There's a predictable inevitability to Take Shelter, a film about the slow unraveling of a good man's life. He has a job, a family, a truck and a best friend, but he's plagued by prophetic visions of an apocalyptic storm. If this makes Take Shelter sound dull, hackneyed, and crushingly banal, it overlooks the fact great films don't need explosions, chases, sex scenes and heavy weaponry. They're often about ordinary people facing something extraordinary.
The performances are compelling. Michael Shannon is magnificent as the troubled working class hero, his physical solidity and mental trauma filling the screen with the presence of a sleeping lion. Also remarkable is the film's everyday approach to madness, which in cinema is usually either a given (most horror movies), or its development is purely exterior (The Shining). Take Shelter examines what it would be like for a good man to worry about the collapse of his mental health. It wonders what a hard-working family man might say and do if he thought he could no longer provide for the family he loves.
Shannon borrows books on mental illness from the local library to figure out what might be happening to him. This is in keeping with his character, whose hands are made for building, not Googling, and removes him from the family home in order to set up a confrontation. It's nice to be shown that you can still find solid, readable medical literature in libraries, despite the many shelves heaving with chick-lit and action-adventure bullshit.
In a film which dramatizes potential, Take Shelter shows an actor (Shannon) and a director (Jeff Nichols) emerging as movie people with a great future. Last year's Mud, with Matthew McConaughey, pulled them further into the limelight. A big-budget sci-fi project, with echoes of John Carpenter's early work, is next on the cards. I look forward to it.
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Saturday, 1 June 2013
SGU Stargate Universe ("Epilogue", 2011)
Nearly every sci-fi series with a spaceship has had an episode like this: for ill-defined reasons the ship is drawn to a mysterious planet. Something dangerous, usually involving unstable seismology or meteorology, means that landing is inadvisable, but senior crew-members descend anyway. A significant discovery is made about the origin or future of mankind. The key to this knowledge is almost within reach, but escape becomes critical as a cataclysm unfolds. All are saved but the knowledge is lost forever. The episode ends with someone looking out at the stars and saying 'there are some things we're just not meant to know.'
Though the short-lived Stargate Universe owed much to the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, it didn't suffer from the latter's metaphorical overkill. In one of many potential-for-development stories introduced in the second series in an attempt to save the programme from imminent cancellation, the crew of the Destiny come across a planet they had settled 2,000 years before.
The planet contains evidence of the lost civilization they had mysteriously founded, but is empty of humans and gashed by flowing lava. The intrepid marines and scientists discover a subterranean library and planetary archive made of precast concrete and blue metal panels. They find ebooks written by their future/past selves, two millennia of videos, advanced scientific knowledge, and gossipy trivia. Reassuringly, libraries are still libraries, even in the future/past. The reader spaces are located on a gantry that mimics the railings of a Victorian library. And the library is underground, bringing to mind the notorious bookstacks of the New York Public Library, the British Library and Oxford's Bodleian.
Just as the crew are on the cusp of discovering the secret of the temporal puzzle, gangways fall and ladder-securing bolts shudder and shake all around. The captain pulls them all away as the planet is torn apart. The series was cancelled. We never did find out the key to the puzzle. Obviously there are some things we're just not meant to know.
Though the short-lived Stargate Universe owed much to the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, it didn't suffer from the latter's metaphorical overkill. In one of many potential-for-development stories introduced in the second series in an attempt to save the programme from imminent cancellation, the crew of the Destiny come across a planet they had settled 2,000 years before.
The planet contains evidence of the lost civilization they had mysteriously founded, but is empty of humans and gashed by flowing lava. The intrepid marines and scientists discover a subterranean library and planetary archive made of precast concrete and blue metal panels. They find ebooks written by their future/past selves, two millennia of videos, advanced scientific knowledge, and gossipy trivia. Reassuringly, libraries are still libraries, even in the future/past. The reader spaces are located on a gantry that mimics the railings of a Victorian library. And the library is underground, bringing to mind the notorious bookstacks of the New York Public Library, the British Library and Oxford's Bodleian.
