Nolan sets up a heist movie in which Cobb accepts this mission impossible.

In other hands, this would be a plodding, clichéd action movie with the star on a motor bike and a blonde on his arm.

But this is planet Nolan; they do things differently there.

Any heist needs a team: in this case it includes a pharmacist who has dozens of dreamers asleep in his cellar, the conman who’ll adopt different personas in dreams, and the architect who’ll create the worlds in worlds in which the dreams will take place.

Because this is complex stuff, beyond the “when-you-wake-up-you’ll-dance-a Highland-fling” of stage hypnosis. Cobb and his team don’t operate at a surface level; they go deep, beyond concept or notion to axiomatic belief.

So this time they’re not out to plant an idea in a dream. Like a set of subconscious Russian dolls, this is going to take place in dream in a dream in a dream.

Still with me?

Nolan creates a complex narrative to explain all this visually: for a film so full of ideas, it’s mercifully free from exposition. And when he is explaining, it’s usually with stunning visual tricks – as in the mirror reflecting in the mirror (where IS Nolan and his camera?).

But even then the mission would be a little pedestrian if it was just about ‘the job’. So Nolan creates an added dimension to Cobb’s own dreams. He lost his wife a few years ago, and she keeps making guest appearances in his dreams – or rather, the dreams that he’s invading in order to do his job. And she’s trying to derail his work.

It’s Marion Cotillard (last seen in La Vie en Rose) as the wife who steals the picture. While Nolan is so busy feeding us ideas, he doesn’t have time to build a three-dimensional cast of character. Cobb’s wife is the exception, thanks to the relationship she has with her husband.

Of course, that relationship is not her relationship at all – it’s Cobb’s memory of their relationships, which reminds us that even with those closest to us, we shaping them in our own image. In the same way as Paul Weston shapes his patients. And they shape him.

Even with DiCaprio topping the credits, there’s no doubt that the star of this picture is writer- director Nolan. It starts with a multi-level labyrinth, keeps the audience on its toes along the way, and ends with a question.

Indeed, the final scene and shot sent a shiver down my spine in just the same way as the moment the cops realized who they’d been interviewing the end of The Usual Suspects.

And like Suspects, Inception also a meta-movie : a film about film-making, a story about stories. Not only are we watching DiCaprio’s dream in a dream in a dream, we’re also in a dark room watching Nolan’s dream on screen. So there are four levels at work here, to which you and I are now building. You’re reading my version of Nolan’s dream, and by the end of this sentence, you’ll have created a version of mine (of Nolan’s, of Cobb’s).

Inception makes the viewer work hard to keep up, offers a visual feast of both location and effects, but most importantly, makes you think. I loved it – at least I believe I did.

Maybe Nolan planted that idea too?

Popularity: 16% [?]

GRAN TORINO

Jim Broadbent once said that it is not possible to make a film better than its script. No amount of direction, editing or on-screen presence is going to lift a mediocre screenplay above, well, mediocrity.

Gran Torino has a perfect script.

Clint Eastwood plays a retired auto-worker / Korean veteran who has just lost his wife. His core values and ingrained discipline means that he keeps his lawn neat and his body in shape.

He is old school, and mourns the passing of core American values.

This is no more obvious to him than the fact that his neighbourhood has been taken over by Asian immigrants, for whom he has no time. But they respect him, and – despite his resistance – they start to show him shared values about family and belonging.

The film charts a journey to redemption; forgiveness for past sins, seeing others for who they really are, and repaying debts of honour. It’s a stirring piece of work, that says much about aging, societal shift, the need for redemption…

…and ultimately, finding peace in the world.

Highly recommended

BROKEN FLOWERS

Bill Murray reprises his existential, my-life-is-empty ‘Lost in Translation’ act in this portrait of a man looking for meaning through his past relationships.

No-one does empty quite like Murray. Like dead air on radio, doing nothing on screen is a sure-fire route to losing an audience, but Murray’s nothing is interesting. There is so much regret behind his eyes that to see him sitting, looking straight at camera but straight through you is like looking at a great portrait.

Murray’s nothing tells a story.

In ‘Broken Flowers’ he’s materially comfortable (he made a pile ‘in computers’) but emotionally bankrupt. A series of relationships have come and gone, but he’s never committed or settled.

So when an anonymous letter turns up, telling his he has a son, it’s a chance to reprieve extinguished flames.

