The Tree of Life (2011): prophetic, symbolic and magnificent.

The Tree of Life starts something like a fragmented family drama.  It soon moves onto an incredible sequence which is almost like an abstract portrayal of the history of the universe, narrowing down to a history of the Earth.  Malick takes all the many patterns of life and existence– from microbiotic organisms to interstellar structures – and creates the most majestic collage. (I couldn’t help being reminded of that sequence at the end of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

The film evolves to focus on the story of Jack, son of a God-fearing American couple.  It follows his journey from birth through childhood as he grows to makes sense of the world and struggles with his complicated adolescent emotions.  The main plot follows Jack and his family, but the film remains universally relatable as it encompasses truly vast themes: life, death, love, hate, childhood, adulthood, parenthood, god, religion, nature, man, gender, sexuality, guilt, fear, shame, happiness, forgiveness, sacrifice…the list goes on.

Nearer the end it becomes highly symbolic, most notably repeating representations of doorways, passageways, bridges, circles, planets, suns, stars, waves, water, trees, hands, the sky and other loaded imagery which will inspire a complex of interpretations.

Ultimately, The Tree of Life is wholly philosophical and its messages are prophetic, discursive and intuitive.  The juxtaposition of the greatest and smallest pieces of the universe gives the human drama a context that is humbling to say the least.  Malick incredibly manages to underline the relative insignificance of man, whilst presenting an emotive human story.  Malick has created an avant-garde masterpiece with mainstream appeal.

Drive (2011): Tarantino would be proud

Nicolas Winding Refn has obviously been influenced a lot by Tarantino.  I think this not just because of the intermittent scenes of graphic violence, but because of the use of a widescreen aspect ratio, the long shots, a mostly still frame and slow cutting.  This visual stillness and the introverted calm of Ryan Gosling’s character provide a disquieting sobriety which balances out the occasional bit of mutilation.  Drive handles some of the most disturbing portrayals of cold-blooded murder in cinematic history with undeniably cool style.  I was immediately reminded of Pulp Fiction and Resevoir Dogs mostly; but the film could be paying tribute to any one of Tarantino’s twisted takes on gangster drama.

An 80s-esque electro soundtrack mixed with the neon-pink titles and cityscapes make this film cry out to be sat next to Tarantino’s filmography as well as classic gangster dramas like Scarface.  Like Tony Montana, Gosling’s driver starts the film as a nobody.  Unlike Pacino’s egomaniacal anti-hero, however, Drive’s protagonist remains a nobody.  The main song in the soundtrack, A Real Hero by College, sums up the driver’s story as it plays over an unsurprisingly down ending with the lyrics “you’ve proved to be a real human being and a real hero” repeating over and over.

Gosling, along with Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman provide captivating characters to drive along a fairly minimal plot.  As much happens off-screen as it does on-screen in this film and that really allows the audience to invest their own imagination into the film to fill in the gaps; making for a more rewarding viewing experience, in my opinion.  A very solid effort by director Winding Refn, Drive is an intriguing, minimalist crime drama that is satisfyingly sure of its genre and cinematic influences.

The Artist (2011): the beginning of an era.

I love the simplicity of early cinema and how it gives you a glimpse of history in glorious 4:3.  In the Lumière Brothers and Georges Méliès films circa 1895, you see people who existed more than a century ago moving about before your very eyes.  The celluloid is scratched and flickers erratically between the black and white images of ghost-like figures as they go about their daily business or present a fantastical play.  Early narrative cinema of the 1910s and 20s has a simple modesty as filmmakers experimented to create storytelling conventions in the medium of cinema – many of which are still used today.  Any cinephile has a romantic attachment to the silent era, because that’s where it all came from.  There’s no wonder why director Michel Hazanavicius chose to create homage to cinema in his 2011 monochrome silent The Artist.  As he says in January’s Sight & Sound: “The real star of the story is Hollywood.”

The film is set in 1920s Hollywood at the peak of the silent era.  It follows the decline of a star and the birth of another as the young studio system copes with the advent of sound on film.  The transition from ‘movies’ to ‘talkies’ meant silent star George Valentin is left in the dust as the young, vibrant Peppy Miller makes herself heard in the world of showbiz.

Sound is obviously one of the most important aspects of The Artist.  This isn’t strictly a silent film, but a tribute to silent films.  The soundtrack includes expressive music to simulate the musicians which would accompany a film in 1920’s theatre houses.  Hazanavicius plays with the audience in the opening scene however, by blurring the lines between diegetic and non-diegetic sound.  He further plays with the idea much later in the film with a dream-sequence in which Valentin can suddenly hear crystal clear diegetic sound, yet his voice remains mute.  These little gags are weaved into the film’s subject matter and give the whole thing a great sense of cohesion – a telling sign of a fully conceived film.

