Matthew 7:1-5

I saw Pasolini's The Gospel According to St Matthew recently, thanks to MUBI. Pasolini's Christ is not some wimpy angel of peace and love, but a hard-core revolutionary expecting to give up his life for the cause. Pasolini lets the original words do the talking, and maybe that's why the Vatican liked it: more or less all the key points from the Gospel in a movie.

At one point, Christ is handing out some random advice, including this...

1. Judge not, that ye be not judged. 2. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. 3. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? 4. Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? 5. Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

Damn it's been a long time since I heard that sentiment. My generation grew up on this stuff. It sank into us, especially since it resembles the Commandment: Thou shalt keep thy nose out of business that is not thine, and having opinions, keep them to thyself lest other people think thou art a twat, and a busybody, and likely a grass, despised by all.

Look, of course we judge people. If we didn't, the same manipulative headcase could take us time and again. We need to learn who to avoid and why. But we also learn to say, with an utterly straight face: "just because you never pay your share of the bill and are always cadging rides but never paying for petrol, does not mean you are Bad Person". It just means we're having nothing more to do with you.

The point is that we don't judge publicly. Maybe privately, but that's always a risk.

Christ is telling us not to judge for fear of the consequences, and because we need a bit or work ourselves (the beam in our eye).

But there are other reasons not to judge publicly.

First, it keeps the air clearer.

Second, it lets the Bad People give themselves away, since they may not have the self-awareness to know that snarky tweets (for instance) are pretty much a turn-off.

Third, Bad People (as opposed to incompetent ones(*)) are not going to change because we say rude things about them.

If no-one tells the SJW that weird hair colours are a give-away, it's easier to spot SJW's.

The Twitters have never heard this stuff.

Two generations of people who never grew up hearing the basic wisdoms of the New Testament.

It's as good a way of understanding what we're seeing as anything else.

(*) We can correct people helpfully without making them feel bad, unless they really are horribly insecure, when nothing we say will be right, and silence is wiser.

Joker - The Movie

Are there two versions of this film? One that the American reviewers saw, and the one I saw recently at my local Cineworld?

This is not the Ultimate White Anger movie. That remains the remarkable 1993 movie Falling Down, directed by Joel Schumacher and starring Michael Douglas. “I’m the bad guy? How’d that happen?” Douglas’ character D-Fens is stone cold sane and sober. He knows exactly what he’s doing, which makes his anger and actions so much more significant. Want to know what Whitey looks like when he gets angry? He looks like D-Fens: it’s deliberate, it’s not pretty, and it’s not backstory.

Joker is backstory: of one of the most well-known baddies in cinema and comics. As that, it is excellent. Unrelenting, intense, gripping, sloshing between wince-making bathos and shocking violence, with a central performance the like of which comes along once a decade.

Joker starts out being a hopeless loser living with his invalided single mother. By the time he strikes out against the three White Boy oafs on the subway, he has a psychotic break. That’s where the touching sequences with the lovely Zazie Beetz come from. I’m not sure if psychotic breaks really work like that, but comic / movie convention says they do.

He has the psychosis because he can’t accept what he’s done. Only Big Bad People kill, and he’s not a Big Bad Person. He’s a loser who idolises Robert de Niro’s TV comedian - some reviewers got very carried away with The King of Comedy references, forgetting that large amounts of cultural appropriation is allowed in comics to ease the creative strain.

However, back in the movie, times are so bad that the majority of the population think that a man who kills three asshole Wall Street guys is pretty much a hero. People show up at protests wearing clown masks.

What do you get when you cross a mentally-ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash? You get what you deserve...

Not quite. Most mentally-ill loners fade into oblivion, bumbling along under the influence of drugs so awful that there’s no secondary market for them. We’re very carefully told that due to budget cuts Joker can’t get his perfunctory counselling and the bottles of drugs he needs to stay doped-and-functional. He’s off his meds. Literally. His psychosis is over - no more hallucinations involving Zazie Beetz; he has literally killed the source of his dysfunctions (watch the movie to understand that remark); and he is now a conscious moral actor. He is only crazy like a fox.

I used to think that my life was a tragedy, but now I realize, it's a comedy

A comedy can be about laughs, but it can also be a play characterized by its humorous or satirical tone and its depiction of amusing people or incidents, in which the characters ultimately triumph over adversity. Joker’s life is that kind of comedy: he triumphs over adversity by becoming a criminal without intent. Which is, of course, the conclusion the film has to reach.

Is there an action take-away from the movie for incels and the downtrodden, ignored and reviled?

If there is, it’s ditch the distractions, the meds, the cliched counselling and advice because those are hiding the real world from you, and you from the real world. Then strike back at those who hurt you. At that point you can see why SJWs would start to get worried. And then Drop out of the economy and live off illegal earnings. Which would get agreement from the Invisible Committee.

Is it me, or is it getting crazier out there?

It’s not you. It is getting crazier out there, and the Wokeful and the SJWs are the ones making it crazier.

However, that’s not why the Wokeful circled round Joker. They knew from the Venice Film Festival that Joker was going to be received as one of the best films of the decade. No matter what anyone said, it would make a profit. It would get audiences. So the Wokeful hitched on to Joker's star to get the publicity for their causes.

It’s a good comic-book movie. I’d put it right up there with Watchmen.

Rama Burshtein's Through The Wall

The reviewers seem a little puzzled by this film. It’s about a thirty-something woman, Michal, who turned to God in her twenties, has a ditzy job (she runs a petting zoo), shares a flat, and suddenly feels the pain of not being able to live a conventional religious social life, for which she meeds to be married to a nice Orthodox Jewish Boy. Let me know when the penny drops.

Yep. This is a movie about the hazards of Alpha Lays and Beta Pays. In this case the Alpha is God, and the Betas are all those Orthodox Jewish men she meets. With the slight problem that none of them seem to be dumb enough or Beta enough for Michal to fool. All of them, from the hot indie singer to the various be-hatted guys sent to her by yentas, catch onto her prickly character, the fact she will be horrible to live with (there’s no father at home, and her much hotter married sister is in the middle of a screaming-in-the-streets row with her husband), and possibly notice that they are slimmer than she is. None of the men are shamed for being smart enough to realise she’s not relationship material: in fact, they each get to tell her she’s a nightmare and full of herself. That’s a clue right there.

The movie starts with Michal and her fiance tasting the food for their wedding. She makes which item to taste first a subject of debate - something her boyfriend point out, and which had a man along the row in the cinema curling up in laughter. She senses there’s something wrong and eventually verbally bludgeons the truth out of him: he doesn’t love her. Despite that, she goes ahead with her plans for a wedding. She’s got everything else, and all God has to provide is a husband. Everyone goes along with this, with increasing reluctance and foreboding, but no sense that perhaps a psychiatrist might be in order. She gets to the wedding room, takes her bridal seat and seemingly starts hallucinating (the script suddenly tells us she’s been fasting) a conversation with the Hot Guy who runs the wedding venue. Her BBW sister even asks her “who were you talking to”.

And then, right at the end, God sends her the hot guy who runs the wedding venue.

This film can be read that way: he only way an over-weight, contentious, socially-inept Four who has clearly bashed through The Wall is ever going to land a hot guy is by a miracle sent from God. Before you say that can’t be what Ms Burshtein intended, don’t forget that she is an Orthodox Jew herself. I’m guessing she feels about Michal the way Red Pillers feel about career-focussed Carousel Riders. In other words, Michal isn’t the heroine, she’s the deluded central figure.

I liked this film, though my reality-principle kept me wondering, in the last fifteen minutes, where the psychiatrists were. The painful lead-up to her groom-less wedding is necessary, because without it there wouldn’t be the miracle ending. There would have been a poor-Michal-strong-independent-woman-vicitim-of-the-Patriarchy ending. Or finally-someone-mans-up-and-marries-the-post-wall-woman. And those were not, I suspect, readings Ms Burshtein wanted.