Not that he grabs the opportunity with gusto. He embarks on his trip almost as a favour to his next-door neighbour, a would-be private eye and whodunit enthusiast.

The cast is top-drawer and Jim Jarmush’s direction is suitably sparing and pared-down. But unlike Lost in Translation, there is no redemption here.

In LiT, Murray gets the chance to be the hero by not taking advantage of Scarlett Johansson.

In BF, the message is downbeat. Murray has failed to grasp his opportunities in life, and this has left him bereft of attachment or joy. But he is also condemned to repeat his future in the same vein. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks because old dogs don’t know how to learn.

Worth a watch, but not if you’re looking for a lift.

LOOKING FOR ERIC

When you’re a Manchester postman, down on your luck, at the tail end of two broken marriages, being run ragged by two stepsons and their no-respect mates, who do you turn to for help?

Eric Cantona. Of course.

That’s the premise of the most uplifting film in director Ken Loach’s entire catalogue. While the world that postman Eric (he shares his name with his hero) inhabits is grim, the tone of ‘Looking for Eric’ is light, upbeat and feel good.

It’s a comedy about friendship and hope.

It’s also – appropriately enough – a game of two halves, which is a slight flaw.

The first half is beautifully played by Steve Evets as the haggard Everyman, and establishes the relationships in his life with great skill: his first wife, his daughter, his workmates, and Cantona himself – suitably enigmatic in pronouncement and pronunciation.

(Apparently, when shooting the scene in which Cantona steps ‘out of the poster’ and into the postman’s bedroom, Evets had not been told that the footballing icon would actually be in the room. His expression in that moment is wonderful).

Yet having established all this, the second half sees Loach and his writer  struggle a little with finding a place to take the idea. The test that’s presented to the lead character stretches disbelief a little, while the resolution takes it to breaking point.

But that is a niggardly complaint given that the fantasy tone of the film. Overall it’s a fun, highly enjoyable fairy tale for grown-ups – and you certainly don’t need to be a fan of Cantona, Manchester United or even football to enjoy it.

Recommended.

FOUR LIONS

If you’re a fan of The Day Today or Brass Eye or Blue Jam, then you’ll know Chris Morris’s world: dark humour, biting satire, and an instinct for really irritating the readers of The Daily Mail.

He doesn’t disappoint with ‘Four Lions’, his first feature film. It’s a comedy about Islamic suicide bombers.

More accurately, it’s about five Muslims in the North of England who think that they have been called as part of the jihad against Western materialism.

In truth, they are incompetent half-wits with a sense of grievance.

The film follows them as they plot their attack, bicker amongst themselves, get angrier with the world, and try to make sense of what is happening to them.

First and foremost, ‘Four Lions’ is a comedy, and it is very, very funny. The visual joke about avoiding surveillance cameras would be worth the price of admission on its own.

But like all Morris’s work, it is an uncomfortable comedy, which is its great strength.

While a couple of the group are a little two-dimensional and only in the story as a source of laughs, the lead character – Omar – is fully drawn, with a wife and child, a job, a house, a mortgage: All signs of a ‘normal life’ which makes his commitment to the cause the chilling thread that runs through the film.

And deepens the question ‘Why?’

Must see (at home on DVD – unless you want to feel very self-conscious about laughing in public)

Popularity: 27% [?]

Lena Meyer-Landrut is this year’s Eurovision Song Contest winner.

It may not be a Nobel Prize or an Academy Award, but winning is winning, and this was a job well done.  Whatever the field, there are always lessons to be learned from people who excel.

Here in the UK we have a love hate relationship with the contest – gathering in houses across the land to bask in its cheesiness, but ever complaining about the voting system that we believe is stacked against us.

Latvia will always vote for Lithuania and Estonia; Estonia will always vote for Lithuania and Latvia; Lithuania will always vote for Estonia and Latvia; and Cyprus will always, always, always vote for Greece.

Indeed, we have convinced ourselves that it is only possible to win by changing our name to Bosnia-Herzegovina.

On Saturday, Germany disproved that theory, and outflanked the ‘bloc voters’. Indeed, it played the rules to its advantage.

LESSON 1: GET THE BEST TALENT

If you spend too long thinking about the idea of the nation state, it’s possible to end up in an existential conundrum that questions the very nature of “belonging” to anything.

What makes the German entry to Eurovision “German”?

