Month: Oct 2010

Eagles on Pogo Sticks likes this.

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Yesterday evening, before we went to the cinema, we were discussing David Fincher’s other films. Which did we like best? Which least? I came up with my personal Top Three films directed by Fincher (in no particular order): Seven, Fight Club and Zodiac, with Alien 3 receiving special mention. (It’s flawed but the bits that I like I pretty much love.) Seven is probably the moodiest of his films, Fight Club the most enjoyable and Zodiac is perhaps the most perfectly crafted Fincher film.

Since yesterday evening, I’ve added The Social Network to the Top Three (which therefore contains four titles now, risking a possible world-destroying mathematical paradox), albeit on probation. Will I still like it that much in a week’s time? In a year? Once I’ve seen it as often as the other films? (Zodiac I’ve only seen three times so far, but Seven was my film for bad moods for a while when I was often in a bad mood.) We’ll see, but for now I would say this: it’s Fincher at the top of his game (Ebert rightly calls the movie “splendidly well made”), working with a script that complements his considerable skills. This makes for an interesting comparison: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was decried by some because that film’s script pulled it in the direction of a mawkish sibling to Forrest Gump (scripted by the same writer, Eric Roth, not to be confused with Eli Roth). I thought that Fincher’s cerebral approach made for a fascinating film that was pulled in two different directions, namely sentimentality on the one hand (script) and a weird sort of Verfremdung on the other (direction), resulting in a tension that didn’t always work in the film’s favour.

Aaron Sorkin’s script for The Social Network, though, is sharp and witty, with little trace of mawkishness. It’s not cold or unemotional in any way, but it doesn’t do the Spielbergian brand of emotion that requires heartwarming performances and a John Williams soundtrack so obvious it makes you feel a little queasy because the sentiment is laid on so thick. The film thrives on repartee and verbal barbs that is delivered at breakneck speed – I’ve rarely seen a movie that is so dialogue-driven and feels this fast (though not rushed).

I’ve seen TV series like this, though, especially one little known one about the president of some far away country. I think it’s called… let me see… The West Wing? Which, coincidentally, was also written by one Aaron Sorkin. Having watched the first four seasons of The West Wing (the ones during Sorkin’s time at the helm of the series), I find The Social Network‘s fictionalised Mark Zuckerberg a dark twin of Josh Lyman, deputy chief of staff to President Bartlet. Lyman is more likeable because he’s got a strong sense of ideals and ethics, but he shares so many qualities with Zuckerberg: the sense of intellectual superiority that goes hand in hand with deep-seated insecurity, the way that every conversation is seen as a battle, the intense need to win, to be right, even if it means being a dick to others – the atrophied social skills and emotional immaturity that is fun to watch with Josh because he works in an environment and with people that ground him every now and then.

While the origin story for Fincher and Sorkin’s version of the Facebook founder is perhaps too simple – Zuckerberg basically gets started on the road to Facebook because of the Girl That Got Away, throwing his social dysfunction right back in his face – it makes for an interesting foil with Josh Lyman. Without his Girl Friday, Donna Moss, would he become increasingly insufferable as Zuckerberg does, ending up a sad, pathetic geek with a brilliant mind?

It is all an illusion

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Chances are that most of you (“you” being my real or imaginary readers – for all I know all of this blog’s visitors are advertising bots) won’t get a chance to see Sylvain Chomet’s L’Illusionniste, his first animated film after Les Triplettes de Belleville at the cinema. If you do get the chance, take it: there’s an additional layer of magic to seeing the film at a movie theatre, ideally one with red velvet curtains and comfy seats.

L’Illusionniste is a rare beast, a non-computer generated (although many scenes definitely received some help from the digital brush), non-3D animated film aimed primarily at an audience over the age of 12. (You won’t see L’Illusionniste lunchboxes at the shops.) It is also about a rare beast threatened by extinction: the old-fashioned, cabaret-type entertainer, in this case a stage magician. The film is set during the ’60s, at a time when the eponymous illusionist, like his fellow artists, clowns, acrobats and ventriloquists, has all but been replaced by proto-boy bands and electric Wurlitzers. (These days we’re nostalgic about the latter, even.)

