Waterloo (Sergei Bondarchuk, 1970)

04 Monday Oct 2010

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Rod Steiger and the art of the nervous breakdown

Before CGI, if you wanted to film an epic battle scene, you had to stage one. Waterloo, the Soviet-Italian film by Sergei Bondarchuk, is one long battle scene, a triumph of manpower and logistics that required a cast of thousands.  To recreate the battlefield, Russian engineers bulldozed swathes of the Ukranian counrtryside, laying five miles of road and transplanting 5,000 trees. With some 15,000 Soviet foot soldiers and 2,000 cavalrymen as extras, during filming the director was said to be in command of the seventh largest army in the world.  They certainly don’t make them like this anymore, and for good reason: a box office flop, Waterloo cost £12m, at that time one of the most expensive films in history.

But for all its epic sweep, the film’s essential drama takes place in the mind of one man. Rod Steiger’s tour de force performance as the diminutive emperor is a study in physical and mental torment. He gives us the military genius riven by self doubt, a monstrous egomaniac obsessed with his own legacy, yet also oppressed by the burden of the myth he has created. For much of the film Steiger’s face is a clammy, seething mass of neuroses; his Napoleon is a Lear-like figure, raging against storms, corralling his generals while bent double with the stomach cancer he is fighting to conceal.

By contrast, Christopher Plummer as Wellington is every inch the unflappable English aristocrat, napping under a tree as his opponent’s forces mass in the valley.  Steiger’s performance came just two years after his portrayal of another troubled soilder in The Sergeant, the story of a gay US army officer struggling with his own repressed desires.

With scenes like the charge of the Scots Greys and the desperate final stand of the French Old Guard, Waterloo is undeniably exciting, boys-own stuff in the vein of historical war epics like 1964′s Zulu.  But in some respects it also prefigures the anti-war films of the post-Vietnam era. At the height of the battle a young man breaks from his unit and runs among the troops, pleading with both sides to stop the killing.  Later, as it scans the scarred landscape, the camera picks out his corpse lying among the dead.  The film closes with a long sequence in which Wellington surveys the carnage, sombre in victory, while Napoleon leaves in his carriage, a broken man.

Mirroring the madness of its subject with its own crazed ambition, Waterloo is a forgotten classic that deserves to be ranked among the finest war films of the ’70s.

Lord Uxbridge: Er-herm. Sir.
Duke of Wellington: [waking] Ah, Uxbridge.
Lord Uxbridge: As I am second in command and in case anything should happen to you, what are your plans?
Duke of Wellington: To beat the French. [goes back to sleep]

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower (Granta, 2009)

20 Monday Sep 2010

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In this supremely assured debut collection, Wells Tower’s sentences roll across the page in the kind of unflappably authentic American vernacular that will be instantly familiar to admirers of JD Salinger, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff. With prose that is tough yet supple, supremely crafted but apparently effortless, his mastery of voice allows him to tell stories with astonishing economy of means.

Tower’s work is frequently dark and often extremely funny. The pathos with which he treats his key themes of failure and dysfunction is apparent from the opening story ‘The Brown Coast’, in which the washed-up central character experiences a moment of deep personal empathy with a sea slug that resembles a turd. Tower’s stories do not end with Joycean epiphanies, but he shares Carver and Wolff’s knack for delivering, almost by sleight-of-hand, flashes of psychological insight revealed in the ordinary.

Much of this collection evokes a Middle America existing in an uneasy truce between civilisation and barbarity. Sublimated rage and desire lurk beneath its surface, with bad blood between sons and fathers a notable recurring theme. Several stories explore a sense of vulnerable, threatened masculinity: ‘Retreat’ is a backwoods male bonding tale about the love-hate relationship between two brothers, while in ‘Down Through The Valley’, a man endures a long, tense car drive with his estranged wife’s lover.