Just as the crew are on the cusp of discovering the secret of the temporal puzzle, gangways fall and ladder-securing bolts shudder and shake all around. The captain pulls them all away as the planet is torn apart. The series was cancelled. We never did find out the key to the puzzle. Obviously there are some things we're just not meant to know.
Thursday, 7 March 2013
Some thoughts on Belle (2013)
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| The Bodleian Library, aka London, ca. 1762 |
Interior scenes of the reinstated Irish parliament were shot in Trinity College's 1937 Reading Room for Michael Collins. And on the frequent occasions when the Bodleian in Oxford has been filmed, it has rarely ended up as a library on-screen. The court bounded by the Schools Quadrangle, Sheldonian Theatre and Clarendon Building (pictured above) has been anonymized by its ubiquity. In Tinker Tailor Solider Spy, in X-Men: First Class, throughout Inspector Morse and Brideshead Revisited, actors and actresses walk across this quad, going about their business, going anywhere but the library. Filmed at low level, the surrounding seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings in Headington stone could be almost anywhere in Oxford. Perhaps the Library authorities are more welcoming to filmmakers than the Colleges - today a website encourages enquiries.
The Headington quarry also supplied the limestone with which Eton College and Windsor Castle were clad. Indeed, Hollywood seems to imagine the entirety of England to be hewn from it. Harry Potter's Hogwarts library is, in fact, the Bodleian's Duke Humfrey's Library, its infirmary the Library's Divinity School. The Divinity School also featured as the lobby to the House of Commons in The Madness of King George. Nearly all of the Bodleian's buildings and many surrounding streets stood in for early-modern London in Terrence Malick's overlooked The New World.
So it is with Belle, an eighteenth-century period drama due to be released later this year. Belle is the only film I've witnessed being filmed outside a library. All day long horses and carriages trundled up and down Catte Street, a filmic simulacrum of London in the 1760s. What are we to make of the illusion? Perhaps it simply adds another layer of complexity. Location scouts and cinematographers are able to look beyond traditional associations and reimagine libraries, usually successfully, as alternative architectural spaces. Once again, it seems, librarians could learn something from filmmakers.
Sunday, 9 December 2012
Some thoughts about Looper (2012)
Paradoxes are arguments that produce logical inconsistency. They're a good way of demolishing bad thinking, but some paradoxes remain problematic even when the smartest heads try to resolve them. After 2,500 years philosophers are still trying to figure out how the sentence 'this statement is a lie' can be neither true nor false. Mathematicians puzzle over a number of internally consistent logical puzzles that yet appear to be self-contradictory.
For fans of literature and film, the most entertaining and familiar brain-twister is the grandfather paradox. Imagine I travel back in time and kill my paternal grandfather as a child. Thus my father would never have been born, thus I would never have been born. So I'm not able to travel back in time in the first place to commit the murder. My grandfather lives, fathering my father, who then fathers me, enabling me to travel back in time to kill my grandfather...
Contemporary physics has answers to this paradox, among them the wonderfully-named Novikov self-consistency principle, the Huggins displacement theory, and Brane cosmology. Time-travel films generally attempt to respect these scientific responses and aim at internal consistency, or neglect considerations of consistency altogether.
Looper tries to do both things at once. Altering the past changes the future if it's convenient for the plot. What appears to be a clever, idiosyncratic and original ending, in which the film's hero works out a way of breaking the endless repetition of two destructive life-cycles, actually turns out to undermine the entire story by preventing the possibility of it ever having taken place.