It’s got moments of comedy and acute observation - the sequence with the snake and the schoolgirls is a gem - and it has moments of pathos where we feel sympathy for the seemingly doomed Michal.

I saw it at the Curzon Soho. I’ve previously written about their silly pricing. Since then, for reasons I’ll explain later, I joined their members’ scheme, got four free films which are almost worth the price of membership, and discounts that meant I paid £11.50 that Sunday. That’s a price I can live with.

Jazz and Whiplash: Review

A couple of months ago a friend of mine told me about a movie he'd seen in which a young man drives himself crazy trying to play drums like Buddy Rich. I saw it last weekend. it was a well-made, beautifully-shot and dressed movie, nice editing, the script, the acting, all top-notch. But. They didn't push the envelope. On the level of content, it is entirely nonsensical, on an emotional level it works rather well.

What this film is really about is how Academia has wrecked jazz as a music form. Let’s get this more or less straight: jazz ended with On The Corner.


Miles was to jazz what Jean-Luc Godard was to movies: On The Corner was his fin du cinema moment from Weekend. Oh sure, plenty of people went on playing stuff they were playing back in the 1960’s, and Wynton Marsalis came along and re-cycled time-no-changes while Miles was in hiding during the 1970’s, but nobody did anything new. Miles, Trane and the avant-garde guys did it all in the 1960’s.

The point of jazz and blues is that it’s freedom within a genre: they played blues, ballads, hard bop, cool, swing, modal, time no changes, or free, and they did it in their own manner and with their own voice. That’s why even a newcomer can identify Miles, Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, Ron Carter, Wynton Kelly, Tony Williams and about fifty other players after just a few notes. Those musicians had voices as distinctive as any composer. They learned as much technique as they needed to make the music they wanted to make.

That’s not what happens now. Listen to Giant Steps.


It took Coltrane three months to figure out how to solo over those fast-changing chords. Let me say that another way: it took the one of the most creative jazz musicians that ever lived three months to figure out how to solo over those chords.Yet young saxophonists are expected to be able to play a Coltrane-like solo over those chords before they graduate. They have amazing techniques, which are entirely beside the point. If Giant Steps has to be used at all, and not treated as a musical dead-end, they should be expected to figure out their solo over those chords. Coltrane’s solo was a solution to a problem: how do you play a hard bop solo over so many chords? Solved. Next problem: how do you play a different solo over those chords? It may be the Koybayoshi Maru of music problems, but it’s better than learning to play a bunch of changes quickly.

And Giant Steps lead to the chord-scale system. It’s the reason all contemporary jazz sounds cold, identical, soul-less and un-musical. Because the musicians are so darn occupied trying to remember what scale they play over E maj 9-5 that they forget to play a tune and a feeling. A real musician can play one note and make you feel an emotion. With chord-scale, the musicians don’t get time to get to the emotions.

Chord-scale, and polished technique, is what gets taught in the colleges. So there’s an analogical, emotional truth in Whiplash: the tutors might not actually shout at the students - and they would lose their jobs if they talked as JK Simmons does - but what they teach crushes them into moulds just as surely.

The ending of Whiplash was yet another bully-and-victim reconciliation scene. Those don't happen in real life and everyone over the age of about 12 knows it. I wanted to believe it, even though I knew it was hokum.

The "good job” speech that Simmons character gets is utter twaddle, both as an author's message and from that character. Which brings me to what I really didn't like about the film. I lost count of the number of times the JK Simmons character told the Joe-Jones-threw-a-cymbal-at-the-young-Charlie-Parker story. (And as my friend said: he did it once, not eighteen times a day for a year.) The teacher's excuse was that he was trying to find, or make, the next Bird. And that's arrogant beyond all measure. It's not a teacher's job to produce another Charlie Parker, it's a teacher's job to teach the frickin' trade skills and knowledge at the speed required. It's the artist's job to become an artist. Teachers are there to set a pace, but not to push. If the student can’t keep up, you let them ring out. You don’t throw chairs at them.

Here's my idea. Talented young man who can ace the technical stuff but wants to play his own music. Get girls, has friends, but those are just entertainment. Fifty minutes of all the different kinds of music in New York. Some glimpses of how the various scenes (jazz, Latin, etc) work, what the economics are. He's trying to find what Miles called a "direction". His friends join orchestras to play other people's music, or bands to play genre music. His girlfriends do what they do - office jobs, whatever. And then he hears it. Five bars. Boom! And we're off. Because that's how creativity works: we build on what others do. And when he finds his musical direction, he finds The Girl as well, because that's the kind of happy ending the audiences like. Everybody behaves well, and nobody gets pregnant or shouts. The most we get is puzzlement: why would anyone want to miss out on jobs and careers just to find their own music? And that is what the story explains.

Just a thought. I mean, it's not within the realm of conventional cinema... but what if?

Citizen Four (2): Big Data Is Even More Useless To The NSA Than To Tesco

Security consultants have a vested interest in scaring you, your employer's IT department and the politicians. Mo' fear means mo' money. There are a few good guys out there, but none of them are working for McAfee, Norton, the Big Consultancies or the big software support companies. Those people are in it for the money. Here's a quick test for anyone who claims to be a computer security consultant. Ask them if you need McAfee or Norton running all the time on your computer. If they say YES, thank them for their time, show them the door and check you still have your watch and all your fingers when they've left. (Why you should is the subject of another post.)

Though the security consultants often seem to be against the Sigint community, their interests are more or less exactly aligned. The Signint guys want the Bad Guys off the Internet because the Bad Guys are lost in the noise there, so they spread stories about how the Internet and phone service is their bitch. The security consultants want to sell you their stuff, so they spread stories about how the Internet and phone service is anyone's bitch, but especially the sigint guys'.

(Don't get me wrong. Banks, medical companies and government departments that deal in personal data need to have secure communications and computers and data. They should vet their staff and make it difficult for even employees to sign on to their networks. You need to practice safe computing at home and in cafes, and run your OS firewalls. But like all security, this is to deter amateurs and up the cost of hacking you as against the next person. If the pros want access to your computers, they will get it.)

The hype says that the sigint agencies can search amongst all this data to find "patterns". There are two kinds of patterns. First those obtained by looking at who is contacting who, and who visits what websites, sometimes called "traffic analysis". The idea is that the agencies have certain kinds of pattern-archetypes they prepared earlier, and go looking for those in new traffic records, thus finding terrorists, drug dealers, illegal gambling lines and all sorts of other illegal activity. Because terrorists and drug dealers don't learn and are creatures of habit. This is more-or-less nonsense. Traffic analysis works when listening in on radio traffic between armed forces engaged in industrial-scale warfare (which is where it came from), but unless it's used in conjunction with a list of "numbers (or URL's) of interest", it's more or less useless on a retail scale. The second kind of patterns are about content: word use, photographs and the like. In business, this is known as predictive modelling, and there's a huge problem with it.

Predictive modelling is used to identify people who have a higher probability of doing whatever it is you're selling or supplying: using certain kinds of social services, taking insurance or loans, making insurance claims, defaulting on payments (that's a huge industry in the financial sector called "credit risk"), committing crimes, or redeeming coupons for Pampers. These are almost always events with a very low incidence - very few people do them each month - and a fairly low prevalence - the stock of people who have done them is less than 10%.

A bliding glimpse of the obvious is that if you want to predict a rare event with high probability, it must be with a bunch of indicators which line up just right almost equally rarely. In business, it can be acceptable to use a method that over-predicts wildly, as long as it over-predicts less wildly than the previous method. If you can send only half as many leaflets and get twice the response rate from those letters, you've halved your marketing costs and kept the same revenues. In business that counts as a result. In espionage, that's awful: you have far too many false positives.

