Respite my face

AAAAAHHHHHHHHHH.

Yesterday was my last exam, which means that I've finished college forever.
This is nice, but also kind of sad because college was great.

The quality of the curriculum was generally quite good, so for exams I was lucky enough to study films such as Chungking Express, La Haine, In the Mood for Love, The Killer, Do the Right Thing, City of God, Irreversible, A Clockwork Orange and...er...Cliffhanger. What's really great, though, is the opportunity to just write about your favourite films, so I've also written about The Evil Dead, The Man Who Wasn't There, The Virgin Suicides, Rushmore and Napolean Dynamite because of the scope of the film and media courses.

I also did a research project/presentation/article on Wes Anderson and a huuuuuge research study on post-9/11 American TV Drama, specifically The Wire and 24.
While this possibly means that I've grown incredibly sick of both Wes Anderson and post-9/11 TV Drama, I've learnt a whole lot and it was actually FUN to learn because I chose to learn it.

It wasn't just the film and media courses that allowed this flexibility; I turned my English coursework assignments into writing on Asian cinema and a study of the language of Firefly.

All of this and a short film and a kid's TV show with a monkey.

All in all, college was fun.
Here's to college.
Thanks college.

How the West Was Won: Part 2

Death is everywhere in the western – anytime a cowboy wants to settle his problem, he reaches for his gun. But ‘Once Upon A Time in the West’ has none of the basic ‘chasing injuns’ morality – it is men who know they are going to die, and who act upon their frontier instincts of greed, vengeance and honour. These are cowboys at the end of their time, at the brink of their era and having to lie down in the face of a new age. The evolution of industry and civilisation is symbolised in the film by the railroad – a major feature of both the mise-en-scène and the narrative. In the vast, empty landscapes of the desert, the black railway line could appear as an intrusion; something new and out of place in an untouched place. The worst enemy of the cowboy is the future – a threat to their old-fashioned methods and philosophies. But the representation of the cowboys in this film provides a sensitive and thoughtful depiction of a time that changed America. They are aged and weathered, and, to quote Leone, they “are conscious of the fact that they will not arrive at the end alive”.

This awareness of the presence of death allowed the film to be permeated with a sense of mourning and melancholy – a farewell to the old west. But the railroad is also present to signify change, and a progression in civilisation. One famous shot follows the film’s heroine Jill McBain as she steps off the train and leaves the station – the camera rises over the wooden shack to majestically reveal a half-built town, busy with activity and inhabitants. This is a pure example of how ‘Once Upon A Time in the West’ depicts its social context – right in the middle of a drastic change that killed one culture and ushered in many others. The final showdown between Harmonica and Frank is made all the more dramatic when we consider that these are two figures of the mythic Old West – and character types that have been seen in many westerns before this – that will soon disappear from their world forever. This shows how the vital link between the film’s signifiers of death, the railroad and cowboy culture allow ‘Once Upon A Time in the West’ to transcend its peers and become a classic.

Gender roles, too, are examined in the film. Traditional westerns had women firmly as secondary characters – distressed damsels, humorous squaws or homely mothers and wives. Claudia Cardinale’s Jill, however, is none of these. She is a New Orleans ex-whore who arrives in the Wild West to find her new family slaughtered, and at this point the story becomes hers – of all the characters, she bears the most responsibility and faces the most hardship – and she does so alone. Both maternal and sexual, Jill is the culmination of other female characters in westerns who is allowed to be just as strong as the men. The male characters seem to revolve around her, and although at times they move close to knights in shining armour, Cardinale never plays Jill as weak or vulnerable. Just as Harmonica, Frank and Cheyenne represent the Old West, Jill signifies a modern, 20^th century America. She is burdened with the responsibilities of independence and technology, and is flung onto the brink of new civilisation. But she faces up to the task, and while the men reluctantly accept their fate and lose their place in the new world, Jill embraces it with her head held high. With complex cowboys and the first true heroine, the western genre is opened up and given a wider, somehow more mature, plain on which to roam.

