Cert: 15
Dir: Samuel Maoz
Israel: 93 min • Ariel Films • In Theatres
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The irony of Lebanon, Israeli director Samuel Maoz’s account of his experiences on the first day of the 1982 ‘Operation Peace for Galilee’, is that it has almost nothing to do with Lebanon per se. The story, insofar as there is one, could be set in any country, any tank, any war. As it is, Lebanon is a film in which nothing happens and the characters make no discernible journey.
The film opens onto a field of sunflowers swaying gently in a summer breeze. If this stunning image remains so allusive, I thought, maybe Maoz actually deserves the Golden Lion he just won at Venice. An hour and a half later, however, the film returns to that opening shot, except this time – groan – a tank drives straight through it. Thankfully, by then I’d been thrashed into weary submission and reminded anew that if war is hell then so are didactic war movies.
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Categories: Film & DVD
Tagged: lebanon, samuel maoz
- Published:
- April 28, 2010 – 15:15
- Author:
- By Akkas Al-Ali
Cert: U
Dir: James Rasin
US: 82 min • JJay Prods. in association with Sundance Channel • In Theatres
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Being immortalised in song is surely a great honour. Candy Darling had that honour twice, thanks to Lou Reed, in ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ and ‘Candy Says’. The former painted her as an oral sex virtuoso. The latter as a sad-eyed creature taking stock of her perceived failures as a ‘woman’.
Being the subject of those songs has kept her luminescent flame alive in the pop-cultural imagination, but such portraiture threatens to reduce her to a cock-sucking desperado and tragic stereotype. James Rasin’s documentary sees that threat off ably and offers up as interviewees a veritable Who’s Who of NYC’s in-outsider crowd of the late sixties and early seventies (Holly Woodlawn, Gerard Malanga, Paul Morrissey, Fran Lebowitz, Jayne County, Pat Hackett), and archival audio interviewees including Candy’s mother and Valerie Solanis. The key figure though, is Jeremiah Newton, Candy’s best friend and inheritor of her volumes of diaries. These, along with previously unseen grainy footage and audio interviews, form the backbone of the film which seeks to piece together the glittery fragments of Candy’s tragically short life: the mid-1960s flight from stultifying Long Island suburban teen hell to the misfit’s Mecca of Manhattan, the development of her persona, the fleeting moment as the shimmering icon of Warhol’s Factory (before the be-wigged pseud got tired of her) and her sad decline and early death. With cruel irony, it was a trajectory fit for a star of Hollywood’s Golden Era, which Candy worshipped but was born too late for.
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Categories: Film & DVD
Tagged: andy warhol, beautiful darling, candy darling, edie sedgwick, james rasin, jane county, jeremiah newton, lou reed
- Published:
- April 1, 2010 – 11:41
- Author:
- By Christopher Brocklebank
Have One On Me
Joanna Newsom
124 min • Drag City • March 1st, 2010
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Music, as the Princess of Darkness once observed, makes the people come together. It also divides people. Joanna Newsom is a performer whose music draws that proverbial line in the sand. In writing about Newsom critics are wont to use the word “polarizing”. One of the reasons for this is that she is decidedly not commercial. Have One On Me is her third studio album, and the eighteen tracks, which clock in at a gargantuan one hundred and twenty-four minutes, defy simple classification. The songs are in effect short stories and are consequently rather longer than usual for the medium. The composition is shaped around the rhythm of the stories, which do not settle into the groove, progress toward a bridge … etc. Have One On Me is unique, unusual and remarkably beautiful.
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Categories: Music
Tagged: baby birch, daniel j levitin, good intentions paving company, have one on me, in california, joanna newsom, joni mitchell, psych folk, this is your brain on music, ys
- Published:
- March 30, 2010 – 11:59
- Author:
- By Christopher Bryant
The Leather Boys
Gillian Freeman, originally published under the pseudonym Eliot George
275 pages • Anthony Blond • 1961 [PB]
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Titles can lead-in or mislead. The Leather Boys, as titles go, is redolent of a mid-sixties Warhol yawnfest or one of Kenneth Anger’s impenetrable, terrifying underground cinematic assaults. It even suggests a debt to Tom of Finland. But it’s as British as a barm cake. The Leather Boys is a 1961 London pulp novel by Gillian Freeman, and later made into a New Wave Brit flick in 1963 by the aptly named Sidney Furie. It is about two late-teen, working-class, south London ton-up biker boys who find themselves surprised, unnerved & ultimately confused to discover they’re in love with each other.