The other blinding glimpse of the obvious is that you need enough examples of people doing whatever it is to find and prove patterns with statistical techniques. There just aren't enough terrorists in the UK, and there haven't been enough bombings, to gather that amount of data.

The holy grail of predictive modelling is that the private process has a public choke-point: everyone who does X, must do Y or Z and almost the only reason for doing Y or Z is X, and that Y and Z are both easily observable. Seeing someone come out of a branch of William Hill is pretty good evidence that they laid a bet. As far as anyone knows, there’s no equivalent of William Hill’s for terrorists and other nasties. And even if there was, it wouldn’t last for long, as they will change methods on an erratic basis. This is basic tradecraft that’s been practiced since Sun Tzu ran spies, and it’s not rocket science. You think that bit in The Wire where the bad guys sent each other photographs of clocks wasn’t based on a real example?

No. Nobody is using Big Data techiniques to spot malfeasors and terrorists. They might be trying, but you can rest easy that they will fail. The benefits of Big (commercial) Data are mostly hype, and the benefits of Big (Intelligence) Data are total vapourware. Except, and this is crucial, when the agencies have a bona fide target and can get that target’s phone numbers and other comms identities. That takes humint, not Big Data. Business has had Big Data for a long time, and the best it can do is improve the efficiency of its mail order shots from, oh, 0.2% to 0.6%.

Collecting data on “everyone” is so obviously pointless, un-economic and silly that if the NSA and GCHQ are doing it, or heading that way, the people in charge should be fired. I don’t think the people who run these agencies are stupid. I don’t think they are really doing what the FUD-meisters in the security business suggest they are doing. But I do think they don’t mind that the security FUD-meisters are saying that they can and are.

So was Edward Snowden actually planted on us by the NSA to spread the fear? I don’t think so. Though it would explain why his location wasn’t found within an hour by an operator looking at hotel security footage from across the world, and why he wasn’t shot the next evening by a special forces sniper flown out to Hong Kong on a Gulfstream and guided by imagery of the hotel bedroom taken from one of the smartphone cameras that was turned on automatically from half-way across the world. Because that’s what the NSA and CIA can really do. Right?

Oh. And the scene in Citizen Four where the bullies from GCHQ make the Guardian journalists grind and drill holes in the hard drives to destroy the data? Pure hype. On a modern terabyte-storing 3.5" platter, a single write 0's pass will eradicate the data past all restoring, just as securely as some fancy 7-pass US DoD wiping algorithm. The forensic guys can deal with lightly damaged discs, discs that have lost their controllers and stuff like that, but once you do a standard disk wipe, it's gone. Hit it with a hammer a few times afterwards if you like. But the guys from GCHQ would prefer you believed that they can see past a data shred, so that you didn't bother in the first place. Then they could "recover" the data.

Citizen Four (1): The Logistics of Tapping

Citizen Four is an excellent documentary about the first days of the Edward Snowden revelations. There’s a lot of him in the movie, and he seems to be an intelligent, savvy young man. This post isn’t about him or the rights and wrongs of indiscriminate surveillance, but about the feasibility of the claims being made about the recent activities of the NSA and GCHQ. It's therefore also about how worried you should be by all those revelations.

Right now the sigint (signals intelligence, as opposed to “humint” which is actual people) community are sending out some very mixed messages. On the one hand, they want to get content-level access to e-mails, websites, Facebook, Twitter and everything else, and they want ISPs to keep it all for a few months. On the other, seemingly they can tap and de-crypt anything, anywhere and in real time, they can turn on the microphone of your smartphone and listen in to your regular conversations of your smartphone, while using its GPS to track you.

Personally, I find the idea that, should I ever get lost or kidnapped, all anyone has to do is call Fort Meade and ask them where my phone is.

As if. The sigint community are, and have been for a good few years, drowning in digital noise. Let's do a little history.

The heyday of sigint was up to the mid 1990’s when most of the world’s telecoms traffic went through copper cable or by radio to satellites. That’s what the GPO Tower was built for: maser trunk transmission.

They took the masers away a couple of years ago. That’s what all those domes at Menwith Park and other places are for. It’s all still useful, as a lot of traffic to Africa, North Asia, parts of the Middle East and other assorted hot spots still goes over satellite. (The Sea-Me-We and FLAG cables go to the major towns in their destination countries, not to places like Syria or Kurdistan. Don't even think about trunk landlines in Syria or Kyrgyzstan.) All you have to do with copper was wrap some wire round it to pick up the magnietic fields created by the changes in current that is the signal, attach it to some headphones or a tape recorder and you're in the bugging business. It's much the same with radio waves. Point an ariel at the sky, tune your reciever to what you know is the satellite's frequency and wander around until you get a good signal. A few technical details aside, that's more or less it.

And then came fire-optic cable and digital. The Signint community hates fibre-optics and digital communication, because:

It makes effective encryption easy;
There’s no regulation of the technology;
It allows humungous amounts of traffic: they aren’t just looking for a needle in a haystack but a salt crystal in a ocean;
It’s horribly difficult clandestinely to monitor communications

That last bit contradicts what you will find on interwebz, which will have you believing that you too can tap into a fibre-optic cable for a tiny cost. Well, first you have to find it. Then you’ve got to dig it up. Then you have to put in your tapping device - and since that involves physically manipulating the fibre, it’s impossible to do without setting off alarms back at the carrier’s NOC - but let’s assume the operators were watching football at the time, and then you re-bury the cable.

Here’s the first question: how are you going to get all that data back to base? A main trunk line will pour out data at around 2T bits/second. Lucky for you that you just happen to have a similar quality fibre-optic cable laid right up to where you did the intercept? Because that doesn’t cost anything to do and isn’t a bureaucratic nightmare anywhere except the City of London. Ah, I see, you have a submarine - the USS Jimmy Carter - that specialises in doing this. And also happens to carry and be able to lay enough cable to get from your tapping point back to some secure naval base, because the commercial cable-layers are just kidding with those big specialised ships and nine-figure costs. Having got the data back to your secure naval base, you then send it down a secure high-capacity line that comes free with every big ol’ shed you build in Utah.

Here’s the real joke. When you’ve done all that, all you’re getting is a light show. Billions and billions of different-coloured photons. You have no idea which photons belong where and do what. The telcos and ISPs have expensive multiplexers at each end of the cable to send and receive all those photons. Those multiplexers have to be set up and synchronised, and can be changed quite easily and without telling the NSA. Without knowing how the sending multiplexer is set up, all you’re getting is a very fast sparkler. So it’s a good thing you have an inside source at the ISP or carrier. You do, right? And no, you can’t use some fancy algorithm to find the order in the light show. Just in case you were thinking that.

No. Nobody’s doing any large-scale tapping of modern fibre-optic cable. The logistics are impossible. What the sigint services do is connect some kit to the telco's switch (for TDM / SS7 voice traffic) or router (for data traffic) so they get a feed that's been neatly structured. They still have to de-crypt it, maybe, and search it, but it's a manageable amount of traffic. They are supposed to have a Court Order when they do that, and I'm sure they do, but... I'm guessing that what's in their kit these days is an array of multi-terabyte drives, and they copy more data than they have permission for. Every week they pop in and swap out the storage arrays. Hence their desire to make legal what they are doing now anyway. But this is a guess.

(To be continued)

Mr Turner vs Topsy-Turvey: Basquiat Wins

Ken Loach’s Topsy-Turvey is one of my favourite films, and one of the best films made about the creative process: in that film the creation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado. I came away feeling as if I understood more about the theatrical world of the time, the men who created those quirky operas, and with more respect than I previously had for their work.

So I was looking forward to Ken Loach’s Mr Turner. And sure, it’s lovely to look at. The performances from his troupe are surpassing excellent. And Timothy Spall gives the best performance of a man-as-a-pig as you could want, if you wanted such a thing. But by heaven’s it’s lazy.

