In Vitra Veritas

Sigh! Such lovely furniture:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1291613,00.html

http://www.vitra.com/

But is my pun on Vitra better than the Observer's La Dolce Vitra? Answers on the back of a 500 Euro note please...

Den Haag

Weekend in The Hague - found this very interesting 1920s Art Deco department store:

http://www.architectuur.org/kramer01.php

http://www.goldengate.net/~mross/Reunion2003/Den%20Haag/175-7582_img.jpg

Took some photos with my cameraphone so I'll post these when I get a chance - there are not many pictures of this building on the web..

Feeling a Little Behind

Oh dear! The rot starts already. Since the last review I have watched two films:

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three

The Italian Job

And I almost saw Padre Padrone, but baulked at the last minute due to mood, and not wanting to fall asleep watching an Italian film with French sub-titles, also not wanting to see a film where a boy gets relentlessly beaten.

So there, no reviews.

Barroso on the USA

"There are magnificent things that exist in the US as well as some fairly horrific things," he declared in remarks which ensured he comfortably won the parliament's support. "I hate their arrogance, I hate their unilateralism."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/eu/story/0,7369,1282148,00.html

I Ran?

The next target?

Ted Rall seems to think so in this article, which does have a certain believability after Afghanistan and Iraq.

Next there's this comment in the Guardian about US exaggerations about the international community's response to Iran's Nuclear Power programme.

All of which reminds me of the Israeli astronaut killed in the Space Shuttle Columbia in February 2003 – as one of the pilots who bombed Iran's nuclear power plants in the 1980's, he was hailed as a hero on his death. No-one seemed fit to mention the illegal bombing of another state, or how Thatcher condemned the bombing. But of course we all know international rules can be broken if you're the bully on the block or one of their protectorates.

Frenzy

Whilst not being one of Hitchcock's more famous films, it's actually a rather tense, nihilistic, explicit and nasty piece. It reminded me a lot of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, if not really posing the serious questions about voyeurism raised by Powell's masterpiece.

The story is set and filmed in an early 1970s London almost unidentifiable with the modern day metropolis, apart from the major landmarks. The many scenes around Covent Garden reminded me of another Powell film, the early scenes of The Red Shoes. In fact Covent Garden of 1948 appears almost unchanged to the 1972 version. Twenty-four years on from 72 and the place would be unrecognisable. The restoration of the print is absolutely wonderful – it makes the 1972 London seem absolutely real.

This film marked a turn to the more explicit and violent for Hitchcock. The rape / murder scene is genuinely distressing to watch, and to film judging by the comments of Barry Foster, the actor involved. Female nudity is also shown several times. The 70s did seem to mark a watershed in terms of screen violence. The explicit horror here is certainly on a par with A Clockwork Orange, and more overt than Peeping Tom. The meals served up by the Police Inspector's wife are also horrific, if in a different way. I was reminded strongly of Eraserhead...

Another link to Peeping Tom is the wonderful Anna Massey. Here she plays a cheeky cockney lass in a very winning way. She does not look ten years older than her performance in the Michael Powell film. Jon Finch plays the unsympathetic hero very well - when he made this he was fresh from playing Polanski's Hamlet, and the character does indeed have a few Hamlet moments. Jean Marsh plays a wonderfully plain secretary. Billie Whitelaw is in her element as a distrusting, cold friend, wife of an ex-RAF colleague of the Finch character, played by the irreplaceable Clive Swift, also known as King Arthur's surrogate father in Excalibur, and of course long-suffering husband to “that Bucket woman.” (My goodness, just found out that BBC TV celebrity gardener Joe Swift is his son with Margaret Drabble.)

Francois Truffaut, after seeing this film, said it was a young director's film. Meaning that there was considerable experimentation going on with this movie.

Two scenes stick out for me. As Anna Massey's character storms out of the pub after quitting her job, she pauses, the screen is filled with her motionless face and all the street sounds are quietened for a few seconds. When the noise returns it is the smarmy grocery trader who asks her if she has a place to go. At this point you realise she is already dead. The second scene is in the promotional trailer for the film, with what must be an effigy of Hitch floating on his back in the Thames.

Brussels, Baudelaire and a Comic Book

Essay on Brussels, Baudelaire and Les Cites Obscures of Schuiten and Peeters.