The audience, I think, is also crucial to this film’s delivery.  The film is very aware of the audience and always cuts to shots of audiences as if to emphasize this.  Hazanavicius is always very aware of what the audience knows and doesn’t know.  The director realises that modern audiences may well know a lot about silent era cinema.  The film is packed with references to classics like Citizen Kane and 7^th Heaven; filmmakers like German expressionist F.W Murnau and Hollywood classic Frank Borzage; and stars like Janet Gaynor and Douglas Fairbanks.  The Artist is also heavy with classical cinematic conventions, for instance the simple use of rain as an expression of sadness.  These conventions used as heavily today would seem ridiculous and clichéd, but within the context of the silent-era style, modern audiences are filled with a sense of fond reminiscence.

The Artist is not trying to be an authentic silent film, but instead wishes to present a novel but respectful nod to the silent era of Classical Hollywood. It is full of references and reads like Hazanavicius' love letter to an era of filmmaking which he - and we - are indebted to. In a time when films like Avatar are attempting to revolutionise cinema by making IMAX 3D the next coming of sound, I'm surprised The Artist was even made. But I'm glad it was. To me it serves as a much-needed look back at the essential beginnings of the art form. Already receiving considerable popular success, The Artist could herald the beginning of an era when mainstream filmmakers and audiences alike become more aware and influenced by the origins of cinema. Apart from all that, The Artist also stands alone as an altogether sad, funny, compelling and entertaining film.

2011 TV Judgment

Another year of TV has passed and I feel the need to make some sort of big sweeping statement summing everything up. I’ve whittled it down to this: TV is all about judgment these days.

I hate to be the guy sitting on his high horse on top of the moral high ground, waving his finger at people, making highfalutin statements.  But it’s true.  Judgment seems to be an increasingly prevalent theme in British broadcasting.

Judgement is nasty.  No one does it.  But we all do it when we watch telly, on so many different levels.  It’s complicated.

Take the X Factor for instance, a show primarily about judgment.  When the X Factor’s on I scoff and criticise the show.  Then I watch for a bit longer and I find myself criticising the judges and contestants.  Then I think about it for a while and write a blog criticising how the show makes you criticise things.

Judgment: it’s everywhere.  It comes in a whole bunch of different forms too.

Here’s a short list of shows which are quite overtly about judgment: the X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent, Masterchef, Britain’s Best Dish, Come Dine With Me, May the Best House Win.

They all follow a simple formula: subject matter + judgment.  Easy.

Masterchef is cooking + judgement.

Come Dine With Me is dinner hosting + judgement.

The X Factor is mediocrity + judgment.

You get the idea.

Then there’s reality shows which don’t necessarily contain an element of judgment, except that the enjoyment derived from such shows clearly comes from a sense of judgment on the part of the viewer.  The Jeremy Kyle Show, Big Brother, I’m a Celebrity, etc.  These shows allow people (obnoxious ones, more times than not) to present their personalities for judgment.  I watch Jeremy Kyle  and think “Jesus, are there people like that actually out there?”.  I watch the antics of desperate Big Brother wannabe celebrities and think the same thing.

We watch to judge.  I’m not an expert on human behaviour but I imagine it’s something to do with making ourselves feel better about our personalities and social situations?

Shows like Jeremy Kyle deal with social problems in a chat show format, but the same kind of thing can be seen in the documentary format.  The Scheme is a horrendous social documentary which follows the lives of a handful of families living in one of the most deprived and depraved areas of Scotland.  The enjoyment is a gawping curiosity at the shocking lives of a particularly underclass community.  You can’t help but stare at the drug addicts, dealers, thieves and criminals with judgmental eyes.  If you watch The Scheme and think “that’s perfectly normal” then you either belong to one of the stereotypes I just listed, or you live in The Scheme.  Or both.

Closely related to such social documentaries as The Scheme are shows like the Big Fat Gypsy series.  These shows exist to uncover often secretive or little-known cultures and societies.  They satisfy a voyeuristic curiosity in us as we’re allowed to see and, subsequently, scrutinize the ways in which people from different cultures live.  Amish: World’s Squarest Teenagers and Bitches and Beauty Queens are further examples of this type of cultural curiosity documentary.

Lifestyle documentaries typically document the lives of people with unusual lifestyles, disorders or illnesses.  Shows like Tourettes: I Swear I Can Sing, Obsessive Compulsive Hoarder and The Real Thumbelina tackle Tourettes, OCD and dwarfism respectively.  It would be entirely wrong for me to generalise here and say that this sort of programming only exists to satisfy a judgmental impulse in the audience, but looking at the increasing trend of light entertainment programming and the recurring theme of judgment within contemporary mainstream culture, I think there’s more to these programmes than simply touching and insightful documentary.  This might seem like a dark and disturbing observation, but it makes sense when you look at the context.