A ton of research went into it, and it’s all up there on the screen, but little of it is in the story and even less in the character of Turner. In Topsy-Turvey we meet Gilbert and Sullivan as established figures: Sullivan already has his knighthood. Similarly, we meet Turner when he’s already a success. Except for the life of me, I can’t see why. He’s an oaf. A big, fat, ugly oaf with an unconvincing line in insincere flattery. In 1838, when Turner was in his mid-50’s, and a year covered by this film, the King of France, Louis-Philippe presented a gold snuff box to him. Watch the movie, and then try imaging that porker being admitted to the Court of Louis-Phillipe.

A film about a successful artist has to explain to the viewer why the artist was successful, and what form that success took. Loach does this very well in Topsy-Turvey, with some to-the-point scenes with their impresario, and even touching on their investment in the Savoy Hotel. It’s clear that Sullivan was talented, charming and raffish, and so dealt with the press and society, while Gilbert was a dour, detail-freak who dealt with the production. And why do we know they are good? Because Loach shows us...


Loach dodges this completely with Turner. Turner's business partner was his father, and he’s a bent-backed inarticulate, obsequious creep. Customers are shuffled into a dark room, made to wait, then lead into a studio filled with Turner’s paintings arranged to no special effect and lit by natural light through a layer of muslin. I’m pretty sure that’s not how Jay Jopling shifts his Gilbert and George paintings, and I’ll bet that Whistler was a pretty smooth operator. The buyers we see are gullible and not very bright, or aged landed aristocrats of such a seniority that everyone has to stand when they enter the room. And John Ruskin. The Ruskin in the film is such a lightweight little git that I kept thinking there must have been another John Ruskin who was the most influential art critic of the time. If i didn’t know any better, I’d think that Loach was trying to tell us that people who bought Turners then were as artistically insensible as people who buy Hirsts now. But Loach can’t be saying that, because Great Painter.

Great Painter is why it’s odd that not once do we get to see one of Turner’s pictures up close and sensual. You’d think that, on his name alone, Ken Loach could swing some decent rostrum camerawork on the Tate’s collection, let alone on the chance of a movie tie-in. But seemingly no. In Topsy-Turvey we got performances of the songs in the Mikado, but the most we get in Mr Turner is Turner dashing back from some expedition and knocking off the next Famous Painting while being a boor to an increasingly weird housemaid. Loach should have watched Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation to remind himself of how to show art to inspire awe and respect.

And then we see Turner having himself lashed to a mast so he can sail through a storm and catch pneumonia? Where did that come from? He just did it on a whim? Or was I supposed to know that story as well? Episode after episode without the joining thread of character.

Watch it by all means. But if you want to see a commercial movie that’s really about painting and the art scene of its time, and yet still about a person, watch Julien Schnabel’s Basquiat. That’s how it’s done.

Frank: The Movie

I have no idea how anyone writes songs. I can extemporise instrumental music on the guitar, piano and recorder; I can write plays, have written poems and stories; I have a glimpse at what creative mathematics and philosophy are about; I take reasonable photographs and can put together a meal from whatever’s in the kitchen. But I have NO IDEA how Curt Cobain wrote Smells Like Teen Spirit.



None. Can’t fathom it. (I can pick up a guitar and "just play" something. Improvisation / extemporisation I can do: song-writing? Composing to order? Not a hope.)

The pianist in Frank could be me - except he can do social media better than I can’t at all, and gets to make hay with a girl who looks just like Maggie Gyllenhall. It has the funniest joke I’ve heard all year

“I play keyboards”
“Can you play C, F and G?”
“Yes”
“You’re in”

I rolled in the aisle.

Frank is sold as a comedy, and who knows it may even have been written and performed as one. But inside it is a portrayal of the creative process and people. The key scene, the one that tells you that Frank and his weird band are actually the real thing, is right at the end. (Spoiler alert). Robbed of his papier-mâché head, revealed as the grown-up version of the troubled child that he was, he walks into the dingy bar his band have a gig at - playing to four people who can’t hear them. Frank looks around and picks features of the room and starts to recite them, which turns into a kind of chorus, which the band pick up on and within three choruses are in full flight, at once backing and soloing over Frank’s song. And it’s good, for its genre. Jam and Lewis it ain’t, but if you’re into that stuff, you’ll know it’s good. (it’s not great, but it’s good.) It’s better than I could do.

And in the meantime, our narrator, who fell in with them by accident, promoted them through You Tube and Twitter, and fails to write a single worthwhile bar of music throughout the movie, leaves, having understood that he’s not a creative musician, but at best a guy who knows when to play C, F and G.

The process that the movie shows us is hermetic (the band don’t want to be a success, and two of them only speak French), obsessive (they take nearly a year to prepare an album that never gets released), and quirky (scenes of recording natural noises and other things). That’s one way of creating ideas and music, but it’s not the only one. At the other extreme is what the great jazz musicians did: play all the time, listen to other people when you’re not playing, and keep experimenting with changes. What happens if we do this, or that? What happens when I get three of the greatest improvising musicians in history in a church and give them some chords to work off? (Hint: Kind of Blue. We just didn’t know that Coltrane, Adderley and Evans were that good then.)



Frank suggests that creative people are odd if not actually weird, and that’s a common enough idea, but it’s an excuse. For the audience. Creativity takes knowledge, skill and application, the willingness to experiment and be wrong, and, of course, a lot of familiarity with what others are doing. It’s hard work and requires a certain amount of single-mindedness, or a lot of opportunities to experiment (as in “I thought I’d try putting prunes in the stew this time”). That’s not likely for people whose time fritters away on conference calls, meetings, making up slide decks, BS-ing in the pub, zoning out on the train and “dealing” with other peoples’ insecurities and neediness. But creative people spend more time futzing, going down blind alleys and pursuing impossible pet projects than anyone thinks.

One thing the movie is pretty darn clear about. It’s better to be the band playing doleful versions of cowboys songs in a nowhere bar than it is to be the people drinking at the bar. Or the piano player who brings the band-leader back to join them. And with that, I do not disagree.

Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac

It’s taken a while to process this movie. It’s not an art-house version of Thanks For Sharing, and neither, thank God, is it a art-house version of the execrable Shame. It’s not a study of sex addiction or nymphomania, and actually is not about sex at all. If you want to see a movie about sex, download something from Kink. You will never see a film about sex in the mainstream cinema. There are penises (erect and flaccid) and vaginas, and what looks like people having sex, but a lot of that is digital compositing. I’m also assuming that the bit where Jamie Bell’s K hits Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Joe with a glove stuffed with coins is not real, otherwise it would have had to have been one take and Gainsbourg would have been un-filmable for a week while the bruises went down. Nah. Likewise the whipping sequence: that’s either a body-double or a prop.

So what is it about? It’s about someone who behaves in some unconventional ways because she chooses to. We should twig that the whole thing is some kind of half-metaphor when Joe explains that, in her early twenties, she was having sex with ten men a night. Do the math. That many plates can’t be kept spinning. And yet again, she has a recurrent case of one-itis for Shia La Boeuf, as would be understandable in a healthy young woman. One-itis and plate spinning don’t go together. It’s also a satire on men’s need to rationalise women’s sexual behaviour.

Right at the start Joe insists to Stellan Skarsgård's Seligman, that she is a bad person.

 

Now, let us remember the rules. Women are never bad people, and if they do something that if a man did it would be a bad thing, it’s okay because, you know, patriarchy. Seligman therefore refuses to believe her, and throughout the film attempts to rationalise every bit of her behaviour, even, for heaven’s sake, in terms of Walton’s The Compleat Angler. There’s even a you-go-girl speech towards the end about how she was “exploring” and “demanding her rights”. The bit where Seligman, having heard how the guy who took her virginity by three strokes from the front and five up the rear, after turning her over like a sack of potatoes, explains that 3 and 5 are Fibonnaci numbers, is so truly silly that we must assume that von Trier did it deliberately: “look at how silly this guy has to be to understand what happens to her”. (Either that, or von Trier is truly weird.)