Embassy Court Brighton

Here's an article in The Guardian about a 1930's restoration.

And here are some photos of the Embassy Course building.

Puss Warmerer

A few nights ago I had a dream in which someone who was apparently my cousin said I was a real 'puss warmerer.' I woke up and wrote that down in my mobile phone's calendar note function, then went back to sleep. Imagine the bemusement when I found this the next day. What could it mean?

I've got in the habit of making rambling short entries in my blog today. Does it work or is it slightly irritating and irrelevant, to hear my wibble rants?

Took a breather from the desk a few minutes ago and walked on the office building's roof catwalk. The heat made my temples throb, literally.

If you wake up at four or five in the morning (in Northern Europe) there is a wonderful display of Venus – so bright against the morning gloaming (can gloaming exist in the morning?)

CallCentreDiary

This callcentre blog is very, very good...

Bits of Michael Moore

Bits of the two Michael Moore films came swimming back through my memory yesterday.

F911 – Sadly funny that you can take four books of matches or two butane lighters on a plane still, but not nail clippers. Just so the tobacco industry can ensure that smokers can light up when they arrive at their destination.

F911 - Heard that Cuba played a bootleg version of F911 on TV this week...

BfC – I forgot to mention the sanest person in the film – Marilyn Manson. What he said about the news scaring the bejesus out of the viewer and then the commercials selling safety and security is so, so true.

I've given up on watching the BBC news as I find it so patronizing and stylized – they've shifted way over to the US model since I left the UK. I hate, hate, hate the two-hander 6 o'clock news, and Fiona Bruce emoting all over t'place. Thank goodness for the RTBF news – sober and old-fashioned. Give me Fabienne Vande Meersche and François
De Brigode any day.

Forza Italia!

Nice editorial in the Guardian about the state of Italy:

I particularly like the idea of Italy being the first post-modern state, not run by government by by the social institutions. Poor Italy; one of the world's great nations (6th biggest economy by my reckoning) and such a wonderful mess.

The Matrix

A one-off from the Wachowski brothers surely? I found Reloaded dire and didn't bother to see Revolutions. I just didn't care. It reminds me a bit of the brilliant L.A. Confidential – and how Curtis Hanson completely failed to make an interesting film out of 8 mile.

Despite the cod philosophy, the film rattles along at a great pace, with some nice breathers such as the meet the Oracle scene. Somehow it never abuses my credibility which is a very rare quality. Of course a mass suspension of disbelief is required to swallow the super-hero antics of Neo, but you feel you share his journey into understanding what is possible. Finally when he attains true karma, you feel it has been earned.

I think the actors really did earn their stripes for this film. I was surprised at the amount of physical preparation that went into the fight scenes. For me the film is really carried by the performances of Hugo Weaving and Carrie-Anne Moss. Somehow Reeves and Fishburn wander through the film playing themselves, but Weaving and Moss really create and inhabit their characters. They are indistinguishable from other characters they have played – I think specifically of Hugo Weaving in Priscilla Queen of the Desert and Moss in Chocolat. Carrie-Anne Moss reminds me of a serious public school girl and Weaving speaks in such an unnatural manner, it almost falls into some kind of parody, but he really gets away with it. It shouldn't work but it does.

A brief thought about “bullet time.” From the “making of” they really trumpet this as a great advance, but I think now the technique has become obsolete – film-makers tend to prefer pure CGI these days. Personally I think this is wrong as it is evident even on a TV screen that you are looking at a real actor in bullet time, even though many of the frames must have been digitally interpolated. CGI still looks crap in comparison – a la Spider-man 2. Actually it was probably Matrix Reloaded that started the CGI character thing in the scene where Neo fights multiple Agent Smiths. That didn't work for me either. Maybe I missed out on a CGI Monica Bellucci in Revolutions?

The fight sequences still hold up very well. Crouching Tiger has to be a future DVD purchase – I really love this wire work. Some day I need to delve into eastern cinema.

In conclusion, for me the Matrix works as an intelligent, thoughtful, exciting, ground-breaking sci-fi film. But we know it was a fluke thanks to the duff sequels. Still, it's a film to treasure.