To be fair, Bruce Willis warns us half-way through: 'I don't want to talk about time travel because if we start talking about it then we're going to be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws.' Fans of the brief-library-visit-as-harbinger-of-trouble scene will also have noticed Willis' impossibly-convenient break-in to an unconvingly-futuristic public library. Unfamiliar with thirty-year-old IT, he still manages to look up private medical records, cross-reference the individuals within with some kind of residency database, and print off giant maps of their present location before escaping undetected into the Kansas night. In the highly-surveilled future it's impossible to do anything without the powers-that-be noticing, unless a convulted way needs to be found of ensuring that the characters are brought together for the final gunfight. Call it the paradox paradox genre - a film that uses paradoxes to simultaneously drive and demolish the plot.
For fans of literature and film, the most entertaining and familiar brain-twister is the grandfather paradox. Imagine I travel back in time and kill my paternal grandfather as a child. Thus my father would never have been born, thus I would never have been born. So I'm not able to travel back in time in the first place to commit the murder. My grandfather lives, fathering my father, who then fathers me, enabling me to travel back in time to kill my grandfather...
Contemporary physics has answers to this paradox, among them the wonderfully-named Novikov self-consistency principle, the Huggins displacement theory, and Brane cosmology. Time-travel films generally attempt to respect these scientific responses and aim at internal consistency, or neglect considerations of consistency altogether.
Looper tries to do both things at once. Altering the past changes the future if it's convenient for the plot. What appears to be a clever, idiosyncratic and original ending, in which the film's hero works out a way of breaking the endless repetition of two destructive life-cycles, actually turns out to undermine the entire story by preventing the possibility of it ever having taken place.
To be fair, Bruce Willis warns us half-way through: 'I don't want to talk about time travel because if we start talking about it then we're going to be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws.' Fans of the brief-library-visit-as-harbinger-of-trouble scene will also have noticed Willis' impossibly-convenient break-in to an unconvingly-futuristic public library. Unfamiliar with thirty-year-old IT, he still manages to look up private medical records, cross-reference the individuals within with some kind of residency database, and print off giant maps of their present location before escaping undetected into the Kansas night. In the highly-surveilled future it's impossible to do anything without the powers-that-be noticing, unless a convulted way needs to be found of ensuring that the characters are brought together for the final gunfight. Call it the paradox paradox genre - a film that uses paradoxes to simultaneously drive and demolish the plot.
Sunday, 28 October 2012
Some thoughts on The Chronicles of Riddick (2004)
I watched The Chronicles of Riddick twenty-four hours ago, and already I'm struggling to recall what it was about. I remember wondering why the principal actor's name (Vin Diesel) sounded more sci-fi than his character (Richard B. Riddick). I remember Mr Diesel turning his head and smirking every five minutes before charging through a dozen professional wrestling types as though they were polypropylene skittles. Some of these monstrous bodies belonged to mercenaries, some to prisoners, some to prison guards. Most, in a film set in a gunmetal-grey meets Cro-Magnon version of the future, belonged to the footsoldiers of a planet-destroying nihilist cult with a peculiar metaphysics.
Combine the toppling of these giant 'Necromongers' with Mr Diesel's talent for ironic quips delivered in a voice that's part Lee Marvin, part Barack Obama, and The Chronicles of Riddick makes for an entertaining, if instantly forgetable, two hours when you're stuck on the Oxford-Cambridge bus.
It's just a pity that so much of the film looks cheap, cartoonish, and artificial. One of the only things that looks real is the small library books in the house of Diesel's friend (or was he an enemy? I was never sure) in dusty New Mecca. It's easier to computer-generate a city than a library. Unfortunately the filmmakers spent so much money on the former that they didn't have much left to spend on the latter. It looks like they just moved the same set of books from one shelf to another as they filmed the scene.
Ever wonder where movie books come from? New York, of course, where Hollywood customers of the Strand Bookstore 'can choose from eighteen basic library styles, for purchase or rental. “Bargain books,” a random selection of hardbacks, is the cheapest, at ten dollars per foot of shelf space. For thirty dollars, clients can customize the color. For seventy-five, they can get a “leather-looking” library...'
Combine the toppling of these giant 'Necromongers' with Mr Diesel's talent for ironic quips delivered in a voice that's part Lee Marvin, part Barack Obama, and The Chronicles of Riddick makes for an entertaining, if instantly forgetable, two hours when you're stuck on the Oxford-Cambridge bus.