And yet, for all it did to help the western, it has to be said that the film is responsible for killing a few cowboys itself. Dead were the heroes of John Wayne and Gary Cooper, puffing their chests and spouting lines about being a man in the name of America. After Henry Fonda has killed an infant, how could things be the same? Post-Leone cowboys were the bleak anti-heroes of Clint Eastwood and Sam Peckinpah – with a major emphasis on atmosphere over narrative. And although ultimately the spaceman replaced the cowboy, Leone’s influence is still felt today. The brutality and grittiness is present in David Milch’s foul-mouthed frontier-based TV series ‘Deadwood’, while the liberal use of violence and irresistible cowboy style (surely it’s only a matter of time before brown dusters come back into fashion) have been transferred to more colourful, futuristic TV shows such as ‘Cowboy Bebop’, ‘Samurai Jack’ and Joss Whedon’s ‘Firefly’. Cinema, meanwhile, has taken a quieter turn into the new century – new westerns are more reflective, almost bullet-less genre essays such as ‘Brokeback Mountain’ and ‘The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada’. These, too, it could be argued, only exist as they do because of ‘Once Upon A Time in the West’. Their pensive filming style and meandering pace – not to mention lush, location-heavy cinematography – often look as if lifted straight out of Leone’s west.

‘Once Upon A Time in the West’ is undoubtedly a classic – a master class in how to make a film truly effective. As if the countless pop culture references and tributes weren’t proof enough of its staying power, the film frequently appears in ‘Top 50’ lists, and is widely considered – alongside John Ford’s drastically different ‘The Searchers’ – to be the greatest western ever made. It is refreshing for a post-Tarantino audience to still admire film that treats the subject of violence so gracefully, and with such little self-referential irony. In its absolute conviction in itself and its inimitable style, ‘Once Upon A Time in the West’ signalled a significant change in the genre – this is the peak of the Spaghetti Western, the peak of Leone, one of the peaks of the Sixties – simply put, this is the best that cowboys ever got.

How the West Was Won: Part 1

Here's an article called How the West Was Won that I wrote last year for my college's short-lived film fanzine. It's on one of my favourite films, therefore it's pretty hefty, so I'm bringing it in two parts.


Three blank-faced men approach a train station somewhere in the Arizona desert. They stroll past the clerk, not sparing a word for him or each other. They simply wait – one cracks his knuckles by the railway, another fills his hat with leaking water, and the third shoos away a fly from his face. As the train rattles towards them, they take their places, guns cocked, on the wooden platform. For over ten minutes, nothing happens. What should be dead space is in fact the now-legendary opening to one of the most atmospheric films ever made – Sergio Leone’s ‘Once Upon A Time in the West’. The sequence ends with all three men dead, after a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shootout with Charles Bronson’s enigmatic hero, Harmonica. We then cut to a family living in anticipation of the arrival of a new mother. The preparations are cut short, however, when the entire family – including a pre-pubescent boy – are killed in cold blood.

If the trite plot and rising body count make this sound like another Hollywood actioner with video game sensibilities, don’t be put off. Leone directs the entire film with such exquisite style that it’s impossible not to be drawn in. Everything about ‘Once Upon A Time in the West’ seems to have been crafted together with such technical precision that it’s hard to believe Leone never spoke a word of English to his cast and crew. Each frame of the film is instantly iconic, be it the breathtaking desert locations, the hugely memorable score, or Henry Fonda’s against-type casting as the villainous Frank (think Tom Hanks playing Tony Montana and you’re halfway there). Most agree that this is Leone’s masterpiece – more poignant than his ‘Dollars’ trilogy, yet not as exhaustingly complex as his later ‘Once Upon A Time in America’. Here, Leone has taken a simple story (written along with fellow Italian auteurs Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci) and injected it with an irresistible grace – his camera frames everything with an eerie knowing eye, juxtaposing vast shots of an expansive landscape to impossibly close zooms into his characters’ faces.

Complementing Leone’s distinctive visual style is Ennio Morricone’s music. The partnership between Leone and Morricone is one of the most popular and successful in cinema history – it spanned for most of Leone’s career, and the score for ‘Once Upon A Time in the West’ remains one of Morricone’s best. What makes the music so effective is the use of four different themes for each of the four main characters – emphasising the conflict between them, and the film’s theme of conflicting cultures. Jill McBain has a sweeping, romantic string piece to signify her role as hope in a dying world, Cheyenne has an ambling, playful whistle, Frank has a chilling electric guitar, and Harmonica has the ominous, sustained notes of his namesake. Leone once claimed that ‘music is forty percent of a film’ – and the union between film and music here proves that he truly believed this. Morricone in fact scored the film before anything was filmed – in this way, Leone directed the film around the music, which helps to explain the film’s unique power in atmosphere and mood.

