Dino De Laurentiis Has Died

Sad news.  One of the greatest producers of camp, and schlock, films, in the history of cinema, has died.  Dino De Laurentiis, among other films, produced La Strada, Serpico, Flash Gordon, Conan movies, a King Kong remake, Barbarella, Dune (one of my favourite films), and four Hannibal Lecter sequels.

Review: The Social Network

David Fincher has been making Hollywood films since 1992, but it was fifteen years ago that he became a critical and commercial favourite with the stylish, dark and shocking Se7en.  Since then, he has made a handful of classic films, as good in their way as anything by Hitchcock or Kubrick, the directors he is most often compared to, in terms of theme and visual originality: Fight Club, and Zodiac.  He has also made a few mediocre films, like Panic Room and that Benjamin Button fiasco.  Zodiac marked a new level of maturity for the director - for that film is justifiably admired for its open-ended, Checkovian (nothing much happens) manner, combined with a low-thrumming menace.  Fincher is, notably, best at mise-en-scene.  He is, like Michael Mann, a stylist first and foremost.

Therefore, his new film, The Social Network, seems an anomaly, though it is about male competition, a regular concern.  It is not about violence (physical anyway) and is not particularly twisty; it also affords few obvious visual treats.  Instead, Fincher has made his masterpiece, with the genius of contemporary fast-paced dialogue, Aaron Sorkin.  I think this movie is one of the best of the new century, and is a sort of hyper-new Citizen Kane - a Citizen Com.  The Kane comparison is not merely cheap or idle - this film, too, charts the lonely rise of a media tycoon, who sacrifices true friendship along the way to the top, to build a questionable empire.  Both films feature a media start-up, exuberant early promise, madcap dialogue, and a dramatic structure that uses flashback to seek the truth.  Both are also centered in California, ultimately.

The Social Network's major achievement is its total transcendence of its supposed topic - a billionaire computer geek.  From the start, when we see a young Zuckerberg wending his way through Harvard Yard, with Trent Reznor's subtly ominous score, a sense of foreboding is built up, so that the title card, telling us this is 2003 hits with something of the impact of the cards in Schindler's List.  We are shocked to realise we are witnessing the making of a phenomenon that is insidious and has maximum culture-changing impact, almost in real time.  Never a docu-drama, the movie maximises the editing options, soundtrack, cinematography, and lighting, to create a hyper-real, very tense, and always entertaining battle of the wits between the uber-men of Harvard and the computer twits.  The film's anti-hero is a cypher, appropriately, as wired-in, and self-directed as any arch-villain in a comic, but also very normal, even sad.  His last act, of friending Erica Albright/Albrecht reminds us that Albright is his Rosebud - the early loss of genuine human contact that triggers a velocity of empty ascension; and her name also echoes the great renaissance artist and theorist.

Ultimately, the key line of dialogue, the key trope is the sentence "can we speak alone" - used several times in the film at key moments to indicate a breakdown of communication, in a public space.  In these instances, the poignant paradox of Facebook is glossed: there is no private space anymore now, and no one again will be able to really "speak alone".  The horror of the film is that a potentially antisocial genius has invented a new form of human communication that utterly transforms the landscape of human interaction. Five specs out of five.

Film Illiteracy

Now that the Guardian has listed its top 25 films in 7 categories (Horror, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Action, Art-House, Comedy, Crime and Romance) I must observe the following - any list of the top 175 movies which does not include, in no order, Shane, The Third Man, The Silence of the Lambs, 20 000 Leagues Under The Sea, Fantasia, Rambo, The Shawshank Redemption,  Lawrence of Arabia, Mr. Majestyk, Ice Station Zebra, The Poseidon Adventure, The Wrath of Khan, Pretty Woman, The Elephant Man, Out of Africa, Sophie's Choice, Schindler's List, The Sting, Jaws, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Midnight Cowboy, Titanic, or An Officer and a Gentleman, can hardly be said to represent the best of genre films.  On the other hand, it is good to see Mulholland Dr., Pulp Fiction, Touch of Evil, Vertigo, Peeping Tom, Days of Heaven, and a few other classics, there.