Lena sung in English; no surprise there – it is the lingua-franca of pop music.

What’s more interesting is that the song was written by Julie Frost (American) and John Gordon (Danish). Obviously, birthplace is not a factor defining the National characteristic of Eurovision entry.

This isn’t sour grapes (really!). The lesson here is that the German broadcaster responsible for the country’s participation spread the net as wide as possible and selected the best talent for the job.

LESSON 2: A QUALITY PRODUCT

“Satellite” was the best song of the evening, with a contemporary beat and a memorable hook.

Appropriately, the Germans have a great description of this: they call it ‘an earworm’.

(Unlike many of the other entries which redefined ‘instantly forgettable’, and in a couple of cases proved that it’s possible to forget a song while you’re actually listening to it.)

Contrary to popular perception, plinky-plonky, binky-bonky songs haven’t succeeded in Eurovision for a long time. The great European public is actually quite discerning.

The track also avoided the Me-Too trap.

Norway won last year with a manic pixie and his electric violin. This year – surprise, surprise – there were more violins on display than you can see at the Last Night of the Proms.

Me-Too is a relevant strategy if you want to take share from the market leader, but it’s doomed to failure in a first-past-the-post competition.

LESSON 3: MAKE THE RULES WORK FOR YOU

While ‘bloc voting’ can appear to stack the odds against certain nations, there is another aspect of Eurovision qualification which is often overlooked.

The “big four” – France, Germany, Spain and the UK – do not have to go through qualification. The size of their TV audiences means an automatic place in the final.

This year, Germany took full advantage of this, selecting its song over two months ago, and then releasing it almost immediately into various markets well ahead of the competition.

(By comparison the UK entry, chosen on the same night as the Germans, wasn’t released until 24 April).

“Satellite” got to number one in several territories, including Switzerland and Sweden, which both gave it the famous ‘douze points’ on the night. In releasing early, and promoting heavily, Germany considerably increased its chances.

From a straw poll of five under-19s Brits in my house on Saturday, four had already heard “Satellite”. None of them knew any other entry.

It takes a lot of work to be an instant success.

Popularity: 33% [?]

…First, that a Randy Newman gig (recital?) deserves a better headline than that; he’s urbane, witty and chooses his words very carefully.

In truth, this was less of a concert than an evening with Woody Allen’s west coast cousin with musical punctuation. Newman is a very, very funny man – mostly at his own expense. His retelling of the ‘Toy Story’ franchise (through the eyes of the composer) was a comic master class, if only for the image of him elbowing a child in the head at the premier because the brat was laughing over his music.

He’s not the greatest singer – never has been – but he doesn’t try to hide that. There is nowhere to hide when it’s a man and a piano and a few changes in lighting states. Indeed, when he failed to hit a note in a song, we all acknowledged that, took him closer to our collective bossom, and moved on.

Like Leonard Cohen – an equally entrancing non-singer – Newman has the poet’s sensibility for rich meaning in as little space as possible. His songs are miracles of economy. I think I clapped more at last night’s gig than I have for many years, simply because each mini masterpiece was done in two-and-a-half minutes.

His urbanity infected the audience; we were a full house at the Royal Festival Hall that wanted to listen attentively, appreciate both his lyrics and his music, and generally bask in one-anothers’ knowingness. And it was a very knowing group – seas of grey heads, bald patches and shiny domes.

Newman’s audience has not only grown old with him, but has grown into his songs. What sounded acerbic and cynical 30 years ago now gets welcomed back into the room with open arms and a “yes-that-what-life’s-like” smile of recognition.

But for all his social insight and mellowed anger, it’s the melancholy of his ballads that strikes the most chords. The love song to his ex-wife, declaring how much he still misses her;  or the declaration of lost love from his most recent album:

Was a fool with my money
And I lost every dime
And the sun stopped shining
And it rained all the time
It did set me back some
But I made it through
But I’ll never get over losing you

That is Newman’s secret; he channels the grief, disappointment and heartache of his audience and gives it voice. About the fragility of the heart and the injustice of the world.

Never did he write a truer word than “you’ve got a friend in me”.

Popularity: 19% [?]

A review of a play that everyone should read.

Want to understand how the financial crisis happened, how it unwound and the implications for us all? David Hare provides all the answers in “The Power of Yes” (National Theatre, London) – 100 minutes of light shone into some very dark corners of the City and government.