Haircut 101

Had my hair cut this weekend. Hardly an inspiring event I know, but afterwards I was in the lift of my apartment wearing my Lonsdale polo shirt and without my specs. The guy who cut the hair just went on and on and on clipping and trimming till there was almost nothing left.

In the lift's mirror I was able to contort my face into a bovver boy grimace - goodness, I was shocked at how "hard" I could make myself look. I was reminded of Ray Winstone on the cover of the Scum DVD.

Later on, on the terrace of the Walvis, I reflected with my friend that I would not wear my Lonsdale / Fred Perry / Umbro tops with this haircut in England for fear of being considered a neo-nazi. The irony is that the guy who cut my hair is Moroccan, and even the cashiers at Lilleywhites in Brussels were arab.

Bowling for Columbine

Another Michael Moore movie – that makes two in as many days – masochism? No, just an unexpected DVD rental.

The figure that made me gasp, even though I already knew the factoid, was the comparison of the number of gun murders in different countries. It went something like Germany 350, France 250, UK 60, USA 11500. I guess the UK is lower than France as the police do not regularly carry guns. But the US figure was the one that made me gasp. Even though I remembered from Jonathan Raban's chapter about Boston in his book Soft City that the violent death rate in metropolitan Boston in one year was more than in Northern Ireland during the troubles. Perspective, perspective, perspective.

Perspective is a major aspect of the film. Life in the USA seems to be so out of perspective. The main thrust of the film was that gun crime is so prevalent in the US because of fear of the other.

A telling contrast was shown by the interviews with the Canadian people of Sarnia, Toronto and Windsor. Many of them said that they had been burgled, but still did not lock their door (presumably during the day, such as when Moore wandered around one of the Canadian cities opening people's front doors. I guess at night the doors would be locked...) nor would they use weapons on strangers entering their property. In the interview with Charlton Heston we find that he had never been burgled, yet he keeps a loaded gun in the house.

Another contrast was between the cities of Detroit, USA and Windsor, Canada. Although the two citied face each other across the Detroit River (the Detroit and Windsor Tunnel is claimed to be “one of the great engineering wonders of the world” - at one mile long!!) the rate of gun murder is infinitely different (zero in the year of filming in Windsor.)

I enjoyed very much the brief history of American violence by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the makers of South Park.

At the end I was left confused. Where are all the gun related murders taking place? If the poor black-dominated inner cities are not where the guns are, is it just the lower middle-class whites in the suburbs who do all the shooting? What were the families like of the two students who did the shooting at Columbine High? If people are full of unjustified fear about robbers, is it just that they have loaded weapons in their households that are never used? Where is all the killing taking place?

Should Kerry win the next election or not. Will it really make any difference? Despite Clinton's strengths and ability to connect and engage in people outside of the USA, many of the criticisms of the Bush administration would still apply to any Democrat administration. If the US is on the way out as a world power, then it barely matters who is at the helm. If the rest of the world decides to divest its dollar reserves, the US economy will implode. And whoever is in the driving seat, it will be a violent implosion. By that I mean the world economy will be trashed, probably without justification, and the USA will not go down without a lot of fighting.

Fahrenheit 9/11

The screen is black. The roar of jet engines fills the cinema through the surround sound system. We hear explosions, shouts, glass breaking. Then another roar of jets and more chaos. Were these authentic sounds of the destruction of the twin towers of the world trade center? Why go to the cinema to see a documentary? Film is about escape and fantasy, no? Why did a documentary win the Palme d'Or at Cannes? Are we being entertained or informed? Are we seeing the facts or clever editing?

There are serious questions about film-making posed by Fahrenheit 9/11. The sequence of the attack on the twin towers does succeed in surpassing a documentary by the use of the empty screen. My mind was filled with my own experiences and images of that day in September 2001 and I imagine the same thing was going through everybody's mind at the same time in the room. It thus became a truly cathartic experience – a shared moment with the other audience members. This is what makes cinema and theatre different from home entertainment, for better or for worse – though I think this time was for the better. At last I was glad to be in a cinema!

Personally I remembered my drive from Zurich to Brussels that day, the SMS message from my friend in Switzerland breaking the news while I was driving through Luxembourg. Then getting home after the long drive and pausing quietly for a few minutes before turning on the TV, knowing that the world was going to go crazy and be different for years to come.