In return for all this listening and attempted understanding, Joe kills Seligman, as right at the end, he attempts a half-hearted rape. In most cases a simple “What the frack do you think you’re doing”, followed by a hefty dose of shaming, would do. Seligman is an old man, and he’s not holding her down. The last time I looked, it wasn’t yet legal or even morally acceptable, even in Denmark, for women to kill men who were attempting to rape them. (Kick them in the nuts, sure, but the legal principle is that the force used in self-defence must be proportionate to the force used by the attacker.) However, I suspect it’s a device to end the movie, which has no other real reason for stopping.

Oh yeah, she’s a bad girl. Prima facie, the scene in the SAA meeting is a little unconvincing: from Joe’s denouncements of the other women in the group, we get the idea that sex addicts are rather pathetic women driven to use sex to fill an emptiness in their lives. This is to set up the contrast with Joe, who likes her desires and urges. As a way of making Joe’s acceptance of her own agency clear, it does the job. She’s the drunk who decides they would rather be drunk than sober and leaves an AA after-meeting coffee session with a little speech to that effect.

I’m not suggesting that von Trier is making any Red Pill points. But he’s a provocateur, and so it’s not surprising that he takes a dissenting view on the morality of his character. He's clearly not speaking about all nymphomaniacs, as Steve McQueen was doing about "all" sex addicts, and that's why von Trier's film is a flawed art movie, whereas McQueen's is propaganda disguised as seriousness.

As a film? Von Trier is a film-maker first and foremost. The stories and characters come afterwards. Of course the plot is silly, just as silly as the idea that a planet would whoosh past Earth and then turn round within three or four days and collide with it.I think it’s better than his last two, especially as he keeps the scissors out of Gainsbourg’s hands (yep, you just winced at that, didn't you?), even if this time he gives her a gun. You don’t read late-period Henry James to find out if the girl gets the guy, and you don’t watch a von Trier for a cracking yarn. Some things don’t have to make sense, they just have to work their magic on you.

It will be on Curzon Online for a long while yet. Go watch.

Review: Jeune et Jolie

You will know from your attendance at Political Correctness 101 that films about prostitution must portray the men as creeps, abusers and preferably violent with it, while the prostitute must be portrayed as a victim of deception, drugs, economic injustice, male violence or, and this is risky, as a plucky single mother making a living the only way she can (before realising the error of her ways, cleaning up and getting a job as an out-reach worker). Prostitution is about providing men with sex, and that means eeeuuuugh! men! and even more eeeeuuuugh! hetero-sex. The central question the film-maker must address is why the heroine would do anything so icky and degrading as, you know, have sex. With men. Who aren't hot. Because disgusting. And Patriarchy. And Girls Are Victims. Of Everything.

So now let's proceed to the film review. Jeune et Joli is a film about a 17-year old girl, Isabelle, who looks a lot like Marine Vacth, who sets up as a part-time prostitute in her Year 13. She loses her virginity to a fit-looking but shallow German boy during the summer holiday, and then, prompted by a) a slightly creepy guy who approaches her after school and gives her his number, and b) what must by now be the annual TV documentary about undergraduates and prostitution, sets up online as a call-girl. Her clients are variously creepy, old, fat and middle-aged, and okay and middle-aged. She charges 300 euros an hour, which certain websites in this country will confirm is pretty much what a girl who looked like Marine Vacth could charge. This bit puzzled the critics: she puts the money in a zip-case in her wardrobe and doesn't spend a euro. (That is Ozon cutting off cliched explanations.

The old guy dies on her mid-act. She scarpers from the hotel. The Police catch up and break the news to her mother, whose reactions are a study in female solipsism, but not more so than we would expect. Anyone Blaming The Family is pushing it.

There's some attempt towards the end at psychological explanation with the legally-compulsory therapist. I found these unconvincing, and I think we are supposed to: again, it's Ozon cutting us off from cliched explanations.

There's also some attempt to suggest that charging 300 euros an hour improves her sense of worth and social confidence, which is most convincing as she walks through a house party full of teenagers doing drunken teenage-y things, and smiles at it all with the air of someone who Knows Way Better. I could buy that as the reaction of a teenage girl in that situation, and therefore as writerly accuracy, but not as authorial assertion. Otherwise Ozon is offering us prostitution as self-development, and I'm going to guess he doesn't believe that any more than I do.

All the critics mention Belle du Jour Of course they do. Ozon even does a visual quote from Bunuel's film to mis-direct them.

(Intentionally misleading visual quote)

But of course they shouldn't. What they should mention is Bonjour Tristesse another novel / film about an amoral young woman. Written in the 1950's it couldn't make its heroine a hooker, so she simply causes a middle-aged lover of her father to commit suicide by bad driving so she and Daddy can go back to being empty hedonists. Real cute kid huh? Oh, and nobody asked why she did that because they were all grown up enough to know why.

Ozon is assuming that we are all grown-up enough to know why Isabelle did it. Teenage girl, hot, and because for Isabelle there's no oxytocin to create spurious bonding and confusing emotions. She did it because she could: the motive of the powerful at all times and everywhere. And that's what breaks every rule you learned in PC 101.

The final bit has Charlotte Rampling as Dead Guy's wife meeting Isabelle to exorcise demons by visiting the room he died in. I wondered about that scene for a while. I kept expecting Rampling to put a knife through Vacth. But no. Instead, she's the only person who actually seems to understand anything about Isabelle. And certainly the only one who shows her any kindness. But then, Rampling's character is a grown-up woman who only exists in movies. She's the real fantasy figure, not Isabelle.

Flip the PC police the bird. Go see it

Thanks For Sharing - Review

Now this is how you make a movie about sex addiction. A swift digression brought on by a little scene at the start of the movie: one big difference between the 12 Step Fellowships in the USA and in the UK is that the American courts do order attendance at 12 Step Meetings, and it's clearly been the conscience of those groups to co-operate. I was the joint secretary of a reasonably large meeting for a year, I've done committee service and I've read the manual (yes, there's a manual) and I have never been approached by anyone asking to have me sign their card, nor have I heard of it, or even read about it in the manual. I think this is because the Courts here don't regard 12 Step Fellowships as suitably official enough, but I have a feeling that UK AA and others wouldn't co-operate even if it was asked. Can you see the headlines? "Driver who killed Annie (4) pronounced cured of alcoholism by AA". That's the British press for you. Nah. I don't think I'm voting to put anyone in the way of that.

Hollywood portrays 12 Step Fellowships sympathetically - a LOT of industry people are in it, and it's worked for them. But this movie isn't cute about it. Okay, so none of the guys will ever look like Mark Ruffalo, nor will any of the gals look like Pink (who appears as Alecia Moore and is Jolly Good Too). And I doubt there are as many slim good-looking women in New York as there were in the movie: America is the land of the obese. And of course, nobody her age looks like Gwyneth Paltrow. Not even her. 