It starts with The Author (played by Anthony Calf, representing not just Hare, but Everyman) coming down stage and addressing the audience directly:

This isn’t a play. It’s a story. It doesn’t pretend to be a play. It pretends only to be a story.

And that ’s exactly what Hare has constructed. This is a three dimensional, many-voiced lecture. It is a revue, with lots of acts coming on to entertain us with the their jokes and their tricks and their cons, hosted my a man in a corduroy jacket.

In his research, Hare interviewed many of the major players: George Soros , Howard Davies (First Chair of the Financial Services Authority), Ronald Cohen (a doyen of private equity ), Adair Turner (Current Chair of the FSA), John Moulton (another leading private equity investor), Paul Mason (BBC Newsnight), along with lawyers, FT journalists, MPs and sundry others involved in the story.

He has woven together a linear narrative that is beautifully paced, and parses out the information in a model of clarity and precision.

BALANCE SHEET

For a man known for his left leanings, Hare seems fair in his treatment of all; no one – whatever their hue – evades his pointing finger:

Davies: Just before he became Prime Minister, Brown delivered a completely irresponsible budget, cutting tax, stoking the boom, all so that he could plan a an election that never happened

and

Cohen: You know that Greenspan made that famous speech in 1996, condemning irrational exuberance? But what’s far more interesting is the speech he didn”t make… In 2004 he didn’t make a speech condemning a gargantuan appetite for risk.

Mind you, one can’t help think that a few of the players used this as an opportunity to settle a few personal scores.

It is also full of astonishing statistics and facts:

Soros: At the time of its collapse, the Royal Bank of Scotland had assets of 1,900 billion  pounds. The gross national product of your country was only 1,500 billion pounds. In other words, RBS was bigger than the entire annual output of the British economy

and

Hammond: The whole Labour government was predicated on the prosperity of the City. Not only was it 9%  of the economy but it generated 27% of the take tax… Of course (Brown) wasn’t going to regulated it!

The ‘play’ is presented in 9 sections (not really acts) and covers all the usual suspects – subprimes, the FSA, Northern Rock, bankers’ bonuses. There are a couple of pantomime villains, but mostly Hare sets the personalities and their decisions in the context and conventional wisdom of the time.

CREDIT TO ALL CONCERNED

If you do have the chance to go to the National , you’ll see a stripped-down production without a set which lets  the characters tell the story. The performances are universally good, although none of the actors really get much chance to develop their roles, because none has an arc or a set of dramatic choices to make.

They are witnesses on behalf of the prosecution, presenting information to make a case.

If the FSA was serious about financial education, The Power of Yes would be a  roadshow run in every town hall and community centre across the land.  But it doesn’t have any money, so that’s unlikely to happen.

Instead, a copy of the script – 76 pages that can be read in a single sitting – should be mandatory reading for every economics and business student, every bank employee and shareholder, every mortgage applicant and broker, every credit card owner and card issuer…

Have I missed anyone?

Popularity: 46% [?]

Given the choice between the Test Card and Match of the Day, the girl with the chalk board wins hands down. At least there’s the opportunity to imagine what the balloon-headed clown is thinking. There is no room for imagination on MotD. Or thought. Both have been expunged from presenter, pundits and presentation.

Aside from the fact that the corporate ethic of Premiership football -- pampered, perfected and polished -- has given the game a characterectomy, TV football redefines the term ‘anodyne’. It has become a synthetic entertainment, as moving and meaningful as a visit to Santa’s grotto.

Three woodentops straddle a sofa like mannequins in a Top Shop window, yet without the personality. And all they talk about is football. That’s it. Their only reference point is football. There is nothing outside the world of football that matters.

BEWARE  -- READER AHEAD

The decisive moment that captured this came during the coverage of the last World Cup, A team of the usual Curprinol men were lined up against the traditional ‘look where your licence money has gone’ backdrop. It was the post-match analysis, and obviously there were extra minutes to be filled. 

Martin O’Neill -- the only man in football who’s ever read a book -- made reference to some cultural icon -- it could have been Nietzsche, Norman Schwarzkopf or Noele Gordon. I can’t remember, and it doesn’t matter. But the response is still vivid:

The three pieces of fence making up the panel looked at him as if he had just said that he’d slept with all their wives. The incredulity was tangible. ‘Wha?’ they coughed, as a single entity. “Wha?”.