Channel 4 seems to have a particular penchant for these lifestyle documentaries.  Judging by the nature of the rest of their output, I doubt their interests are entirely sympathetic to their subjects, either.  Channel 4’s canon of zany game shows like Balls of Steel , Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker-brand satire and the paramount in soft-porn programming Eurotrash, make it clear their interests lie very much in satisfying the need for light entertainment (to say the least).  How can documentaries about neurosis and behavioural disorder be taken seriously when they exist in relation to unashamedly provocative sensationalism such as Embarrassing Fat Bodies, and have badly-tasted titles like A Bipolar Expedition.

I don’t mean to demonise Channel 4, they just happen to be the clearest example of how cultural context (in our case one ridldled with judgment) influences our reading and understanding of other texts.



A strange new genre of show has emerged recently and is, I think, representative of 2011 TV and the culture of judgment I’ve been harping on about.  I’m talking about the hybrid between reality TV and soap opera, the truly disturbing The Only Way is Essex, Made in Chelsea, Geordie Shore and Desperate Scousewives.  Horrendous displays of narcissism, egoism and vanity are displayed in dull plots with such hammy acting it leads you to contemplate whether it’s real or not.  TOWIE is about as real as an Essex girl’s boobs.  These shows are truly awful and the characters are so annoying, but people watch to judge their words, actions, tastes and appearances.

This kind of superficial judgment is where I think ‘light entertainment’ has taken us in 2011.  It’s like a tacky tabloid culture on screen.  Press standards and tabloids have been getting whipped into shape by Lord Leveson this year. However, the chances of the same happening for TV’s throwaway ‘light entertainent’ is sadly pretty thin, I think.

I wouldn’t say that everything on TV is about judgment.  I’m not going to pretend that the vast majority of shows have, in some form, an aspect of judgment, either.  But there is definitely a noticeable recurrence of the theme, enough for me to say I think it stands among one of the most defining features of British TV and culture in 2011.

Evil is in the eye of the beholder, as the saying goes, but I think there’s too much evidence for this to be merely a cynical view of my own. The theme of judgment spans genres and formats.  At uni we were taught that commercial imperatives are increasingly taking over for broadcasters, which means populist imperatives take over for content producers, which then results in an increase in ‘light entertainment’ over more 'serious' programming.  Whether you take that to mean the quality of broadcast programming is in decline is up to you.  But there’s definitely a lot of judgment going on.

Here's to 2012.

Social media, the Batman and my first byline.

The trailer for The Dark Knight Rises was released on Monday.  It's probably one of the most hyped films I've ever not seen yet.  Everyone's been going on about it.  So I thought I'd write a little piece on this with my thoughts on how social media could be changing the game for filmmakers and marketers.  I got it published on the STV Entertainment website with my first ever byline.

Without getting too self-critical, it is a little conjectural and verbose.  On the positive side, I felt like I was sharing some decent ideas and writing for a large readership was an enlightening challenge.

Here it is:

The article.

Comments welcome.

The Notebook (2004): writing the textbook for the romance genre.

Well, I did it.  I took my masculinity to the next level.  I watched The Notebook.  And I liked it.

Many of my female friends have cited it as ‘the film they’ve cried the most at’ over the years.  Some of my more honest male friends have said the same, only in fewer words.  Something like “really sad”, usually.

It is really sad, because it was designed to be.  Every aspect of the film was designed to tug on your heartstrings at strategic points in the story.  It’s this formulaic nature that is the film’s most crowning achievement.

The story follows a very classical design, what scriptwriting guru Robert McKee calls the “Archplot”.  It features causal and linear change, a closed ending, external conflicts and protagonists who actively pursue their destinies.  The Notebook is undeniably of the romance genre and has exactly what you would expect from the genre: boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy loses girl and so on.  The picturesque cinematography and dreamy orchestration immediately scream at the audience: “this is a conventional romantic drama”.  The casting directors have chosen conventionally attractive male and female leads: the gorgeous Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling.   The overall design is cohesive, coherent and pleasing.

Despite all of these very apparent and deliberate generic traits, enjoyment of the film is not hindered in the slightest.  In fact this conventionality is the very trait that makes the film so enjoyable.