There was just one scene that had me muttering "yeah, right, as if", when the Tim Robbins character has a row with his son after presumptuously and falsely, as it will turn out, accusing him of stealing some Percocet. Robbins goes into a Korean grocer and can't take his eyes off a black girl with hot pants and an afro who clearly time-warped in from the early Seventies, while he orders a bunch of lottery tickets and a fifth of bourbon. Just in time, his mobile rings and he's saved by the call for help from a fellow addict. My problem is that his character was a gajillion years sober, and while YMMV, mine tells me that I couldn't make that much sobriety if I reacted that strongly to anything. The people with long-term sobriety I know are nice enough and polite enough and they do their duty when called on, but they are pretty frikkin emotionally stable. After my friend's funeral, I blew off the rest of the afternoon, went home, ate some cake and chocolate (but not stuffing it), watched Rent and burst into tears over the "Will I lose my dignity / Will someone care" song. (As indeed any human being with feeling would.)  That was it. It didn't occur to me to take a drink or light a cigarette. However, I've heard people with fifteen years talking about their slips, so…

I'm not going to talk about the rest of the movie: it's full of scenes that ring true, or are true, because I've been there. The writers clearly know what they are talking about. And if you've ever worried that maybe you look at too much porn, or think about what some random woman would be like in bed too often, or your partner thinks you want sex too often, then go see this movie, and watch the scene where Josh Gan rubs himself up against a Chinese girl on the train. Yeah. You don't do that and nor do I. But those guys do.

Oh, and there was a killer line about triggers. "Anxiety, that's a big one". 

Identify? Moi? Meme pas!

Before Midnight

I know. Everyone will be reviewing this. Everyone in London is going to see it. It's the third in a series that might have a fourth ("Before Lunch"?), about Jesse, a cocky, good-looking young man who looks a lot like Ethan Hawke, and Celine, a quirky French girl who looks a lot like Julie Delpy. Having met on a train eighteen years ago (Before Sunrise), and ten years later in an English-language bookshop in Paris (Before Sunset), they are now married, with cute blonde twins, a divorced wife who raced off with Jessie's son when Jessie went with Celine to Paris to have the twins. They are now enjoying a six-week holiday in an idyllic setting in Greece, or not, because at the end Celine stages a huge row in the evening.

It's at that point the movie stops being an affectionate and skilful homage to the inspiration of the first two: Eric Rohmer. Rohmer's people talked, and were often scrappy, and Marie Riviere could be the whiniest woman on the face of the planet, but no-one ever got nastily angry and most of the time they were urbane if they weren't actually charming. Rohmer didn't really believe much in True Love, and Soulmates, and stuff like that. His view of sexual relationships was that they were transient and of little substance, and the only time he pretended to believe in True Love, everyone was so glad, they gave him the Palme d'Or for The Green Ray. Rohmer characters would never set off the way Celine does: they are too adult and sophisticated.

A few years ago, I might have seen Celine's anger as an expression of Female Insecurity that Jessie is Being Too Insensitive To Address And Was His Fault Anyway. Not now. She fabricates the row from nothing, in fact, from a perfect day and a wonderful supper. They have been given a hotel room for the night by their friends, who will babysit the twins. They walk there through a beautiful Greek evening. And after a while, it becomes clear that Celine is looking to pick a fight. She has no reason to do so: well, other than that Ethan is still skinny and hot and male, and she's a "fat mommy" - in her own words. Here's a tip ladies: if that's what's making you insecure, get to the gym and on a diet. Don't scream at your man until he gives you reassurance just to shut you up. It might work in this movie, but in real life in the year of our Lord 2013, it will alienate him even more.

Delpy creates a portrait of everything that men now deplore about modern women. The emphasis on "her career", the emotional self-indulgence, the physical deterioration, the random emotions, the resentment about her children and role as a mother, the shit-testing… it's all there. Hake's Jessie is the poor son-of-a-bitch who is stuck with her, and his "I love you's" come across as horribly lacking self-respect. His guilt about not being there while his son goes through High School is a show. He has indeed put the last eight years of his life at Celine's disposal, and look what he gets for it:  she's losing respect for him. The whole thing could have been scripted by Roissy.

I'm guessing we're supposed to read her as expressing her pent-up middle-aged insecurities, and to blame Jessie for setting them off by not-quite suggesting they move to Chicago to be near his son. To make that sympathetic, we the audience have to buy that women are allowed to express their feelings intemperately, and with cruel and hurtful attacks on their partners. You might, I don't. So to me, her outburst is as deliberate an action as a debutante snorting coke, and has the same purpose. The row is entirely strategic, and her words are meant to be wounding and hurtful. It doesn't occur to her to say simply: if we move to Chicago, your ex-wife will screw around with the weekend access, you will be happy or sad or upset at her whim, and so she will wreck your daughters' lives as well. Jessie will mutter something about wanting to be there for his son, and she should say: she won't let you be there for him, and you know it, you haven't failed, she has failed your son. But no, what we get is a gender-war-based tirade about Jessie's behaviour, her lost dreams and all the rest of those tired old tropes. Doing it the calm way would have made a much more interesting movie, because then Jessie would have had to deal with his self-indulgent feelings of guilt. Now there's a Rohmer movie for you.

Delpy and Hawke are compelling. I didn't walk out. The first half of the movie is beautiful. The second half is a terrific portrayal of a train wreck. I didn't buy the reconciliation, because I know that in real life, a woman who behaved like Celine does is actually one symptom short of a personality disorder. Walking out on the father of your children saying that you don't love him anymore is actually pretty close to breach of contract. Either you mean it, when the two of you are over, or you don't, in which case you are not a functioning adult, but a spiteful, hurtful, self-indulgent and self-pitying mess. There's simply no excuse for her behaviour. It's a gigantic shit-test designed to make Jessie prove his love for her, and when he does, she will lose even more respect for him because he fell for it. The only way to pass a shit-test is not to take it in the first place. Adults don't do that to each other.

There aren't many happy people in Rohmer movies either - and when there are, they are old. The middle-aged ones just look good next to his unsettled central characters, as in real life, couples will put on a show in the presence of unhappy Others. In this, Linklater and Delpy are following their mentor, but it's too extreme, and they create a madwoman instead.

There were, however, a number of women chuckling away during these scenes, and at Celine. It was the kind of laughter that suggested they saw her as an emotional child with no self-knowledge: of course she would behave like that, silly thing, she's French and clearly a little spoiled. Which is another way of saying what I just said, but without the insistence that a forty-year old woman behave like an adult.

Let's look at the "Before" trilogy: boy meets girl on train, follows every rule in the PUA book and gets an SDL in a park. Making promises to meet in a year's time, they not only don't, but also seemingly never correspond again. They meet ten years later, both the worse for emotional and relational wear, and the sex takes over again. Then they get married and have children, and she turns into Frustrated Resentful Wife who can only get her kicks by fabricating specious rows. Looks like Linklater, Delpy and Hawke - who co-wrote all three films - are saying that the last thing that two attractive people who have a magic sexual attraction between them should do is get married and have children. Because look where it gets them.

Red Pill gets through every time.

Maiwenn's Polisse

I finally caught up with this film at the Renoir one Sunday morning. That evening I read the reviews and wondered if I had seen the same film as the reviewers - even as Roger Ebert. Man did the reviewers not like it, and the more American they were, the less they liked it. At first I though that this was due to reasons like: 1) Maiwenn uses one name, 2) she's very, very attractive, 3) she's married to Luc Besson, 4) she's French and 1-4 taken together mean she's just so much cooler than the reviewers they don't like it. 

After a while I decided it was something else. Polisse is about the work of a Child Protection Unit in Belleville, a working-class but not unduly rough area of Paris. So you know what that means, right? Creepy fathers doing things with five year-olds, live-in boyfriends abusing the ten-year-old daughter, under-age teenagers being exploited by "boyfriends" and creepy drug dealers, and of course, and endless stream of female victims. Men Bad, Women Victims, Cops Restrained but Caring and Tearful just once. Nothing else is allowed.