O’Neill’s retort was equally honest and unwelcome by all those seated with him, those in the control booth, and probably the BBC Head of Sport.

“There’s more to life than just football.”

The former England / Scotland / France / Slovakia / Turkmenistan strikers who were adding their immense wisdom that evening shifted in their seats like amoeba on a match head. O’Neill had thrown down a gauntlet and wanted to see if anyone would take up the challenge.

No one took the bait. This was outside their comfort zone and outside their contracts. Imagine the conversation in the bar after: “We’ve always thought you were a bit odd Martin, and we put up with you because you’ve won a few trophies. But don’t make us talk about anything that’s not in the boundaries of our glass bubble.”

Football presentation is all CGI analysis and telling the audience exactly what’s on the screen. As if the people who are really interested don’t know, and the people who aren’t interested really care. This (like every other football coverage, on whatever channel) is conversation reduced to the level on an imagined pub conversation.

Imagined, because I think football fans are more interesting than TV presentation seems to believe. Certainly they have more cultural reference points than the pundits who’ve had ‘a lifetime in football’. (Why is that such a badge of honour? That’s just as limiting as a lifetime in pork sausages).

And certainly -- unless you’re a fair-weather, whoever’s-top supporter – they have a back-story of failure and disappointment and a great sense of the ridiculous.

THE FABULOUS BAKER BOY

Hence, I have welcomed Danny Baker back to Saturday morning radio like a Prodigal Son turning up on my birthday, Christmas and Wedding Anniversary all at the same time.

In Baker’s company, football is not longer po-faced and studiously self-absorbed. He reminds us that it’s a game, that it’s funny, and that for every minute of polished Premiership pomposity there are hundreds of hours of incompetence, mistake, accident, failure and arcane information (did you know that the Fairs Cup – predecessor of the self-inflated UEFA bandwagon – was so called because it was originally set up to promote international trade fairs?)

Baker’s strength is his breadth of reference. When commentating on an especially dull match in which nothing – in fact, less than nothing –had happened, he pointed out that the referee was called Mr Low. “And I wonder how many other referees are named after a David Bowie album”. 

Unless there’s someone lurking in the lower divisions called Damon Dogs, I expect the answer is none. But that’s not the point. Baker can make entertaining conversation from an empty paper bag. Listen to him for ten minutes, and you can hear the synapses making connection after connection, endlessly weaving stories, anecdotes and games into a tapestry of football trivia and fandom.

Here he is on the subject of Swindon goalkeeper Fraser Digby and the theft of his comb from the team changing room. Baker immediately tuned in to the humour inherent in the phrase ‘Fraser Digby’s Washbag’, and asked his listeners to set it to music.

It says more about football than pundits ever can.

Popularity: 59% [?]

 Three movies in a month; genuine, big screen, pay-for-your-ticket film experiences. So everything that follows is on current release, and you won’t have to change your LoveFilm order to see any of them.

 They’re all worth a view, although my recommendation might surprise:

 DISTRICT 9

Almost 30years ago  a  vast ship of aliens arrived above Johannesburg – and stayed. Once the human race got over the fact that they were here, a settlement was provided for the visitors.  Not exactly the Hilton by, hey, we made an effort. This has now grown and the novelty of having these tentacled bipeds around (nicknamed ‘Prawns’) has worn off. The locals want them moved on to a new site further away from the city.

 The film focuses on the administrator put in charge of the resettlement project (played by almost unknown Wikus Van De Merwe) . He’s a willing, enthusiastic middle manager who just happens to be the son-in-law of the Chief of Police.

 We follow him from first getting the commission, through the legal niceties of resettling the ‘Prawn’, and the problems he encounters through resistance in the camp, from both the Prawn and the criminals who have set up shop to exploit them further..

 Of course, this isn’t a film about aliens at all; it’s about race, and class, and division. It’s about prejudice and the rule of law. It’s also about finding common ground.

 It’s a big film, with impressive e aerial set pieces and a realsense of scope. It plays a little with convention – sometimes showing us ‘documentary footage’, sometimes presenting the action as drama. Think about this for too long, and you find that the writer and director are ‘cheating’ so that they can show us aspects that would otherwise be inaccessible. But that’s a minor quibble.

 The Van De Merwe character starts as a feeble yes man and evolves (literally) into a figure of deep beliefs, realising who his friends really are, and who he can trust. Among the  scale and the violence (which is sometimes rather comic book), he is a prism through which we can see the issues that are being played out, and how politicians will always appeal to the lowest common denominator when dealing with a contentious issue.