‘Once Upon A Time in the West’ takes its time with getting where it’s going; the playful editing of the opening sequence sets a pace that mimics that of a dying man – filled with tense pauses, slow movements and sudden bursts of violent energy (not to mention a noticeable lack of music – instead, a rhythm is created through amplified diegetic sounds). Amazingly, although the film is over two and a half hours long, there are only fifteen pages of dialogue. Characters and events are determined through looks and actions (the film was once described as ‘an opera of stares’). The narrative never feels rushed or forced as it does in previous westerns; the characters are simply, in some way or another, living until they die. Indeed, if the film is about anything, then it must be, as Jason Robards’ outlaw Cheyenne observes, ‘something to do with death’. Death visits the film in all its forms – violent and sudden, treacherous, cold-blooded, slow and inevitable – it serves as punishment or release to several different characters throughout the film. There are many who claim that Charles’ Bronson’s Harmonica is in fact the spirit of death, and not a human being at all. There is much to support this – his entrances into scenes all include the same ominous sweep into the frame, and for all his screen time, his secret purpose ultimately manifests itself as one brutal act of revenge. Educationalist Sir Christopher Frayling points out that Harmonica’s guidance of the camera and his mysterious movements around the rest of the film suggest that he has a supernatural power over time and space.

No salt

Nuts, I have decided, to the BBC.

Everyone loves them, and they don't deserve any sort of love.
Why? Because their programmes are BAD PROGRAMMES. They rip off other things according to what is popular and what will get most people saying "Ooh, that's good, isn't it?"
Unfortunately, those same people would also spend real money on Vernon Kay's autobiography.

First of all: Doctor Frickin' Who.
Doctor Who is a great theme tune, let down by a shamefully bad show.
It's a shame, really. For many a saturday night I've sat myself down in front of the TV and I've really wanted to enjoy it. Time travel, aliens, robots - all signifiers of something that should have some sort of value. But within minutes it's all ruined by the writers reminding us of how witty and self-referential they are.
Case in point: one episode was set on a spaceship that was flying too close to the sun, putting the crew and the ship into danger. Sound like a good plot? Yeah, well, that's because it was stolen from Sunshine, which just happened to have been released two weeks prior, and was very popular.

As if this weren't shameful enough, it was ruined by a string of pointless, clumsy, off-putting pop culture references. Any chance at tension or credibility in the narrative was ruined.

The fact that both Peter Kay and Catherine Tate guest-starred says just about everything. This is crowd-pleasing, pandering junk, that thinks of itself as very clever and assumes that you agree.

Doctor Who isn't the only bad thing about the BBC, however. Another popular show, Hustle, is just as sickeningly smug. Now, I used to enjoy Hustle quite a lot. Yes, it's always been smug, but it was also just good enough to enjoy without cringing too much.
But, as the budget got bigger so did the producers' heads, and it's all gone wrong. The last episode of the latest series featured the gang of cons do a revenge job on a casino owner in Las Vegas after he attacked the oldest member, Albert. Sound familiar?
Yeah, well, that's because this plot was stolen from Ocean's Thirteen, which came out within the same week and was also very popular.
Robert Vaughn was even wearing Elliot Gould's glasses, for goodness sake.
Hustle has always stolen its ideas and techniques, but this cashing in on popular trends is just pants.

The problem is this obvious, adolescent BBC idea of 'cool', that can also be seen in Torchwood and Robin Hood.
People who rebel are cool! They don't wear suits or work for 'The Man'! They may have an attitude problem, but they always do the RIGHT THING!
They will probably be Cockney and/or attractive!
Clichés are...cool?
You're getting bored, you say? Uh...look, it's something you recognise from that film you watched and never really decided if you liked!
...Have some merchandise!

Anyway, this rant is over, because it's taken a ridiculously long time to write, thanks to the combined efforts of my illness and YouTube.