Certainly not a bunch of cops bursting into laughter when a teenage girl explains how she was prepared to give out blow-jobs to get her smartphone back. The critics didn't like that one, and you could feel Ebert squirming. Call me crass, but I got why the cops were laughing, though you would need to see the staggering performance of the actress playing a teenage girl who had no idea at all that it was wrong to give blow jobs because she had been conned out of her phone and was looking at you with a "what's the issue" face. Faced with that you could only cry, tear your hair out or laugh. The cops, sensibly, choose to laugh. The actress was portraying a girl who simply did not understand that she was supposed to attack the person who stole her phone, scratch her eyes out and kick her teeth in. She didn't even see herself as a victim. I know, you're having a hard time getting your head round this one.

Maiwenn broke just about every PC rule in the book on this one. Girls as perpetrators of abuse on each other? Check. Disrespecting traditional Islamic values? Check. Mothers giving their very young boy-children hand-jobs to get them to sleep? Check. Mothers kidnapping their children? Check. Male perpetrators not coming across as violent creeps? Check. Portraying Romanies as anything other than victims of prejudice, let alone as actual gangsters? Check. Suggesting that street beggars are a part of gangs and not the victims of an uncaring social system? Check. No absent fathers not paying child support? Check. Policemen and women being abrupt with the victims as much as the perpetrators? Check. The Police believing a father's denial of abuse against the allegations of the mother when they're in a custody fight? Check. 

Maiwenn, Maiwenn, don't you know you can't mess with the conventions like this? This movie is seriously French: no PC evasion, no fake tolerance and no denial. No wonder the Anglos got all fidgety about it.

I'm going to assume that, given how much profile this film had in France, the Child Protection Unit Maiwenn spent a year with was prepared to accept her portrayal of them. There's no publicity about the Parisian police saying that the film did not represent the work or attitude of the Unit. Perhaps they liked it because she had them saying what they wished they could say, perhaps they thought it made them look better. If there had been an official distancing, the nay-sayers would have been all over it. (In some cases, absence of evidence is evidence of absence.)  

The scene where the African mother hands her son over because she's sleeping on the street and can't get both of them into a hostel, which the Unit can't either when they try, was heartbreaking, and the little boy's shouts and screams absolutely wrenching. The scene where the rape victim giving birth to a dead baby was a mixture of bureaucratic pathos and real emotion. The actress' performance was so good it felt like a documentary - all the bit-part players gave performances that good.

And that's what I was thinking as I left the cinema. How the hell did that little slip of a girl get all those performances out of everyone? The main cast was a big-time crew and were clearly improvising brilliantly at times, but those bit-players! Wow. After years of watching this stuff, I've come to the conclusion that it's the bit-parts that make or break a drama.

As for the ending. The All-Men-Are-Bastards Iris throws herself out of a window. A lot of people thought this was silly, presumably because they didn't understand why. I was surprised, but frankly, the actress sells it. Iris is bulemic, sour, has a lousy marriage, has alienated her police partner to the point where they are going to be split up. She works a gym-teacher-and-young-boy case where the boy and teacher actually clearly care about each other, even though they know the relationship is wrong. This shakes her faith in what she's doing. In the closing scene she gets a promotion to another unit and everyone applauds politely, but as if she's not there - which she isn't since she's left - and at that point her world empties out completely. But her jump isn't about her, it's about the people who have just abandoned her, to get back at them.

Polisse is right up there with Goodbye First Love as one of the best films of 2012 as far as I'm concerned. Sure the latter is an elegant homage to all things Rohmer, and the former is a slightly out of control helter-skleter ride, but then the best moments in life often are. 

Elles - A Film of Two Versions

So I saw Elles the other Sunday. You may need to check which version your local art-house is playing, because I think there are two. They look the same, but somewhere there's a subtle difference.

Elles is about Juliette Binoche writing an article about two students (Anais Demoustier from the bainlieus and Joanna Kulig from the Polish tower blocks) studying in Paris, who work as prostitutes. They get their dates through an Internet site, so they don't have pimps, and they don't have drug problems, and they seem to be studying as well. They have flats you and I would like to have, and Joanna Kulig has a LOT of shoes as well as an amazing pair of natural breasts. The clients range from a hot young man to an abusive creepy guy to a guy who breaks into tears when faced with Anais Demoustier's lower regions (Even ten years ago I wouldn't have understood that, but I do now.) 

Meanwhile, our Juliette has a husband who keeps answering his mobile in the middle of supposedly important conversations, an older son who's skipping school (because his parents are such great role models) and a much younger son who plays computer games. The younger son is there to indicate that even after a chunk of years, Juliette and her husband were still enjoying a full marriage. Hubby and older son have porn on their "ordi's" (the diminuitive of "ordinateur", so presumably slang for "laptop").  She's a workaholic, deadline-fearing, control freak who feels her actual life is betraying the bourgeois dream she must have had when she got married. Binoche is the go-to actress to play complicated women who you know would be unbearably irritating after an actual whole day, and I suspect we weren't supposed to sympathise with her, but to see her as the problem, not the victim.

The film I saw seemed to have three main positions. First: "the girls come from poverty, can make enough money to get nice flats and things while studying, and you're going to expect them not to? How much do you know about the world in 2012 exactly?"  Second: "so guys go to hookers, and when what they have at home is Juliette, what exactly do you expect them to do?" Third: "sure some of the guys are creeps and some are nice, and some are sad and some are slightly weird but fun. You were expecting what, exactly?"

The film I saw was a stylish (code for "lots of designer clothes, really good photography and set design") but emotionally realistic piece of story-telling - even if it is about a very small niche in Parisian society. I thought it showed the rewards and risks of the lives the girls were leading quite well, and it didn't fall into all the tired old cliches about up-market prostitution.

Other people saw a movie that didn't get with the program and give us those tired old cliches about up-market prostitution. As in "Szumowska provides lurid scenes of perverted sex, but she offers no new insight into the sordid world of prostitution and the dangers sex workers face" or "In case you have forgotten, all women are prostitutes, and all men are johns" or "Szumowska attempts to draw an equivalence between Anne’s line of work and that of her young subjects, but fails to make anything meaningful stick. Elles is the polar opposite of Steve McQueen’s Shame: while that film was a scorching tract on the commodification of desire, this is just smut with a baccalauréat". The last reviewer clearly imbibes the Kool-Aid and is looking for a job in the British Film Industry - Shame was a load of cliched codswallop with zero insight into anything. 

This movie commits the cardinal Anglo left-wing feminist sin of failing to show women as victims, the cardinal Anglo misandrist sin of sympathy to men, and the cardinal Anglo female solidarity sin of being on the side of hot young girls against tired and dishevelled wives. I stress the "Anglo" bit, because anyone who has met Polish women will know that they don't really connect with all those Anglo views. Somewhere in this movie is an understanding for all the hot girls who cashed in their hotness while they could - and if there's one thing Anglo misandrists hate more than men, it's hot girls who cash in.

A recurring device through the movie is the use of classical music to indicate that our Juliette is having a fantasy sequence. This would make the happy-family ending - where everyone is sitting round the breakfast table, in contrast to the harried and un-communal real breakfast at the start - a complete fantasy. In which case we can guess that things are not working out well. I suspect that the film-makers had to compromise at points, and this ambiguous happy ending was one such compromise.

Richard Curtis On Love, or Not, Actually

It's said that English - read, London-based - movie critics don't like Richard Curtis's films. It's something about the way he doesn't have guttersnipes and pony criminal types yelling at each other all the time. His casts are almost always pretty people who have enough money for poverty not to be the driving force of their lives, and they have good manners, nice voices and a sense of humour.

I'm referring to his three masterworks: Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Love, Actually. 