 A thoughtful work – much more thoughtful than its shoot-’em-up trailer – and  ultimately a political film. A compelling couple of hours.

 MOON

Like District 9, one of the immediately striking factors about Moon is its scale; except this time, we’re at the other end of the spectrum. Moon, at its core, is a one-man movie.

 Sam Rockwell has been one the far side of the moon for three years, the sole  employee on a mining base that’s excavating a valuable energy source and shipping it back to earth. He keeps in touch with his wife and daughter through video link, with only a talking robot-computer (the voice of Kevin Spacey) for company.

 His contract is about to run out and he’s due to return home. The fact that the film opens with a corporate video of his employers gives us warning signs that all is not as  it seems and that something bad will happen.

And indeed it does. He has an accident while out in a moon buggy, servicing one of the automated mining vehicles. Fade to black.

 The next scene starts with Rockwell laying in sick-bay, being tended by the in-house robot. And the immediate question is ‘how did he get there?’

 It’s been a while since a film kept me guessing for so long; not only about the miraculous return to base, but also the answer behind the answer, and the moral issues it raises. And there are many: the morality of science; the ethics of corporate behaviour; the sanctity of life; the nature of identity. For a small film, it has a vast philosophical sweep and packed with ideas

 The style and atmosphere owe much to budget 70s sci-fi, it’s nearest neighbour being Silent Running, the eco-fi film starring Bruce Dern with robotic chums Hewie, Dewie and Lewie. Indeed, in several scenes in Moon has Rockwell in a mini greenhouse, talking to his plants.

 It’s well-paced and shot with considerable confidence by first-feature director Duncan Jones. If you like your sci-fi on a lower key, with ideas at the fore, then Moon  (which still hasn’t received general release) is well worth a visit.

 CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS

“Hey, Paul has children. He has to go and see this kind of thing. Count me out.”

 Cloudy with an Chance… is the story of geeky-kid-come-failed inventor Flint Lockwood who lives in a tiny community in the middle of nowhere that is entirely dependent on sardines. Bored to tears (and seeing that perhaps there’s a limited future in the fish industry) Flint invents a machine that can convert water into food. An unhappy accident sends the machine skyward, and the next thing the population knows, it’s raining cheeseburgers.

 Mr Mayor sees this as a fantastic opportunity to get his tiny community on the map, and hijacks our hero to start ordering food to order. It snows choc chip ice cream; it hails sirloin steaks.

 And you think “Why is his wasting my time with a kids’ film?”

Because, despite the outstanding qualities of both District 9 and Moon, my movie of the month is Cloudy, and will almost certainly  be in my Top 10 Pick of the Year for any genre, in any form of entertainment. It’s brilliant.

 At surface level. it’s a well-told morality tale about greed. Can always get what you want? Perhaps it’s not such a good idea to keeping asking. It also has a lot to say about popularity, being different, obesity, and America’s obsession with surface. It’s beautifully designed and the stylised faces of the characters – from Flint’s saucer-like eyes to his father’s beautifully hirsute monobrow – make it a genuine cartoon.

 It’s also astonishingly inventive. OK, that can be said of all the Pixar / DreamWorks CGI output of the past 20 years. But this really does look like it’s been created by people on hallucinogenic substances. The food flotilla is like a Timothy Leary acid trip. It’s not just beautiful to look at; it’s seriously, worryingly weird.

 The relationships between the characters are well drawn and they matter. I’ll make no bones about it; on a couple of occasions I had a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye. Perhaps because the central story – the real core to the film – is the relationship between father and son, which speaks to me in both camps.

 But these moments we skilfully set contrast to the main emotion of the film: it’s very, very funny. Laugh-out loud funny. Embarrass your children funny. Have-the-people-in-front-of-you-turn-round-and-glare-at-you funny. 

 Why? Because it’s made by and for people who love film.

 The script, the graphics, the set pieces, the dialogue are littered with references to other movies. Not in a sign-posted, oh-look-here’s-a-Star-Wars image way. But by taking reference points from popular culture, lightly dipping them in food references, then leaving you to discover them for yourself.

 Indeed, I began to wonder whether the entire thing was a cinematic Rorschach Inkblot test, with me projecting imagery onto it. When Flint stands with arms outstretched, facing the sky, basking in a rain of cola, was that a reference to The Shawshank Redemption, or was he just standing that way because that’s the way you ‘d stand in a sheet of soft beverage?