I became a fan of the film as a teenager, discovering it late one night on BBC2, back in the days when terrestrial television cared to bring great cinema to the masses. This was long before I became a swallow-tattooed card-carrying Smiths fan (St Morrissey is a huge, huge fan of this peon to proley poof passion) but it somehow seemed to reflect my feelings far greater than Queer as Folk, which was in full swing at the time and being lauded as a realistic a representation of gay life as we’d ever seen. Well … maybe it was, maybe it did reflect a certain reality. But not mine.
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Categories: Classic: Books
- Published:
- March 12, 2010 – 13:05
- Author:
- By Christopher Brocklebank
The Movie Songbook
Sharleen Spiteri
42:54 min • Island • March 1st, 2010
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Fresh from her first solo endeavour, the cruelly underrated Melody, Sharleen Spiteri has ventured from Texas to Hollywood for her sophomore album, The Movie Songbook. Essentially conceived out of a low-key invitation to sing The Bee Gees’ ‘If I Can’t Have You’ at a Saturday Night Fever tribute concert, this project saw Spiteri record the album in a mere 8 days at the legendary Capitol Records Studios in Los Angeles, under the production of the iconic Phil Malone, whose CV boasts Frank Sinatra, Liza Minnelli and Barbara Streisand. The self-confessed film aficionado has created a tribute album that reinterprets not only some huge cinematic songs, but also a smattering of understated movie gems.
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Categories: Music
- Published:
- March 9, 2010 – 14:52
- Author:
- By Nick Smith
The Happy Island
Dawn Powell
275 pages • Steerforth • 1938, 1998 [PB]
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Dawn Powell is a unique voice in American literature and one of its finest satirists. Whilst her contemporaries, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis, were writing tracts about the perils of the new post-war America, in which men were men, women were women, and most of them hypocrites, Powell wrote about “the way we live now” without the need to wrap her stories in social and moral packaging. Her literary heritage is not that of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe, but Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, Honore Balzac, and finally Gaius Petronius, author of the Satyricon. In The Happy Island, Powell set out to write what she called a story about “the bachelors of New York in the Satyricon style”.
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Categories: Classic: Books
Tagged: dawn powell, ernest hemingway, evelyn waugh, prudence bly, satyricon, sinclair lewis, the happy island
- Published:
- March 8, 2010 – 13:46
- Author:
- By Christopher Bryant
Snapshots in History’s Glare
Gore Vidal
256 pages • Harry N. Abrams, Inc. • November 2nd, 2009 [HB]
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Snapshots in History’s Glare is a beautiful book of photographs accompanied by the urbane and sardonic commentary that one would expect from Gore Vidal. It is the fourth venture into autobiography from a writer who for most of his career asserted, “I am not my own subject”. The first of these, Screening History, started out as a series of lectures at Harvard. “My life has paralleled, when not intersected, the entire history of the talking picture,” Vidal observes in this remarkable book, the first part of which is reproduced in the early chapters of his second memoir, Point to Point Navigation, on the grounds that it is now out of print. Screening History is about how reality is filtered through the media, whether it be cinema, television or print, and in looking at this through the lens of his autobiography Vidal produced an unique analysis. In Palimpsest, and its sequel, Point to Point Navigation, Vidal followed the more traditional path of the memoirist, and now in Snapshots in History’s Glare he provides the photographic accompaniment that was somewhat missing from the earlier ventures.
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Categories: Books
Tagged: fred kaplan, gore vidal, howard auster, palimpsest, playboy, point to point navigation, screening history, snapshots in history's glare
- Published:
- March 3, 2010 – 16:11
- Author:
- By Christopher Bryant
Clementine the Living Fashion Doll reviews
Frank’s Closet in her own inimitable fashion … and with almost as many outfit changes.
As Shelia Blige was the mistress of ceremonies for Frank’s Closet, so Clementine is for Polari.
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Categories: Clementine,Stage
Tagged: clementine the living fashion doll, frank's closet, gary amers, russell whitehead, sheila blige
- Published:
- December 9, 2009 – 10:55
- Author:
- By Clementine the Living Fashion Doll
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Volume 5: Predators and Prey
Georges Jeanty (Artist) • Cliff Richards (Artist) • Andy Owens (Artist) • Jane Espenson (Author) • Steven S. DeKnight (Author) • Drew Z. Greenberg (Author) • Jim Krueger (Author) • Doug Petrie (Author)
144 pages • Dark Horse • September 9th, 2009 [PB]
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Categories: Books
Tagged: buffy season eight, buffy the vampire slayer, doug petrie, drew z greenberg, harmony, jane espenson, joss whedon, steven s deknight
- Published:
- December 3, 2009 – 09:22
- Author:
- By Christopher Bryant