It’s all about balance: too much generic traits and the film is plagued by cliché and contrivance; not enough conventionality and the film becomes too incoherent to be enjoyable.  The Notebook strikes these balances perfectly in all aspects of the film.  It is expressionistic at times, naturalistic at others.  Its glowing romanticism avoids saccharinity by measured moments of dramatic realism.  Its sadness is balanced by a sense of simple optimism.  The soundtrack is overtly emotive, but used selectively.

As well as all of these technical elements, the story also does well to avoid laborious mediocrity in a genre notorious for it.  For example, one aspect of the story is that Allie’s parents are opposed to her relationship with Noah.  Just as you think “that’s all a bit Romeo and Juliet”, the mother character is given a new dimension as a complex subplot is revealed, her motivations change and everything feels more real than an archetypal Shakespearean romance.  The Notebook consistently sits on the sweet spot in the tension between generic and unique.

When a film can be described as generic yet original, that’s when it can be described as a textbook example of its genre.  This is Hollywood filmmaking at its finest: when films are designed to provoke a certain kind of reaction and achieve this goal with devastating accuracy, whilst remaining effortlessly enjoyable.

Rating:

Frozen Planet, “Polar Bear-Gate” and the lamentable British tabloid culture.

It has recently come to light that some of the sequences of Frozen Planet include footage which was filmed elsewhere, other than in the wild, as the programme’s content was leading people to believe.   A few of the most contested instances of this practise include shots of a polar bear in a zoo, timelapse photography of ice particles forming and a caterpillar hibernating over winter.

This recent storm in a teacup has nothing to do with the ethics of producing a wildlife documentary, and everything to do with the British media’s political climate.

Frozen Planet’s use of this material is a matter of practicality.

If you watch Frozen Planet’s hibernating caterpillar and think “yes, that’s what they’ve done: they’ve found a caterpillar in the middle of the Arctic and set up a camera which probably costs hundreds of thousands of pounds and paid a crew to undergo the whole operation for months on end among the harshest conditions on Earth” - then you are an idiot.

If you take this view, I’ll spell it out for you with another example so it’s nice and clear: it’s really difficult to find a polar bear in their natural habitat, film that same polar bear day after day from a helicopter and in extremely treacherous weather conditions AND make a story out of it which people will enjoy watching.

Frozen Planet is a drama documentary: it takes the nature documentary format and makes it more engaging and enjoyable for modern audiences by creating characters and narratives for their featured subjects.  Whether they’re talking about a family of whales, a tiny lemming or the Arctic landscape itself, the programme personifies the subjects through storytelling conventions, thus allowing the audience to relate to the subject.  Frozen Planet very much fulfils the principles that Lord Reith set out upon creation of the BBC as a public service broadcaster in 1927: to inform, educate and entertain.

In order to comply to a storytelling format, sequences have to be logical and linear.  If there are certain crucial moments missing in a sequence, the story doesn’t make sense.  The producers can either describe the missing moments through narration or splice in footage which was taken elsewhere in order to finish the sequence.  As Frozen Planet’s essence lies in aesthetically pleasing visuals with minimal narration, the producers’ choice is clear in this case.

This kind of logic isn’t good enough for the British tabloid culture, however.

Throwing around terms like ‘fakery’ and ‘misleading’ and getting a right kick out of putting the word ‘gate’ at the end of things, the journalists involved in this so-called scandal are ignorant children at best, political and commercially motivated puppets at worst.

The BBC’s director-general Mark Thompson has suggested this is all retaliation to the BBC’s coverage of the Leveson inquiry into Press standards.  Drenched in delicious irony, the Daily Mail, that great arbiter of truth, tried to spin his words into a gossip story.  There are probably many examples of how various papers and media outlets have taken this non-story and milked it for their own agendas, but I do not have the willpower to wade through the trash in order to pick out the particularly filthy bits for you.  You can help yourself to that bit of enlightening research.

This all sums up the general decay of Press standards and the rise and rise of tabloid culture.  It’s no more than gossip-driven, morbid, invasive pulp with a particular fetish for scandal-porn.  ‘Polar Bear-Gate’, if anything, strengthens the validity of the BBC and the need for public service values to be upheld above populist and commercial imperatives.

If the press genuinely believe the BBC have orchestrated Frozen Planet’s stories in a misleading way, it is a step backwards for media-savvy-ness.  Frozen Planet is clearly a drama documentary. It deals with stories. It’s quite clear there is a dramatic and necessarily fragmented element to the show.  To suggest that Frozen Planet doesn’t make this clear enough is either very stupid of an individual journalist or insulting to their paper’s readership – or both.

I’d like to see these journalists attempt to burrow under the snow to film an over-protective wild polar bear and her cubs resting in their den.  Although, they’d probably do quite well as they’ve already proved their proficiency in sticking their noses where they don’t belong (see: Leveson inquiry).