Will Brooker On The Twilight Saga's Soundtracks

"Well, you built up a world of magic," Hayley Williams taunts, halfway though the Paramore track "Brick By Boring Brick", "because your real life is tragic." If it's a dig at fans of Stephenie Meyer's supernatural romance saga, Twilight, it's a particularly snide one - as Paramore contributed two tracks to the movie soundtrack. But it hits hard and hurts, like a bitchy heel-stamp, because it fits the stereotype.The Twilight fan of popular caricature has graduated from Harry Potter's Hogwarts only to mope around magic college, mooning over pale vampires and buff werewolves.

The Twilight franchise is the cultural equivalent of an emo teenager's bedroom, with all its melancholy self-indulgence and its unattainable pin-ups. More specifically, it's a teenage girl's bedroom. Twilight's protagonist, Bella Swan, is effectively a blank, a screen for the viewer to protect herself onto and into, and be faced with the deliciously difficult choice of choosing between two hot young men, Edward Cullen and Jacob Black. Twilight is, or so opinion has it, a wish-fulfilment fantasy for the kind of adolescent girls who dye their clothes black, doodle skulls in their schoolbooks, and write bad poetry.

Which makes me wonder what I'm doing, as a straight male academic on the wrong side of forty, owning all three Twilight film soundtracks and listening to them way more than I expected.

I could justify it in terms of my official commitment to cinema and my personal passion for photography, which would be true but not the full story; Twilight and its promotional imagery are visually arresting, but they're
not what fully captivates me. I could deny it's because of the hot young men, which would be a complicated half-lie: looking at the 17 year old actor Taylor Lautner's body - his abs and pecs carved from gleaming mahogany - I'm hit with a weird mixture of admiration, resentment and determination to do more sit-ups.

But above all, it's the world that draws me in. Sure, it's a world of magic. But as Morrissey once noted, much of what gets us through our own lives (and yes, they're sometimes tragic) is the knowledge that "there is another world, there is a better world. Well, there must be." There's nothing especially childish about the idea of slightly-shifted alternate universes: science fiction, from Michael Moorcock to Phillip Pullman, depends on the concept. Twilight, like a host of other popular narratives before it, builds a world just a little different to our own, and invites us to cross over.

There's an obvious pleasure, as evidenced by countless fan websites, in mastering the details of that world, its rules, histories and taxonomies. I'm not committed enough to investigate and memorise every member of the
Quileute tribe and Cullen family, or the intricacies of their interlinked backstory. I'm too old, with too much real-life stuff to worry about, to dig deeply into Meyer's mythology. But I can understand in a moment why it would be important to a fifteen year-old, bound by stupid rules and lacking control in her own world, to enter this alternative sphere, to know it intimately, to master it, to gain an expertise in something she owns for herself. It's not about wishing the two hottest boys at school would compete for your attention - or it's not just about that. It's about having something truly your own.

At the margins of Twilight, I can only glimpse those pleasures. But for all the easy criticism levelled at the films, they contain moments of astonishing beauty: most obviously, in their roaming aerial shots over Washington's forests, but also in the way they use visual effects not just for obvious scenes of CGI combat, but to create striking, memorable images.

And those moments are often woven so tightly with a particular song that the soundtrack inevitably brings the image back to mind. The stunning, five-minute tracking shot that simply circles around Bella in her room - we
watch the seasons change, while she, sunk into depression, sees nothing - is carried by Lykke Li's "Possibility", with its painfully resigned lyric "there's a possibility. all that I had is all I'm goin' get." The sequence where red-headed vampire Victoria flees through the forest from Jacob's werewolf clan, an autumnal streak against the green and brown, pounds with the fuzzy bass and telegraph-taut drums of Thom Yorke's "Hearing Damage".