Yet Towers is nothing if not versatile, proving equally at home in the mind of a schoolboy or an 83-year-old war veteran. He excels when evoking the frustrated, yearning dream-world of adolescence, as in ‘Wild America’, the tale of an insecure teenage girl competing with her posher, prettier friend which, with its undercurrents of predatory sexual menace, echoes Joyce Carol Oates’ classic ‘Where Are You going Where Have You Been ?’

Despite his laconic, unflinching style,  Tower cares greatly about every one of his flawed, blind, struggling protagonists, whose predicaments are handled with tenderness and compassion.  His writing has wonderful natural rhythm and his eye for detail is breathtaking, showing a particular feel for the raw materials of the native landscape. He can slow down time, framing scenes  in the readers’ eye with cinematic clarity and intensity. So spare is the style that when Tower does allow himself a moment of terse poetry, he lights up the page with a line you want to read out loud.  Tower even lets his hair down with the final, eponymous story – an inspired, David Foster Wallace-style romp about ageing Vikings who are tiring of the rape-and-pillage circuit.

With Everything Ravaged, Wells Tower has distilled the achievements of a great literary and stylistic tradition and freshened it up with a post-modern glint in his eye. So addictive is his prose you will likely tear through this collection in a few short hours. This is a hugely enjoyable debut from an astounding young talent.

Klaus Nomi – ‘Lightning Strikes’ (1981)

10 Friday Sep 2010

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Had to share this bonkers video of uber-camp German countertenor Klaus Nomi covering Lou Christie’s ‘Lightnin’ Strikes’. Apparently his outfit is based on one worn by David Bowie on Saturday Night Live in 1979; Nomi supported Bowie as a backing singer and liked his giant tux so much he had one made for himself.

Though he died in 1983 of an AIDS-related illness, an animated version of Nomi appeared in an episode of cult US cartoon show The Venture Bros in 2006.  ’Klaus’ appears alongside Iggy Pop as one of Bowie’s henchmen, attacking his enemies with his falsetto and the over-sized bow-tie from his famous outfit.

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Is this is the future of the music video?

05 Sunday Sep 2010

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Ok, so here’s a cool thing. US director Chris Milk has invented the interactive personalised music video. The beneficiary is Arcade Fire’s We Used To Wait, a typically epic/anthemic meditation on origins,  hope, regret and the passage of time.  Milk’s website uses the latest technology to lend the film an eerie personal resonance.

Harnessing some of the possibilities of HTML 5, the next generation language  for multimedia web browsing, Milk simultaneously employs multiple browser windows to achieve a splitscreen, storyboard effect. Best of all, through the magic of Google Maps, the site allows you to put your childhood home at the centre of the film.

The result is spooky and affecting. Go there now.

30 Days Of Night (David Slade, 2007)

04 Saturday Sep 2010

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That rare beast, a vampire film you can get your teeth into

The recent glut of vampire movies is probably enough to sate even the most ardent fang-flick fancier, but 2007′s 30 Days Of Night is one you may have missed.  Based on the cult comic book of the same name, it’s a proper grown-up horror film – an exercise in bleak, existential terror.

Once a year in the remote snowbound town of Barrow, Alaska, the sun sets and does not come up again for an entire month. A pack of vampires discover this ideal hunting ground and, as the light dwindles, they descend on the town for a feeding frenzy.  Josh Hartnett plays the local sheriff trying to keep a handful of survivors alive long enough to see the dawn.

The plot may not be original, but in the hands of Hard Candy director David Slade and with Sam Raimi on production duties, the film’s execution is a cut above. Stark, minimal and strikingly shot, its relentless air of grim isolation harks back to John Carpenter’s 1982 masterpiece The Thing.  It features some brilliant set pieces and camerawork, including a stunning prolonged aerial shot as the vampires first lay waste to the town.