The movie’s plot is of a crystalline simplicity and there are few if any surprises. The ageing illusionist, searching for the increasingly rare show he can do here and there, finds himself performing on the Hebrides, where his magic and old-school manners charm a young girl working as a cleaner. When his engagement is over, he heads for the mainland, and she follows him. The two settle in Edinburgh where he finds that his bagic has been too convincing: in order to keep the girl charmed, he provides her with more illusions, more magic – a pair of lovely shoes here, an elegant coat and Audrey Hepburn-type dress there. Except, of course, this sort of magic can’t be spirited from top hats or people’s ears, so the illusionist has to take on one deadening job after another to keep the girl in gifts. His increasing absence from her life, which he never explains to her, leads to her finding magic in another man instead, a handsome young beau, and the disillusioned illusionist moves out one day while she’s gone, leaving a card: “Magicians do not exist.”

And that summarises the film’s intriguing tension: magicians don’t exist, it is all a charming illusion, the penny in your ear comes out of the magician’s sleeve or palm, cleverly hidden, and the fat, belligerent rabbit was in the hat all along. And yet, and yet… The film, like its sad hero, is all about the charm of illusion, it magics us away to a time and place that is better, more charming than reality. It creates people that never existed, an Edinburgh that never was, and its touches of the real – the film idealises but does not Disneyfy – only add to the spell.

At the end, the illusionist acknowledges that there is no such thing as magic, and pretending that there is creates false expectations, hope and illusions of the dangerous kind: the shimmering red shoes, the beautiful dress, even the crayon miraculously regrown after it had been worn to a stump, act as gateway illusions. He is right: magicians do not exist. The film shows this – in 70 minutes of beautiful, touching magic.

East meets West, multipy by seven

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Seven Samurai is probably the Kurosawa film that is most immediately enjoyable by Western audiences. The Japanese director has rarely been as culturally specific in his work as some of his compatriot film makers, finding inspiration in Hollywood westerns, and what is probably his best known film requires little in the way of cultural knowledge from audiences mostly ignorant of Japanese culture and history. (Hey, everything I know about Japan I learnt from Richard Chamberlain and Shogun!)

Which didn’t stop Hollywood director John Sturges from making a Western (in both senses of the word) remake of the film, The Magnificent Seven. Samurai (or, more accurately, ronin) become gunslingers, Japanese villagers become Mexican peasants, but the film remains largely unchanged in its broad strokes. It is perhaps more immediately iconic to Western audiences, featuring stars such as Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson and James Coburn (the film feels like a The Great Escape (p)reunion at times, also sharing director and composer with the POW classic), but in terms of changes it is relatively restrained.

There are perhaps three major differences, though. The first of these is the leader of the bandits, portrayed by Eli Wallach. He has no counterpart in Kurosawa’s film and serves as an intriguing counterpoint to the gunslingers, a charismatic “There but for the grace of God” commentary on the heroes. The second, stronger change, is how the youngest, most inexperienced of the samurai and Toshiro Mifune’s peasant posing as a samurai, perhaps the actor and director’s most indelible creation, are conflated into one character in Sturges’ film, a mere boy of a gunslinger played by Horst Buchholz. While combining the two characters into one may work in theory, Buchholz is no Mifune; he manages the fanboyish kid who goes all googly-eyed over the larger-than-life heroes much better than the bumbling, cheeky but eventually most tragic character of the seven.

The change that weighs most in my mind, though, is this: in Kurosawa’s film, we believe that the time of the samurai, of sword fights and strictly regulated chivalry has come to and end. The ronintake the job of protecting the villagers because there isn’t anything else for them. As skilled as they are at what they do, they’re essentially relics of a bygone age.Brynner, Coburn, Bronson and especially McQueen are first and foremost stars. They give lip service to the passing of an era, but Brynner’s lines – “Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose.” – ring false coming from him, the self-awareness sounds phony. The Magnificent Seven is magnificently entertaining and, but it doesn’t pull off the sadness that accompanied the rollicking adventure in Kurosawa’s original.