There's a haunted other world in those songs - a world not just of vampires and werewolves, but a world of teenagers, who feel things harder, deeper, stronger than adults. It's a world of intense emotional pain, where a
romantic break-up, even after just a few months, can stop the seasons. But it's also a world of heightened beauty. It's a world we all lived in, and a world we have, for the most part, left behind. As adults, we don't tend to feel those highs or lows anymore. Even music, which used to transform the world and shape our lives, becomes just background.

The magic of the Twilight soundtracks - all three of them - is that they remind me what music used to feel like. Walking by the river, at Kingston, on an autumn evening, as sunset turned to dusk, I had Band of Horses in my headphones from the Twilight: Eclipse album, declaring "Life on Earth / is changing." And it felt true; the world was briefly cast in amber light, and transformed into a music video where everything was precious and doomed.

Sure, Twilight's an adolescent world of magic. But sometimes we need more magic, and sometimes it's good to remind yourself how it feels to be an adolescent.

Dr. Will Brooker (pictured) is Director of Research for Film and TV at Kingston University, UK.  He is the author of the BFI film classics Star Wars, and books on Alice in Wonderland and Blade Runner, among others, and is an expert on fan fiction.  He is a contributor to Eyewear, as photographer and cultural ruminator.

Forget It Jake, It's Chinatown

As The Guardian observes today, Joe Mantell, sadly, has died.  As they also note, for a little-known character actor, he got to say some very famous movie lines.  Arguably, his "forget it Jake, it's Chinatown" is the greatest last line of any film, barring perhaps "I am having an old friend for dinner" and "Nobody's perfect", so he was lucky - but also talented, he imbued that brief sentiment with so much ambiguous darkness it carries a whole social vision of hell on earth with it.

The Week Hollywood Died

It's been a bad week for American cinema.  It seems hard to imagine another seven days or so in which so many generations of Hollywood died off, one after the other.  First, Gloria Stuart died - the actress with the incredible career from the James Whale and James Cameron periods.  Then the director Arthur Penn died - he who helped to announce the new wave of American counter-culture with the splatteringly subversive and sexy Bonnie & Clyde, still one of the great films about American violence.  And, the same day, Sally J. Menke, Tarantino's closest collaborator and editor of all his films, starting with Reservoir Dogs, died - closing another period of American cinematic style.

And, then, today, Tony Curtis, Bronx-born legend of bedroom and bedroom farce, the greatest male comedic sex symbol (the greatest female one was Monroe), and the last of his era's titans, died.  His career was really only 15 years, from Houdini in 1953 to The Boston Strangler in 1968, with perhaps a half-dozen great roles, in Trapeze, The Sweet Smell of Success, Some Like It Hot, The Defiant Ones, and Spartacus (plus the first two mentioned).

What a bad week.  Greats, gone.  We have their films.

Buried and Frozen

Two new movies out now in Britain - Buried and Frozen - chart terrifying ordeals by people caught in a single location - a coffin, or a chair-lift above howling wolves.  Psycho introduced us arguably to the psychopathology of the film experience - Peeping Tom had made audiences recoil a year before.  Now, viewers have been groomed to want, and expect, more sadism, more suffering.  Where once audiences cheered on heroes or ordinary people (they laughed, they cried) now they sneer, jeer and cheer as victims are tortured, mutilated, humiliated, and forced to endure the most nightmarish of scenarios.  There is no doubting the force of "car crash" viewing - some spectacles demand our begrudging, horrified looking - but is pandering to such a looking the best use of the filmic art?  I myself think both films are likely to be suspenseful, well-oiled, and, worst of all, entertaining.  Yet, how will this trend pan out?  As we aim ever more tightly at the heart of the isolated human being in extremis, what shall we, as viewers, hit?  Truth, beauty, or a lowered humanity, on the bestial floor among the gum and stale popcorn.