As the screen shows images again of New Yorkers' shock at events, major points are to be awarded for the use of Arvo Part's “Cantus in Memorium Benjamin Britten,” which is an unmatched musical outpouring of grief.

Another positive item was to show that life in Baghdad before the invasion was not hell as is so often assumed. OK, Moore overdid the saccharin somewhat by showing happy smiling children and weddings. But it is something I tried to tell as many people at the time – Iraq was not the hell of Taliban Afghanistan. (The stupid sexist comment in the film of the Taliban visitor to the US was a good way of showing how dangerous the Afghan leadership was.) I remember just before the invasion reading that the Baghdad symphony orchestra were rehearsing Beethoven. This detail made me realise the error of the Iraq war. Of course Saddam Hussein was a dictator and not a credible leader of a state. It's not the fact that he was removed I object so strongly about, but how and why.

At heart, this film is a socialist polemic. The main message is not really about Iraq or the US elections in 2000 or Afghanistan, or Al-Qaeda or Saudi Arabia or Bin Laden. Fundamentally it is about the exploitation of the poor by the rich through capitalism and war, by the “military-industrial complex.” I can understand why this film is so divisive in the US. As the underlying message is so subversive to the US system, it is easy to see how anyone on the right would find the message impossible to digest. Hence the focus on accuracy and bias from the right. Accuracy is not really the point of this film.

In any case, Moore cleverly defends himself against charges of unreasonable bias by showing interviews with US TV journalists freely admitting their pro-war biases. If Fox TV can lie for the cause of freedom, why should Moore be any different. Only there are no blatant lies in Moore's work – just partiality and omission. There have definitely been lies from the neo-con right.

It was good to be able to see things that were not shown on TV news, such as the real gore of war, children with arms blown apart, cartloads of dead cadavers, the two mercenaries whose bodies were taken apart, burned and hanged in the Faluja street. Also it was instructive to see an actual Saudi public beheading, even if the quality of the image was too poor to see any detail. Other scenes that seem to have escaped the news were the images of the inauguration of George W Bush, where protesters prevented the traditional walk to the stand for the first time ever, and Bush's motorcade being pelted with eggs. It's hard to remember now the farce that was the 2000 US election. Also the scene of the congressional representatives, all from ethnic minorities, protesting at the invalid accession of president Bush and being dismissed by Al Gore as no senator would come forward to sign the objection. Their anger was very affecting.

There were a number of omissions I found strange. The main omission seemed to be the anthrax panic that ensued after the 11th of September. Moore gave a very good sequence about how panic was ratcheted up to ensure public compliance about mass erosions of civil liberties, and there were Fox News items about poison pens and internet chatter on obscure small towns. But there was nothing about how the anthrax scare was sourced to a government laboratory. Was this scare manufactured by the authorities? How many people did die from anthrax poisoning in the end? The sequence on the “Coalition of the Willing” rightly pointed out how few countries were on-side, but it was a bit specious to omit the support of the UK, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. Also the role of Tony Blair in legitimising the occupation of Iraq was omitted.

On a comedy level, I did laugh out loud more than most films that purport to be humorous.

An interesting aside is how this film has made so much money (over $100 million from box office receipts so far) and yet Moore is amenable to downloading this film by internet. How canny to encourage piracy and show that you can still make a fortune from a low budget documentary. It was funny to see the US right initially encourage downloading as a way to cheat Moore his royalties, only later to go quiet when the right realised this was a great way to spread the message of the film, whilst also disproving that downloading films and music is “killing” the creative arts. Predictably comment is made about how this working-class socialist is now a multi-millionaire – the old champagne socialist argument. So it's OK to make money exploiting poor people then rather than by polemical film-making. And maybe as he's so rich he should get a better haircut and a clean baseball cap?

For me, the quotation from George Orwell's 1984 is the key to the film. Like Orwell, Michael Moore is socialist polemicist using mass entertainment to get his message across.

And now, please. I'm fed up with US politics. I swear people in Europe are more aware of the facts that the average US voter. If Kerry wins, it could be a bad thing as the US economy is heading for a huge debt-induced car crash. A democrat win could mean Bush presidencies for years to come. Let George W. become the John Major of US politics and destroy the credibility of free-market capitalism as the best way to manage an economic system.