The bloodsuckers themselves are superbly realised.  These are old-school Nosferatu – ancient, feral and demonic, their black eyes and oval faces seemingly based on sharks. They behave like pack animals, loping over the roofs of the town and screeching like hyenas as their human prey huddle together in their hiding places. It’s great to see a film so true to the unvarnished spirit of these folk monsters. Danny Huston as Marlowe, the vampire leader, is particularly terrifying.

30 Days is a viscerally brutal film with some exceptionally graphic scenes. It’s uncompromising in its intensity and does not let up. Nor does it strive for cheap effect, the script remaining lean and understated right through to the end credits. Along the way it subtly explores its themes of family, community and sacrifice, without forgetting to serve up some gratifyingly kick-ass moments, such as when bearded man-haystack Beau Brower, the town outsider, takes on the fanged tribe in his snow-plough.

In a genre currently saturated with cynical teen-market remakes and torture porn, here’s a horror film with integrity. If you think Twilight sucks, try this.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (2004, Hodder and Stoughton)

04 Saturday Sep 2010

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The very definition of a mixed bag – but this book contains a glittering jewel of contemporary short fiction

With Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell tests his readers’ patience to the limit and gets away with it - just.  Half way through five of the book’s six stories, Mitchell breaks off – sometimes on a cliffhanger, sometimes in mid-sentence – and embarks on the next. Only the sixth story is presented without interruption, an apple core around which the others begin and conclude in sequence. Depending on your point of view this is either an audacious narrative device, or a thin pretext for stringing together a bunch of short stories and calling it a novel.

Sure, there’s a sprinkling of cross-references, and interlinking themes such as imperialism, anthropology and Nietzchean philosophy; protagonists encounter one another’s stories as texts, and some even share mysterious birthmarks: “Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies,” one character tells us suggestively.

This vague air of quasi-mysticism is one of Cloud Atlas’s weaknesses. Another is the degree of pastiche evident throughout, particularly in the first three stories – a journal of a 19th century sea voyage that riffs off Melville and Conrad; a string of confessional letters charting the misadventures of an amoral young aesthete in inter-war Belgium, which reads like John Banville; and a political conspiracy thriller which takes its cue from Watergate-era movies like The Parallax View and The China Syndrome. For another story, a blackly comic farce, Mitchell essentially relocates One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest to a retirement home in Hull.

Thankfully there are plenty of flashes of brilliance, and even at his most derivative Mitchell carries it off with enough verve to keep you turning the page.

But Cloud Atlas’s saving grace comes with the fifth story, ‘An Orison of Sonmi 451′, in which Mitchell delivers a glittering jewel of contemporary short fiction. It’s a slice of dystopian sci-fi set in the Korea of the far future – a totalitarian corpocracy presiding over a privileged class of passive consumers whose every whim is catered for by servile synthetic clones, or ‘fabricants’.  Sonmi is one such drone, her entire world circumscribed by the daily rituals of a fast food diner. The story of how she acquires self-knowledge, escapes her fate and becomes a talismanic figure in a secret resistance movement, is nothing short of scintillating.

Once again, Mitchell’s inspirations are less literary than filmic, paying tribute to the visions of Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner and George Lucas’ THX 1138.  But ‘Orison’ transcends its familiar premise, as Mitchell creates an entire culture in meticulous, glowing detail, a world at once thrillingly alien yet uncomfortably close to home. It’s a cautionary parable of mythic proportions, whose themes continue to resonate in the story that follows, set in an even further-flung future in which humanity has regressed to the iron age.

Mitchell is as at home with the edge-of-your-seat action sequence as he is painting rich narrative vistas.  A capricious talent, he tends to falter when he attempts profundity, but the versatility and potency of his imagination frequently dazzle. A fearless stylist who can turn his hand to almost anything, David Mitchell loves to take risks without a safety net. If you’re willing to forgive the occasional wobble, it’s a high wire act not to be missed.