Eddie Fisher Has Died

Sad news.  Eddie Fisher has died.  Times change: Fisher was once one of the most famous people on the planet, a teen heart-throb easily as known as Lady Gaga is today, and his marriages and love liaisons were huge news.  Today, I wager, he is barely recognised as a musician or public figure.  One of his daughters has become iconic, though, for her roles in the Star Wars films, first iteration: the wonderful actor and writer, Carrie Fisher.

Kevin McCarthy Has Died

Sad news.  The great character actor Kevin McCarthy, best-known for his role in the original sci-fi poli-sci film classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, recently died. In an odd coincidence, the film was seen as a commentary on McCarthyism; Joe McCarthy was no relation. His ultimately-paranoid performance has become a benchmark for the genre, and the movie introduced the idea of "pod people" into the imaginative lexicon of North American suburbia - where unthinking ideological "mind absorption" seemed to have struck all those zombified by the Eisonhower-era.  "They're here already!  You're next!" could be the rallying cry for any concerned citizen though - afraid of either immigrants or the Tea Party.  Several times remade, never bettered. 59 years later, it remains one of the must-sees of the period.

Claude Chabrol Has Died

Sad news.  Great French new wave director Claude Chabrol has died at the age of 80.

Danger Factor: Infinite

When I worked as a screenwriter for children's television in the 1990s, for the likes of HBO, Paramount, Hanna-Barbera, Alliance-Atlantis and the CBC, I was sometimes called upon to write "bibles" for shows.  One of the chapters was usually on the "danger factors" or "violence levels" for the kids at home - or, to put it plainly - could they repeat this at home, and die or kill or wound or injure themselves in the process?  Most of the shows I worked on wanted to avoid, at all costs, danger levels that could or might lead to a child being hurt, in any way - and indeed, psychologists worked with writers often, to strike a proper balance.  This sort of concern might surprise some industry-watchers, who consider everything aimed at children as cynical or profit-led, when, in fact, and not just to avoid litigation (but that too), quality is often uppermost in the creators' minds.

Not so with the cartoon-like live-action superhero movie of the summer, just out on DVD, Kick-Ass.  I saw it last night, finally, and was amused and appalled in equal measure.  Kick-Ass reads like a rather obvious inversion of the Spider-Man arc (and cites this influence often): a nerdy high-school kid takes on a new life as a costumed crusader.  This time around, the boy gets to sleep with his crush, has no powers to speak of and is beaten to a pulp, and lives in a world where the bad guys and other heroes are equally cruel and vicious.  Notably, Big Daddy, an ex-cop seeking revenge for his wife's death at the hands of a kingpin crime-lord, has trained his little daughter, Hit-Girl, to take bullets in her stride, and use most knives and firearms with lethal force.

Kick-Ass is subversive, fun, and sometimes thrillingly nihilistic.  It would be amoral not to recognise, though, that, while it is "just good clean fun" that phrase needs to be retooled for the 21st century with its denuded values, and recalled as "just good dirty fun" - because Kick-Ass is also Sick-Ass.  The sight of an 11-year-old child sadistically murdering people (she kills perhaps 50 or 60 onscreen, often in gruesome ways) dressed in a kinky outfit with a purple wig and mask, and using - among others - the "c-word" - is of course wildly unexpected and therefore entertaining.  Indeed, the film's own characters allude to her Nabokovian charms.  It is also - I hate to party-poop on a major franchise that everyone loves - wrong.

Perhaps because it is wrong it appeals - it could hardly appeal for being vanilla-nice.  No, the makers of this film have trod on the dreams of childhood innocence and woven a crazy tapestry from the remaining shreds.  How can a young actor be made to speak such lines, and kill so many?  We live in a bizarre world, now - one where pornography, violence, and outrage are broadly encouraged and applauded, but where expressions of faith or conviction are often derided.  As Lady Gaga recently suggested, we are living through the Apocalypse.  Perhaps not.  But this ain't Kansas, either.

Batgirl Returns!

Eyewear is pleased to feature the second of a series of Batgirl portraits from the film academic and photographer Dr Will Brooker, of Kingston University. What next?  And why that cheek-smudge?