But boy, how does Steve McQueen manage to have the worst haircuts and still be so eminently sexy? Add him to the list topped by Alexander Skarsgard. (Don’t know what I mean? Watch Generation Kill with a staunchly heterosexual male, get him drunk and then ask him what he thinks of Skarsgard.)

Insert guest blog here: David Nicholls

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The following blog entry was written by that most elusive of creatures, mege1, whom you may remember from blog entries such as this one. Unfortunately, tech gremlins prevented him from posting the entry himself, so I’m doing it for him, in between holidays. I’ll be back for good in a little over a week, at which point I’m hoping to post something witty, insightful and not at all redundant about Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven. The Goofy Beast – Always Ahead Of The Curve When It Comes To Being Behind.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: Yes, David Nicholls’ books all have the same basic plot: Boy and girl seem to meet and to start liking each other, but there are obstacles and pitfalls. Hackneyed, you say? So what? You see, there’s that book about a mad captain who goes after a white whale. Oh, and another one tells us about a guy on who is stranded on an island. Boring, isn’t it? On the other hand, do you really read books for their plot? If you dismiss each and every book on the grounds of it being another love story, then an angry mob consisting of irate live readers, dead writers and led by Will Shakespeare and Jane Austen wants to seriously haunt you.

It is also blindingly obvious that David Nicholls and Nick Hornby are perfectly comparable: Both borrow heavily from contemporary music, film, and pop culture trivia; both know how to bring in a joke whenever they feel like it. Both are not likely to end up on any serious reading list, but what of that? They don’t aspire to be, I imagine.

Nicholls’ debut, Starter for Ten, is about a teenager leaving home and going to University and falling for a rather posh and glib beauty. They both end up on the hopeless team for that game show, University Challenge, and it’s clear from early on that his clumsy courtship will go unanswered. But man, can Nicholls tell you a story. The whole book is full of comedy, but at the same time, all the characters are believable and right there on the page. My main delight is the scene during that night when the teenage lover-boy is invited to the girl’s parents’ holiday cottage, gets stoned and goes for a glass of milk in the middle of the night. For reasons better left explained by the novel itself, mum and dad turn up naked in the kitchen. It could have been raucous, it could have been clumsy and slapstick-y and awkward, but Nicholls handles that moment with wit and grace – as much as there can possibly be, anyway.

The Understudy uses a lot of Nicholls’ first-hand experience as an actor. (Nicholls has pretty much given up on acting and has switched to writing screenplays – and novels, obviously). The man from the title plays extras like corpses and bystanders and is also the understudy of a conceited movie superstar who plays Lord Byron in a London stage play. The understudy falls in love with the star’s wife while keeping quiet about the star’s flings. Again, the plot may not prompt you to pick up that book; it’s in the telling. Nicholls gets a lot of the backstage atmosphere of a theatre right, at least as far as I can tell. He is not afraid to show wayward or obnoxious traits of a protagonist you are supposed to like for most of the time. The understudy starts lying, not because he’s selfish, but he wants to protect someone else and so digs himself deeper into the Pit of Failed Actors. And that, as we all know, is a deep pit indeed.

Nicholls’ latest novel, One Day, seems to be all the rage. Nicholls himself has taken on the noble task to turn it into a Hollywood screenplay, a situation he has rendered with all the acerbic wit necessary in his previous novel. One Day, again, is about a girl and a boy who almost sleep together on the night after their graduation; the novel goes on to tell us about what happens every 15th of July for twenty years. That’s quite a good concept to avoid lengthy bits, and it also allows the author to bring in all kinds of pop trivia. This novel here is more serious in tone, although there are enough comic elements left. While the first two novels can be read during a longish train ride, One Day has the good instinct to delve into the two protagonists’ psyches. All three novels are great reads, by themselves, but also if you’ve come out of some serious reading of Literature with a capital L, like I have. Go on now, have some fun. Any day now, David Nicholls’ novels will be part of pop culture. You’ll know when his name or the name of one of his novels are the answer to some question on some televised game show.