2012 (Roland Emmerich, 2010)

12 Monday Apr 2010

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It’s the end of John Cusack’s career as we know it in this apocalyptic yawnathon

2012, as predicted by the Mayans, is the year the world will end. Solar flares have boiled the Earth’s core, unleashing a cataclysm of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis that threaten to ravage the planet’s landmass like so much pie crust.  Down on ground zero is Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), a divorced LA writer whose camping weekend with the kids turns into an epic battle to get his family to safety.

At the helm of this juggernaut is Hollywood’s  master of disaster Roland Emmerich, the man behind box office leviathans like Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow and 10,000 BC.

Sadly, the most spectacular thing about 2012 is quite how, armed with a blank-cheque budget, Emmerich has managed to mould his earth-shattering subject matter into something so prosaic and uninvolving.

The wheels start to come off early on, as the Curtis clan make their escape by car and plane from a crumbling LA.  In the hands of a Spielberg this would be heart-in-mouth stuff, as all around the fleeing family roads rupture, skyscrapers buckle and chasms gape.  But this is conveyor-belt calamity: as the world gives way beneath them, a hair’s-breadth from death, all Cusack and co can muster is a series of goofy “woooah!” reaction shots. There’s no real sense of danger or consequence. Even the CGI seems phoned-in.

Like its predecessors, 2012 invites us to take a perverse pleasure in witnessing the flimsy constructs of our civilisation topple, symbols of a global system as vulnerable to the avarice of bankers as it is to terrorist attack. Like the resurgence of the horror genre, the return of the disaster movie signals a new age of anxiety for modern audiences. It’s as if we feel ourselves to be living in a world of perpetual imminent collapse, captive to the opaque whims of government and insecure in the knowledge that the rich will always sell us out.

Sure enough, in 2012 the world’s elite buy themselves tickets to safety, leaving the rest of humanity to face unthinkable carnage. To offset this disconsolate message, the film feeds us a miniature morality play – apocalypse is the occasion for Cusack’s failed American father to gain redemption by saving his family from dysfunction and the rival claims of an interloper (his wife’s plastic surgeon boyfriend, played by Thomas McCarthy).

Along the way, Emmerich throws in some spurious emoting, as characters we barely know or care about say tremulous long-distance goodbyes to family members, mere moments before being swept to their deaths by gargantuan walls of water.

John Cusack looks decidedly sheepish throughout and decides to keep his head down as much as one can when one is the protagonist of a blockbuster. Meanwhile Woody Harrelson hams it to high heaven as a crazed conspiracy theorist, and Danny Glover as the President seems content to offer his services as a poor man’s Morgan Freeman.

Insulting in its emotional cheapness and bogus morality, 2012 is the end of the world as a sanctified Disney ride. Worse still, it’s a barely competent exercise that fails to deliver the goods even on its own terms.

Still, the sea looks cool.

Daniel Barenboim conducts the Berlin Staatskapelle @ Royal Festival Hall, 01/02/10

03 Wednesday Feb 2010

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In this series of concerts pairing Beethoven’s piano concertos with orchestral works by Arnold Schoenberg, Daniel Barenboim has found an inspired way of linking two musical revolutionaries who, though separated by centuries, are nevertheless kindred spirits.

The implication of this shared billing is that what Schoenberg did for the music of Brahms and Wagner, Beethoven did for the music of Haydn and Mozart – he made it ‘breathe the air of other planets’.  As if to underline these affinities, tonight in the Five Orchestral Pieces, Barenboim points up the underlying romanticism of Schoenberg’s string writing, which even as it leaves traditional harmonic language behind, is full of echoes of the 19th century.

This series of orchestral miniatures dates from before Schoenberg began to reign in his free-floating chromaticism by introducing the twelve-tone system that would lead to the formal constraints of Serialism.  Loosed from the moorings of tonality, these pieces are shimmering and exotic, with none of the dryness of later works.  In the elegiac solo cello and viola of the second piece, for example, there is surely beauty enough to appease the most conservative of ears.