Bourneography, or, On First Looking Into Anna Chapman

Philip Noyce directed one of my favourite films, Dead Calm, an utterly thrilling (and romantic) movie about a bereaved couple and a handsome madman on an isolated yacht (based on an idea by Orson Welles for a movie).  Then he directed a lot of big-budget thrillers based on Tom Clancy, some a little hit and miss.  Angelina Jolie, who stars in his new film, Salt, is a curious actor - although world-famous - she has been in relatively few good films - and, more interestingly - alternates between action blockbusters like Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Wanted, and more intelligent worthy dramas like The Changeling, A Mighty Heart and fusions of the two like Beyond Borders.  She worked with Noyce last century in The Bone Collector, so they have a history.  Salt wants to be a franchise like the Bourne trilogy - that most influential of all genre movies of the 00s, reshaping Bond and the style of all subsequent thrillers.  It has a good shot at this aim.

It's not as fun, smart, or fire-on-all-cylinders as other chase-em movies, though - one thinks of The Fugitive as the classic of this kind of pic; nor as sinister-slick as Telefon, Winter Kills, The Manchurian Candidate, or any number of sleeper-spy movies it also borrows from.  I enjoyed the first act immensely - Salt's escape from CIA HQ is cool and fast-paced up to her rendez-vous with the Russian president.  I had a few problems with the spider venom (far too obvious why it is needed) telegraphed by the silly detail of her having a spider-scientist for a husband (a wasted August Diehl, so good in Inglourious Basterds) - and the identity of the second Russian mole, while not immediately a dead give-away, is hardly surprising.  The actual plot (or web of intrigue, natch) is too silly for words - and actually impossible to execute, based on about a million things going exactly to plan.  "Day X" is kicked off in a way that, working backwards, actually makes no sense.

That being said, Jolie kicks serious butt, and does a few amazing stunts, killing a baddie in the last reel in one of the most astonishing ways I've ever seen.  It is odd, but we never see this amazing killing machine in a T-shirt - her arms are always sleeved - because Jolie is sadly near -anorexic in look, and her arms have no muscles (she is no Linda Hamilton) - but she kicks and leaps and clings to walls and trucks like Spider-woman.  I found the "War Games" scene at the end sort of exciting, however, again, nonsensical (the use of a machine-gun to breach a top-secure room is just dumb, and ricochets would have killed Salt).  The very end is, like the Dark Knight, or the recent Robin Hood, an attempt to establish the myth of a loose-canon outlaw working beyond the margins of society and civilisation, hunted and hunting.  Seen as a bit of a spoof, and with a few satisfying moments, Salt is a mid-level actioner worth paying to see on a big screen.  I'd even go to Salt II.  But it doesn't compete with Anna Chapman.

Maury Chaykin Has Died

Sad news, the American-born Canadian character actor Maury Chaykin has died.  His mother was Canadian, and he gravitated to Toronto in the 1970s, making his name as an ACTRA stalwart in any number of TV shows and films.  By 1990 he was making it into major movies, and at the end of his career, and life, was recognisable to a whole new audience for being on the popular Entourage.  Chaykin was physically striking, and unruly or slovenly, able to skew bad or simply schmuck as the script demanded - indeed, he was one of the great character actors of the last few decades.  Gifted with a superb voice and presence, he often stole the show.  He will be much missed.

My Voyage In Art

Not mine, actually, but Michael Lawrence's.  Lawrence is a fascinating, multi-talented painter, sculptor, and writer, based on the Greek island of Hydra, where he has his studio.  Lawrence, widely collected by Hollywood types like Oliver Stone, was greatly influenced by his mother and father, who were, if not Hollywood royalty, then within the palace walls: his father was famous film noir actor Marc Lawrence, who often played memorable heavies; and his mother was novelist-screenwriter Fanya Foss.  They moved to Italy in the 50s, and befriended many European and expat artists and actors there.  Returned to LA as a teen, Michael went to high school with Jim Morrison, of The Doors.  Lawrence's exuberant, joyous, playful, and colourful paintings, prints, sketches, and watercolours are inspired by Fellini, Tati, and in general represent a carnivalesque vision, referencing poetry, film, and other cultural signposts, as well as the sunny, sometimes erotic, lifestyle of the Greek islands.  He is an artist worth getting to know.  His book, My Voyage in Art, is a good intro to the man and his work.