It's just a pity that so much of the film looks cheap, cartoonish, and artificial. One of the only things that looks real is the small library books in the house of Diesel's friend (or was he an enemy? I was never sure) in dusty New Mecca. It's easier to computer-generate a city than a library. Unfortunately the filmmakers spent so much money on the former that they didn't have much left to spend on the latter. It looks like they just moved the same set of books from one shelf to another as they filmed the scene.
Ever wonder where movie books come from? New York, of course, where Hollywood customers of the Strand Bookstore 'can choose from eighteen basic library styles, for purchase or rental. “Bargain books,” a random selection of hardbacks, is the cheapest, at ten dollars per foot of shelf space. For thirty dollars, clients can customize the color. For seventy-five, they can get a “leather-looking” library...'
Sunday, 21 October 2012
'No one should be forbidden to consult these books freely!'
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| The monastery librarian. For some reason, books are always returned by their due date |
What's it about?
James Bond dons a monk's habit and investigates a series of deaths in an Italian monastery in the early fourteenth century. It all turns out to be the fault of Aristotle, who had the temerity to write about the subversive power of laughter seventeen hundred years earlier. The monastery librarian doesn't agree with the great polymath, and goes to great lengths to suppress rediscovery of a lost text, bumping off a series of grotesque brothers who have the combined personality of a logic textbook. Can Bond and his adoring young sidekick solve the mystery before the Papacy, Inquisition, monastery authorities, and all-pervading medieval miasma defeat them? Never fear, they have the power of literary theory of their side!
What's it got to do with libraries?
What's it got to do with libraries?
Umberto Eco's first novel tranformed a relatively obscure Italian professor of semiotics into an international poststructuralist superstar. Unlike Derrida, here was a European prof whose books you could actually read. Unlike Foucault, he didn't say awkward things about madness, imprisonment and sex, and unlike Deleuze his name was easy to pronounce and his ideas weren't so obviously loony.
The Name of the Rose was a whodunnit with extended subplots and digressions into metaphysics, the politics of the Avignon papacy, and the supression of the Waldensian, Albigensian and Catharist heresies, among other obscurities. Its hero was the man Eco would have liked to be had he been born in 1275 - a learned, wise, liberal controversialist. Like Eco Franciscan friar William of Baskerville prefers books to women and wine. Unlike Eco, he thrives on the border of respectability and radicalism. Does his name hint that like a Sherlock Holmes story, the digressions provided a clue to the mystery? Or that, at heart, this was merely a silly adventure story? Or that Eco was showing what a genius he was, a dazzling Holmes to his readers' plodding Watsons? Why, all and none of the above. This is postmodernism people.
A 600-page novel gives an author space to excurse on Aristotle's poetics, and lots of time for character-building and plot development. A novel provides space and time to build up an unfamiliar world. A film can also do this. One thinks of the tidy efficiency of Kurosawa's depictions of Sengoku-era Japan or the Coen brothers' ability to evoke all that is necessary about rural Texas in five seconds of landscape.
But director Jean-Jacques Annaud is no Kurosawa or Coen. His film raises many more questions than it answers, and betrays the complexity of medieval Europe under an ever-present patina of mud, dusk and smokey grey. The reason for the murders Sean Connery investigates might make sense if you wrote your PhD on Thomas Aquinas (as Eco did), or to students of medieval textual transmission and historians of papal politics. After 600 pages of drip-fed Aristotelian propaganda, it may also make sense to readers of a sex-and-murder laced historical thriller. But it will not make sense to your average moviegoer.
The library and librarian are central to the plot. But little about them makes sense either. Why is the library designed as a labyrinth, when the only two people able to enter are the librarian and his assistant? Why exactly are so many monks creating illuminated manuscripts - who are they copying them for, and why? How can a large scriptorium exist in an institution whose leadership promotes a policy of literary suppression? How can the monastery library be so famous when it is nearly impossible to access its books?