Yet, judging by the tenor of several conversations during the intermission, these century-old compositions can still provoke perplexity in modern audiences. Though essentially introspective, along the way they manage to be by turns witty, bawdy, barbed and viscerally terrifying.  As juddering stabs of dissonant brass jolt us in our seats, it’s clear Schoenberg still has the power to shock and unsettle.

Barenboim and the superb Berlin Staatskapelle seem utterly at home in this music, and able to flit between the sound-worlds of the respective progenitors of Romanticism and Modernism with ease.  The pleasure Barenboim, conducting from the piano with some wonderfully flamboyant gestures, takes in the verve and wit of Beethoven’s second concerto is palpable. This music is in his blood. He conducts without a score and plays with the spontaneous air of a man observed through his living room window on a Sunday afternoon.

For the fourth concerto, arguably Beethoven’s greatest, we are in for an altogether different order of music-making.  As Barenboim launches into the darkly mysterious opening, we are instantly reminded of just how daring this music was, and of how modern much of it still sounds. With its epic scale, its filigree light and shade, and its superabundance of harmonic invention, the Fourth is like many concertos within one – a dazzling tumult of ideas perfectly realised.

While Barenboim relishes the virtuoso passagework, his approach is the antitheses of the steely precision of a Pollini – his Beethoven is all about flow.  The ear may detect the occasional fluffed note, but Barenboim’s playing has an unerring and irresistible sense of pulse. He gets better and better, dashing off a scintillating take on the first movement cadenza and showing rapt concentration and poise in the magnificent slow movement. Come the third movement Vivace, Barenboim is on fire. By the time he hits the last note he’s won himself a lengthy and unanimous standing ovation.

Star as he is, at the peak of his artistry tonight, one stopped thinking of Barenboim altogether and thought only of Beethoven, as if the composer himself were at the piano. And that is the most we can ask of any musician.

The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (Faber & Faber, 1957-60)

03 Thursday Dec 2009

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by Bolokovsky, guest contributor

When Lawrence Durrell published his teratology of novels The Alexandria Quartet (1957-60), he could hardly have been more out of step with the emerging new wave of British fiction.

For although Durrell was born a decade earlier than his near-contemporaries John Osborne, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe and Kinglsey Amis, the publication of the Quartet roughly coincided with Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), and Amis’ Take a Girl Like You (1960).

For Durrell, this new generation of British writers – the so called ‘Angry Young Men’ whose kitchen sink realism eschewed any form of glamour or exotica – epitomized everything that he characterized as ‘The English Death’. As he explained: ‘English life is really like an autopsy.  It is so, so dreary.”

By contrast, it’s impossible to understand Durrell without seeing him as he saw himself: a European. Durrell’s heroes were DH Lawrence, Richard Aldington, Robert Graves, Norman Douglas and T.S.Eliot – all writers who considered themselves Europeans first, and British citizens second.

Despite its unfashionable aestheticism, The Alexandria Quartet – comprised of Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958) and Clea (1960) – was a critical and commercial success. Set in Alexandria, Egypt, before and during World War II and taking modern love as their central subject, the four novels describe the same sequence of events from several points of view, allowing individual perspectives to change over time.

Durrell’s high art aesthetic makes no concessions to the reader, but the demands it makes are rewarded with writing which is superbly evocative of its ‘spirit of place’, Alexandria.  The city, a favourite haunt of the Greek modernist poet Cavafy whose unnamed presence pervades these novels, is conjured up in all its extravagant sensuality.

By comparison with the collection of dowdy sparrows that inhabit the work of his peers, Durrell’s characters are fabulous birds of paradise, brilliantly placed in this exotic setting. Alongside the central character/narrator Darley (who seems to represent Durrell), at least three other important figures in the Quartet are writers.