Tom Mankiewicz

Sad news.  A super screenwriter, Tom Mankiewicz, has died.  He wrote the screenplay for Eyewear's favourite Bond, Diamonds Are Forever, as well as Live and Let Die, and several others.  He also created and directed the kitsch classic TV series Hart to Hart.  Mankiewicz was related to the writers of Citizen Kane, and All About Eve, and as a script doctor became legendary in Hollywood, salvaging, for instance, Mario Puzo's Superman script.  He will be missed.

Patricia Neal Has Died

Sad news.  Oscar-winning Patricia Neal has died.  She acted in a number of films, but stands out in Hud, co-starring with Paul Newman.  Hud is one of the great films, and one of Eyewear's favourites.  Neal was married to the writer Roald Dahl, and divorced him finally after a marital betrayal on his part.  She had important roles in The Fountainhead and The Day The Earth Stood Still, and a classic episode of The Waltons.  She suffered a stroke in her late 30s and overcame disability to act again.  She will be missed.  She had a rare quality.

The World Cup Of Love?

Cruz and Bardem, the top Spanish film couple of all time, and possibly the two sexiest humans alive (present company excepted, dear Eyewearers!), have been married.  Lots of confetti!  I thought Cruise-Kidman was big.

Sympathy For Mel?

Evelyn Waugh, a bit of a rascal, was asked how he could be a Catholic with his wicked ways.  He replied something to the effect - imagine what I'd like be like if I wasn't one?  The same applies, tenfold, to Mr. Gibson.  An apparent wife-threatener, hater of minorities, and police officers, he seems to be battling demons, the bottle, a lot of rage, and lord knows what else.  I feel for him, but also for those who must have to cope with his tantrums.

So - the question is - what does the film world do with this man?  He is rich enough to bankroll his own films - and his last one was a work of near-genius.  But as an actor, he may be toast.  That would be a shame.  Plenty of actors and actresses have been troubled and trouble - to say the least.  Brando, for one.  Gibson is not a Val Kilmer, to be discarded.  He needs good commercial roles.  In Edge of Darkness he was startlingly compelling as a doomed angry and violent cop - he was channelling what he is, into his art form.  If he was a poet, or painter, we might call him a tragic genius, like Pound or Pollock.  Instead, we revile him.  I say, condemn the sin, and try to get the sinner to get back to work.  But if he is found guilty of beating anyone, he should have the full weight of the law down on him like a ton of bricks.  His soul can wait for a later judgement.

Ronald Neame Has Died

I have always enjoyed genre movies, and B-movies, and disaster movies.  Ronald Neame directed the greatest of these, The Poseidon Adventure, a classic Hollywood kitsch-fest that has made the idea of a fat lady swimming underwater en route to "The Holy Land" both deeply moving and faintly comic.  Nor can we forget the pathos of the tough NYC cop played by Borgnine losing his wife to a sudden jolt, fall and fireball ("Linda!!!"), or Gene Hackman's tormented Vatican II priest dying to save his unlikely comrades on the cross of an inverted door-wheel.  Remakes have done much to prove the commercial genius of the original, whose humour, humanity and sense of adventure (indeed) have yet to be recaptured in any such flick since.  Neame made other films, but my other 70s favourite by him is The Odessa File, which manages to capture the gritty feel of the period, with a superb performance by a young Jon Voight.  The scene where he avoids being crushed by a Berlin metro car is exciting, and one of my favourites, as is the shoot-out in a disused factory. A master has died.