RIP Cinephilia

Yesterday I payed my respects to Cinephilia - my local video store, and probably the greatest video store in the country, which has now closed.
For over two years I used it as a reliable source of the good, the bad and the totally freaking insane. And everything else. Seriously, everything.
So for my first rental (In the Mood For Love) to my last (El Topo) and everything in between, goodbye Cinephilia.

I'm now pretty scared about what comes next. I don't know what I'm going to do in terms of getting films. I'm settling for Birmingham Central Library at the moment, but it just doesn't compare.

Another reason to be sad is that the BBC's Blast event, which looks like a wonderful and brilliant set of workshops, has been placed on the dates of my exams. And, probably, the exams of a lot of teenagers nationwide. I guess the BBC forgot that THE WHOLE THING IS AIMED SPECIFICALLY AT TEENAGERS. Anyway, if you can make it, please do, it looks great.


But it's not all bad! I'm now the proud owner of a new (old) TV, much bigger and better than my other one. Now I can waste ALL of my revision time watching Deadwood again, on a bigger screen.

Music TV Part 2: Music TV piped bees into my hotel room

So we all know why Music TV is an amazing thing.
And if you don't, scroll down a while and find out.

But really, is it?
No, don't answer. Although it may be good, it-
No, I said don't answer-
You can't-
No, I know, it was a rhetorical question-
I was just-
I-
It-
SHUT UP AND LET ME TALK!

Music television is rubbish and horrible.
Y'know why? STEREOTYPES, my friend.
Look at 50 Cent's videos. They present - nay, glorifiy - the image of young black men as criminals. The same goes for a lot of mainstream hip-hop, in fact. And countless music videos objectify women, in ridiculous ways. To such an extent, in fact, that often the music is just an excuse for some bad porn.
Whether we may realise it or not, the more exposure these videos get the more these stereotypes are reinforced...leading to us all seeing women as sexual objects and black men as criminals (and black men seeing themselves as criminals).

And REALLY the only thing that television does to the industry is harm it.
It makes some people get really successful, yeah, but the wrong people.
Shows like The X Factor and Pop Idol give instant global popularity and wealth to people based almost entirely on their image and attitude, with little or no attention on music skill.
Imagine how demoralising and harmful this is to bands and musicians who may have honed their talent for years, and spent those same years trying to break into the industry. To see Gareth Gates sleeping on a bed of pound coins is just a bit poo. Even if pound coins are a rubbish bed.

...

AND OH YEAH remember how I said that music video is an art form? Complete with visionary directors who enable to band to exert their creativity?
Yeah, well, Westlife called, turns out I was wrong. Then Busted, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera called, but they made the same point, so I just hung up on them.
Their videos are about selling them as a brand, according to the current trend or just to make them look good.
No one is watching the video for 'Dirty' and thinking 'My, what a talented girl.' Unless you're being ironic. In your own mind. Weirdy.




The Rolling Stones














Anyway, Music TV is good because of VVVV and bad because of ^^^^.

The End.





I can't believe I'm passing this off as revision.

Watch HBO

So I finally finished watching the first series of Heroes, and even though it was all a bit abrupt considering the apocalyptic tone of the rest of the series, it was pretty good.
So what next, I wonder?
Well, as well as a second series, also greenlit is Heroes: Origins, a spin-off mini-series. Six episodes are planned, with a new character introduced each episode. Sounds alright, right? Wrong.
At the end of this mini-series, the public will vote for which character they want to appear in series 2.
THIS MAKES ME ANGRY.

Why has all TV turned into a gameshow or phone-in? Are the writers so afraid and without confidence that they can't do the writing themselves? Why not just create a show the way you want it, and then let the audience make of it what they will? Even better, why not write something that came from your own head? This test screening initiative has existed for years, but this is ridiculous. Programmes like Heroes should exist so that we DON'T have to watch crap like Big Brother.

NBC are pandering to their audience a bit too much. I'm hoping it is them forcing it, and not the writers. It's still okay to hate networks.

Except HBO.



HBO rule.

Interlude

Guess who's popped up in Heroes!



I sincerely hope this means a long-overdue Maclcolm McDowell revival.

Viddy well, brothers...