Of these, the most problematic is the novelist Pursewarden, the high priest of aestheticism, scattering aphorisms and philosophical and artistic pronouncements whenever he appears. His portrayal borders on caricature, and at times it is difficult to accept that his pretensions are meant to be taken seriously; nonetheless he, alongside the cross-dressing rogue Scobie, and the alluring Jewess Justine, remain wonderfully memorable characters.

Durrell’s prose, as he describes sexual couplings and political intrigues among the streets and cafe’s of Alexandria, and evokes the atmosphere of the surrounding countryside,  sea, and islands, is startling visual, ornate and intricately worked. Particularly in the first novel Justine, Durrell allows his poetic sensibilities to flow unrestrained, saturating the text with beautiful imagery and an almost febrile intensity.

Durrell himself was critical of his ornate style. In an interview with The Paris Review in 1959, he said of his prose: ‘It’s too juicy…I always feel I am overwriting. I am conscious of the fact that it is one of my major difficulties.”

These self-acknowledged weaknesses aside, at his best Durrell can be compared to such supreme modern prose stylists as Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike and John Banville.  Like them, Durrell may be criticised as favouring style over substance, or accused of being overly elitist and esoteric.

But to the appreciative reader, The Alexandria Quartet is the work of an artist using the full palette of his genius to create an intoxicating mixture of sensual imagery and unforgettable characters.

Susan Boyle – I Dreamed A Dream (Sony) 23/11/ 09

01 Tuesday Dec 2009

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Here is a voice that has had to swim the vast ringing spaces of Simon Cowell’s cynicism in order to reach us.

Perhaps this explains why for much of I Dreamed A Dream Susan Boyle sounds like she is singing in a wind tunnel. This is not helped by the fact that her much-vaunted vocal assets have been heavily treated – pumped up with the studio equivalent of Botox.  It adds to the artificiality of her already mannered vocal technique, which (perhaps at the insistence of her voice coach) consists largely of piling on layer after layer of wobbling vibrato.

Which isn’t to say there isn’t a voice here, of sorts.  On rare moments when Boyle relaxes into her natural midrange, you can hear it – a kind of long-breathed warble, with enough power to worry the edges off the custard creams in the church halls of West Lothian.

Contrived it may be, but Boyle’s Elaine-Paige-on-steroids singing style is at least preferable to the nasal histrionic whinnying that now seems compulsory for new pop acts.  The fact that she offers an antidote to the generic urban/RnB template surely goes a long way to explaining Boyle’s staggering popularity.

And there’s another saving grace: Cowell has been merciful – there is no opera here.  Instead the repertory ranges from predictable anthems like the title track, through contemporary stadium-pop and the odd nod to her church roots with the likes of Amazing Grace and Silent Night.

Boyle’s take on Wild Horses, the Jagger/Richards paen to the heaven-and-hell pull of heroin, is downright eerie. There’s even a stilted, bloodless rendition of The Monkee’s Daydream Believer that hooks the song up to an iron lung and drains every last dreg of Pop life out of it.  At times the track order is bizarrely incongruous – one minute Boyle’s going all breathy and Bette Midler on us for Cry Me A River, and the next, she’s wading into a pious rendition of Great Thou Art.

There’s a sort of implied biographical narrative underpinning these song choices, which seem to soundtrack Boyle’s years of thwarted ambition and strangulated passion as she stayed at home to care for her ailing mother.

It’s ironic, then, that Boyle, despite striving for effect to an almost fatiguing degree, seems incapable of investing any of these songs with a scintilla of authentic feeling. This is un-music, manicured with pitiless efficiency by Cowell’s production team, with any vestiges of what might have made Boyle’s singing distinctive carefully airbrushed out of the aural picture.

What I Dreamed A Dream exhibits most powerfully is an overwhelming self-consciousness, a morbid awareness of itself as product.  Even as it insinuates itself into our lives, soundtracking our weddings and work-do’s, this record is harbouring a sneaky secret: it’s not really on our, or the music’s, side at all.

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