As the only mainstream film I know of with a concern for monastic libraries and the process of medieval manuscript production, The Name of the Rose has also done much to propagate historical falsehoods. Nearly everything we see about the production, circulation and storage of texts is inaccurate for a fourteenth-century monastery. The 'manuscript adviser' named in the credits is an illustrator of children's books. Monks transcribed books (in their cells, not in libraries) in order to better learn their contents - they did not spend their days drawing pretty pictures for the hell of it. What we're left with is confusion designed as clever provocation, a Hardy boys television mystery with some big-name actors. We get intellectual pretensions, naked girls and chubby monks, and trite banalities of medieval life.
Is it any good?
In the opening credits we are told that this is "A palimpsest of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose." This immediately set off my pretentiousness alarms. Despite all the theatricality, this is a poorly-paced and lazy film which answers none of the interesting questions the plot and setting might be presumed to pose.
Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud
Written by George Andrew Birkin, Gérald Brach, Howard Franklin, Alain Godard, based on the novel by Umberto Eco
Cinematography: Tonino Delli Conni
Editing: Jane Seitz
Cast includes Sean Connery, Christian Slater, F. Murray Abraham, Helmut Qualtinger, Elya Baskin, Michael Lonsdale, Volker Prechtel, Feodor Chaliapin Jr., William Hickey, Michael Habeck, Urs Althaus, Valentina Vargas, Ron Perlman
Reading this blog in the UK?
Buy the DVD from Amazon.co.uk
The Name of the Rose was a whodunnit with extended subplots and digressions into metaphysics, the politics of the Avignon papacy, and the supression of the Waldensian, Albigensian and Catharist heresies, among other obscurities. Its hero was the man Eco would have liked to be had he been born in 1275 - a learned, wise, liberal controversialist. Like Eco Franciscan friar William of Baskerville prefers books to women and wine. Unlike Eco, he thrives on the border of respectability and radicalism. Does his name hint that like a Sherlock Holmes story, the digressions provided a clue to the mystery? Or that, at heart, this was merely a silly adventure story? Or that Eco was showing what a genius he was, a dazzling Holmes to his readers' plodding Watsons? Why, all and none of the above. This is postmodernism people.
A 600-page novel gives an author space to excurse on Aristotle's poetics, and lots of time for character-building and plot development. A novel provides space and time to build up an unfamiliar world. A film can also do this. One thinks of the tidy efficiency of Kurosawa's depictions of Sengoku-era Japan or the Coen brothers' ability to evoke all that is necessary about rural Texas in five seconds of landscape.
But director Jean-Jacques Annaud is no Kurosawa or Coen. His film raises many more questions than it answers, and betrays the complexity of medieval Europe under an ever-present patina of mud, dusk and smokey grey. The reason for the murders Sean Connery investigates might make sense if you wrote your PhD on Thomas Aquinas (as Eco did), or to students of medieval textual transmission and historians of papal politics. After 600 pages of drip-fed Aristotelian propaganda, it may also make sense to readers of a sex-and-murder laced historical thriller. But it will not make sense to your average moviegoer.
The library and librarian are central to the plot. But little about them makes sense either. Why is the library designed as a labyrinth, when the only two people able to enter are the librarian and his assistant? Why exactly are so many monks creating illuminated manuscripts - who are they copying them for, and why? How can a large scriptorium exist in an institution whose leadership promotes a policy of literary suppression? How can the monastery library be so famous when it is nearly impossible to access its books?
As the only mainstream film I know of with a concern for monastic libraries and the process of medieval manuscript production, The Name of the Rose has also done much to propagate historical falsehoods. Nearly everything we see about the production, circulation and storage of texts is inaccurate for a fourteenth-century monastery. The 'manuscript adviser' named in the credits is an illustrator of children's books. Monks transcribed books (in their cells, not in libraries) in order to better learn their contents - they did not spend their days drawing pretty pictures for the hell of it. What we're left with is confusion designed as clever provocation, a Hardy boys television mystery with some big-name actors. We get intellectual pretensions, naked girls and chubby monks, and trite banalities of medieval life.