 There’s a TV cameraman who looks a lot like a 3D, computer generated version of the squat Cousteau character in the Pink Panther TV cartoon. My imagination, or a conscious homage? And if so, why was he there?

 Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Cloudy with a Chance succeeds as all great comedies succeed. Not by funny one-liners nor by pratfalls, but by creating a bubble in which everything is funny. A world in which we anticipate and actively participate in making the humour work

 True movie magic.

Popularity: 100% [?]

It’s the hottest ticket in town; two of the greats of the Shakespearean stage (both who have crossed-over into Hollywood blockbusters) acting in the definitive play of the C20th.

This isn’t just ‘Waiting for Godot’: this is McKellen & Stewarts’ ‘Waiting for Godot.’

I studied the text as a 17 year-old, and managed to bluff my way through, not really understanding what was going on: Two tramps stand under a tree, talk about not very much, get interrupted by a man in a frock coat with a half-man-half-whippet servant at the end of a rope, then do it all over again in the second half.

Or, as one critic wrote at the time of its premier: “Nothing happens, twice.”

Revisiting it 30 years later, and it makes a lot more sense (my, how education is wasted on the young). Two people, locked in an embrace of mutual dependence, pass their days hoping for a revelatory experience that never arrives.

Suspended in perpetual non-time, Beckett’s view of the human condition is bleak indeed.  All that we have to sustain us is hope, but we live in a state of eternal disappointment.

Life is suffering.

So how do the two tramps – Estragon and Vladimir – keep going; more to the point, how does Beckett think we keep going? Partly through habit, partly self-delusion, party through humour. Much of its critical deconstruction over the past 50 years has pointed out that the two main characters are like a music hall double act, all patter and punchline. And so director Sean Mathias has set this production in a theatre, that is within the proscenium arch of the ‘real’ theatre is another proscenium arch, the remains of a a destroyed building to which Vladimir and Estragon return each evening to wait.

Maybe Godot is their agent? Maybe an impressario? A writer? Most importantly,  he’s a potential audience – which given the chosen setting for the production is the essence of it’s existential question: what is a performer without an observer?

At best, nothing. At worst, insane.

But the production immediately presents a paradox: there IS an audience, and we’re lapping it up. We’re in the presence of McKellen and Stewart, who are obviously reveling in the adulation that we are lavishing on them.

There is great warmth about their performance; they obviously enjoy each others’ company. The show I attended (Milton Keynes Theatre) was early in the national run – before it transferred to the West End – and already the schtick was as polished as Laurel & Hardy or Hope & Crosby. It’s a great double act, built on Beckett’s staccato dialogue, then layered with the baggage that the audience brings to the performance. Beyond Vladimir and Estragon, this is Captain Picard and Gandalf. No matter how bleak things get, it’ll be alright at the end.

And indeed it is, albeit outside the parameters of the play. At the curtain call, the two leads trip the light fantastic to centre stage, then dance like Flanagan & Allen to the wings, embracing the audience and extending the  double act to a trio: McKellen, Stewart and us.

In that moment, the importance of the audience is reinforced;  the fourth wall is completely broken and we’re let in on the joke. All this has been made up! It’s not real. All is well with the world. Thanks for coming, safe journey home, sleep well, happy days.

It’s the central conceit of the production (although not Beckett’s play) and its major failing. McKellen and Stewart are fantastic actors – the former has brilliant craft, the latter incredible presence – but throughout Matthias’ production, it’s very hard to forget who they are, because they keep reminding us that we’re in a theatre watching giants of the theatre play two old men from the theatre looking for an audience in a old theatre.

The evening is Beckett-lite. While his original vision is dark and bleak, with a seam of  black humour, this production is mainly vaudeville with an mild injection of seriousness. Perhaps that’s the only way to get a mass audience, and it’s hard to detract from a full house in a theatre that’s usually the venue for touring productions of ‘Buddy!’, tribute bands and soap-star pantomimes. It is a very entertaining evening, and at least it’s not another vapid collection of pop songs masquerading as a musical.

I just wish that they hadn’t all tried so hard to wrap everything in the warm, nostalgic glow of Morecombe & Wise.

Popularity: 2% [?]

‘In The Loop’ – satire of spin

Why do we visit the movies? Why do grown people sit in a dark room, watching flickering images dance on a screen?

For me it’s usually one of three reasons; to escape, to gain insight or to understand. Really good films provide two of the three; classics deliver on all fronts. I wrote recently to a couple of friends about ‘Chinatown’, and realised that Polanski’s masterpiece creates a noir world in which I have frequently been lost, gives me a deep look into the heart of darkness each time I watch it, and provides a clear history lesson on the foundation of Los Angeles.

Three out of three.

I hadn’t really given this a lot of thought until I emerged from seeing Armando Ianucci’s  “In The Loop”, and found that its 90 minutes left me feeling so much better. Certainly it’s funny, and instructive. But there is another quality which took me a large coffee to fully appreciate. It’s cathartic.

WHERE’D ALL THE GOOD PEOPLE GO?

Anyone paying only scant attention to the UK Parliamentary expenses farrago – and the ensuing Cabinet fall-out – has experienced a contour map of emotion. Incredulity at the porn. Laughter at the duck house and the moat. Disbelief at the flipping. Anger at the capital gains tax (avoidance). Bewilderment at the stupidity.

Then, just as the curtain was coming down on the final act, and The Telegraph coverage was running out of steam, they came back into the spotlight for an encore: How can I throw myself on my sword more dramatically than my colleagues? How can I ’send a message’ to win back public trust before I get fired?

And so James resigned to show that he loves ‘the Party’. Jacqui  went because she has been ‘hurt’. Beverley ‘wants to spend more time at home’ (if she can decide which one).  Hazel – the Communities Minister – pulled stumps on the morning of the local elections, while wearing a hilarious badge she’d found in her breakfast cereal, and couldn’t work out why it had caused such a fuss. Caroline swore undying allegiance to the PM, then got dropped from the first team, so told everyone that she was tired of being used a window dressing (while finding time to be photographed for a Chris de Burgh album cover.)

Just when you thought the dust had settled, the Foreign Secretary chose to tell the world that he was fully behind the leader (despite the fact that he had considered resigning around the same time as his best friend James, who he had now left high and dry.)

Which brings us to the final bump on the emotional Richter scale: disappointment. Sheer, bloody disappointment that Ministers of the Realm can be so totally, utterly average. That the leadership of a country can end up in the collective hands of a managerial cadaver that is so extraordinarily ordinary.

Don’t you have the overwhelming desire to see them grabbed by the lapels, shaken to their senses, and given  the Alex Fergusson hairdryer treatment?

Enter Malcolm Tucker.

TAKEN NO PRISONERS

Tucker is the lynchpin of  Ianucci’s political world in both ‘In the Loop’ and ‘The Thick of It’ , the BBC TV predecessor. Wiry, aggressive, machiavellian, manipulative, devious, completely without scruple or conscience, Tucker (as great a creation as Basil Fawlty and superbly played by Peter Capaldi) is the man who holds government together through fear, intimidation and emotional blackmail.

Actually, it’s mostly just fear.

He is surrounded by incompetents – hapless, bed-wetting, spineless apparatchiks who entered politics straight  from university and whose experience of life is limited to their gap year. Tucker, by contrast, is a street fighter. If he wasn’t running communications for the PM, he’d be doing the same for a drugs cartel or an international arms dealer. He thrives on conflict, control and being at the heart of power.

Rake thin, foul mouthed, running on Alpha male adrenalin, Tucker only has to flair his nostrils – and Capaldi has the best comedy nostrils since Kenneth Williams – to intimidate his prey and invite his audience to snort with derision.

Some say that both character and portrayal are based on Alistair Campbell, erstwhile spin doctor to the Blair project. Campbell says that there’s nothing here that he recognises, and that he found the film boring. Whatever its relation to reality (and Campbell certainly knows how to bend that to suit his purposes)  the film and TV series raise important questions about the role of unelected officials, the development of Policy ‘on the hoof’, the marginalisation of Parliament, and the way that an insatiable 24-hour media shapes political behaviour.

But for all its worthiness (and to be fair, it doesn’t preach in the slightest), the greatest enjoyment it delivers is the vicarious thrill of seeing over-promoted members of the political classes being tongue-lashed by a master of the game.

It’s why in our house, when an incompetent minister publicly lets a cat out of a bag, we say:

“It wouldn’t happen in Tucker’s time.”

Popularity: 43% [?]