Is it any good?
In the opening credits we are told that this is "A palimpsest of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose." This immediately set off my pretentiousness alarms. Despite all the theatricality, this is a poorly-paced and lazy film which answers none of the interesting questions the plot and setting might be presumed to pose.
Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud
Written by George Andrew Birkin, Gérald Brach, Howard Franklin, Alain Godard, based on the novel by Umberto Eco
Cinematography: Tonino Delli Conni
Editing: Jane Seitz
Cast includes Sean Connery, Christian Slater, F. Murray Abraham, Helmut Qualtinger, Elya Baskin, Michael Lonsdale, Volker Prechtel, Feodor Chaliapin Jr., William Hickey, Michael Habeck, Urs Althaus, Valentina Vargas, Ron Perlman
Reading this blog in the UK?
Buy the DVD from Amazon.co.uk
Wednesday, 26 September 2012
The other 30%
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| I know it's mumbo-jumbo, but it's in this big old book! |
What's it about?
"The Bible speaks of the Ark leveling mountains and laying waste to entire regions. An army which carries the Ark before it... is invincible." The Nazis are in Egypt, on the verge of finding the Ark of the Covenant. Only one man can stop them.
What's it got to do with libraries?
I don't get conceptual art. I side with the late lamented Robert Hughes in believing that modern art is radical and vital, but has been going downhill for about 100 years. For me, at the very bottom of this hill, next to Tracey Emin's dirty bed, is the 'video installation'. Meandering artworks with baffling names like (Trans)FORM-ation S-3 just don't do it for me. When I watch them I think: 'This isn't art. This is rubbish. I could do this.' So if Messrs Saatchi, Lowry or Gagosian ever gave me some gallery space, here's what I'd film in the hopes that they'd allow me to project it.
A fixed camera mounted on a library desk would record an archaeology professor reading all day long. Whenever this buttoned-up, tweedy and bespectacled prof moved from his books, a tasteful hand-drawn map of the library would appear, a slowly-moving red line showing his route to the water cooler. After eight hours of work, he'd pack a leather suitcase and leave. The camera would move along the desk, on which would sit a Wesson 'Bapty' revolver, a bullwhip, a dusty fedora, and a library catalogue card with 'the other 30%' written in a cursive hand.
My artwork would be called 70% of All Archaeology is Done in the Library, a line taken from Raiders of the Lost Ark, Professor Indiana Jones' first cinematic outing. It even sounds like the name of a video installation.
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| Real archaeologists have hats, but no whips |
Some say that the Jones character was based on Robert John Braidwood. Others claim their own pet mid-century archaeologists active in exotic places as the maquette. In truth, a more significant influence on the script is the simple fact that a profession that spends its time in libraries, classrooms and muddy holes is an unlikely, and thus amusing, source for heroism. For the same reason, one reason why libraries work well in films is that in real life, paradoxically, nothing much ever happens in them. This is why most cinematic libraries bear very little resemblance to off-screen ones. They're not meant to. They appeal to day-dreams and the inverted worlds of the imagination.
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| Real librarians are much more rock 'n' roll |
Is it any good?
Raiders of the Lost Ark is terrific entertainment. Its annual showing on Christmas television throughout the 1980s means that I have seen it more times than any other film. Very early on I decided that I wanted to be archaeologist when I grew up. Until about the age of nine, when I realized that real archaeologists have to spend 70% percent of their time in the library. Hang on...
Director: Steven Spielberg
Written by Lawrence Kasdan, George Lucas, Philip Kaufman
Cinematography: Douglas Slocombe
Editing: Michael Kahn
Cast includes Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey, Jonathan Rhys-Davies, Denholm Elliott
Reading this blog in the UK?
Buy the DVD from Amazon.co.uk
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