Let's deal with Notting Hill quickly. The only think I can remember from that film with affection is the fruitarian joke: "so this carrot..." "...has been murdered. Yes." The movie ends with Hugh Grant persuading Julia Roberts to stay in England - presumably forsaking not only all others but also her career. This really doesn't happen. In a huge way. A discreet affair perhaps, but not marriage and children. Way too many economic inequality issues. It's a fantasy, but it didn't need to be. The heroine could have been a British actress who went over to Hollywood and had a couple of big movies, but was losing her novelty in and attraction to the industry and was looking for a way out. British actresses who make big time movies have a habit of coming from middle-class places like Twickenham (Kiera Knightly, Clare Forlani) and would plausibly settle for a bookshop-owning Hugh Grant, if there was more money or connections knocking around. With that story they don't get American money for the movie, but you get the point I'm making. Even if we insist on actually Julia Roberts, we could have had a real friendship with a little nookie, and then a to-the-point but kind scene where she has to say goodbye. She can explain that she has obligations "I'm not an actress, I'm a small corporation. Actually, not that small." ("You look petite to me.") Again, you get the point. And you could keep the fruitarian.

But no. Love between pretty people is a fantasy. 

Love, Actually was supposed to be a ghastly, sugary Christmas confection with a cast of pretty faces and only one poor person in sight - and she had a job. As Prime Minister Hugh Grant's tea lady. I don't know about you, but the film I saw was a meditation on the hopelessness of love and desire. Skip the Hugh Grant-Martine McCutcheon story - that was there so Griffin Mill could have a happy ending. There's nothing wrong with a happy ending: it lets you get away with all sorts of cynical stuff in the second act.

Quick, name one couple who actually have a believable resolution. That's right, the body doubles John and Judy. Oh, and the Laura Linney character having her life taken over by her brother. Where there is disappointment -  the Alan Rickman  / Emma Thompson marriage or Colin Firth being cheated on by Sienna Guillory - it's real, and where there is happiness, it's a total and obvious sham. Everything from the idea that there's another woman on the planet who looks like Claudia Schiffer to the idea that hot American girls would fall for a Basildon burke is a rampant nonsense. Sam the schoolboy finally kisses Joanna his American crush as she's leaving the country. This looks like a win if you're really not paying attention. It isn't. She's on the other side of the Atlantic. No Joanna nookie in Sam's future. You just got fooled by that "or you'll regret it the rest of your life" bit. That's a consolation prize. The Hugh Grant - Martine McCutcheon story is there to make the rest look almost plausible. If he'd left it out, the utter unreality of the other stories would be running all over your Christmas cake. This leaves John and Judy. The not-so-pretty real people who are shy but attracted. This is hopeful and believable. 

Which brings us to Four Weddings and a Funeral - a film which should live in blessed memory for being one of the very few that actually makes London in particular and Britain in general look like somewhere you might want to live. The prettiest couple in the movie - Hugh Grant and Andie McDowell - are the ones least certain about how they really feel, most distracted by anything else in their lives and most tentative about committing. Kristen Scott Thomas - an Englishwoman so elegant she had to move to France to survive - is hopelessly in love with Hugh Grant, who barely even knows she's there (and it's a tribute to everyone's acting that we believe that). Everyone else, however likeable in short doses, are twerps, shy, dorks, thumping crass idiots and braying shelias - think of the "ghost of girlfriends past" scene (which is the most important in the film). It is such people who fall in love and walk down the aisle - not pretty people with self-doubt. (Note, "pretty people with self-doubt" is a tautology: pretty implies self-doubt.)

I doubt it's the "author's message" that only the crass and the below-the-pretty-line people can fall in love and marry. I'm guessing it's something he's seen and found makes a useful skeleton for a script. It is, after all, comforting for the majority to see themselves winning in the game of love while Hugh Grant only gets to the end in what any fool can see is a fantasy. It lets Curtis set his characters up for us to laugh at them while seeming kind in the end. There is one movie where the pretty people do fall in love, and we believe it, and that's Four Weddings. The last act of that film is one of the neatest pieces of dramatic plotting ever put on the screen. Everything comes out of the characters, which is where good drama comes from, and it calls on a principle we can all believe: if you're not in love, you shouldn't get married. 

Young Adult - Diabolo Cody, Jason Reitman, Charlize Theron

I saw this film about three weeks ago and I still haven't quite sorted it out. I like the director's other movies, and Diabolo Cody is my kind of writer. They made Juno together and that was enough for me. I was a confused by Young Adult, and when I'm confused, I turn to Roger Ebert. I don't always agree with him (especially over the grossly over-rated Synechdoche: New York) but his reviews often help me clarify what I'm thinking.

Charlize Theron plays Mavis, a late-thirties freelance writer of adolescent novels who lives in an high-rise apartment in Minneapolis, drinks too much and her battle prep includes manicures and pedicures. She's divorced, behind on delivering the final novel in the series that's been paying her bills, and suddenly gets a mail from her high-school boyfriend Buddy Slade  announcing the birth of his daughter. Off she goes to the baby shower, or whatever they call it, to bring the boyfriend back with her. 

Would a real-ish Mavis really do those things? Well, here's the painful identification bit. Mavis reminded me of me when I was her age - except I was prettier than Mavis and didn't drink Coca-Cola to get over hangovers. We both had relationships from our youth we held onto as a kind of fantasy, neither of us were happy in our jobs, neither of us were happy where we lived, both of us drank too much, but we hadn't crossed the line. I knew my unresolved crush was married and had children, and living a life more suited to her than any I could provide. Somewhere in the bit of my brain where reality rules, I knew there would be no reviving anything. But very few people have the grasp of reality I have - something I've been told a number of times, as if it's a bad thing - and without that, yes, I would have set off after her. So I accepted Mavis' homecoming both as a plot premise and as an emotional truth.

That connection was totally lost when I was asked to believe she would stick around after meeting the dreadful, gender-shaming betamax that her high school boyfriend has turned into. A man who bottles his wife's breast-pumped baby milk, and who quit drinking out of solidarity with her during the pregnancy? No. Had I actually met my unresolved fantasy, who I'm pretty sure is an exemplary wife and mother, I would have muttered something about having the wrong address and left quickly. The real exemplary mother wasn't the fantasy. So I couldn't buy Mavis not reacting the same way, and I lost the connection.

When she's visiting her parents, Mavis says she thinks she may be an alcoholic. Ebert believes this. I didn't. Alcoholics have a streak of self-pity, even after years in recovery and a good few runs up the Steps. Charlize Theron is just too tough to be a victim. I think Jason Rietman wanted it that way. Because he gets to have her behave as an alcoholic woman with neither judgement nor protective vanity, but without us emotionally believing it - because Charlize Theron's body language just doesn't communicate it. 

Young Adult is about how awful small town life is. Since you're not allowed to say that - unless it's made unreal by being spoken by a teenage girl - this has to be disguised as a Homecoming movie. Homecoming movies are either like Sweet Home Alabama, where the local-girl-made-good-in-the-big-city learns to value her home-town roots and high school boyfriend, or lead up to a Revelatory Climax in which we discover that a) the heroine was a bitch or b) the heroine was molested by her father. There's a Revelatory Climax in this movie, where we discover that the heroine nearly had the boyfriend's child, but it was spontaneously aborted. I didn't buy that as anything but a script fix, so I ignored it. It's just there to confuse us. The real climax is the speech from Collette Wolfe's character Sandra Freehauf to the effect that, yes, the small town life utterly sucks, and will Mavis please take her to the Mini Apple. Mavis says no, but the speech gets her right back on track. "Thanks, I needed that" she says.

That I did identify with. And the bit where she gets out. With a completed novel. The couple of scenes where she writes in diners and fast food joints, and steals lines from the very people who make up her audience? Those I liked, those actually swung. The film ends with her Young Adult novel's character leaving behind high-school and heading into the real world with high hopes and a couple of ego bruises. Is this supposed to be Mavis? Or is it just her book? I think that's another ambiguity to make the story palatable. Because what awaits Mavis isn't pretty: she isn't going to be happy, satisfied or content - except for a few brief moments. You understand I'm speaking from experience here. She's going to spend the next forty years showing up and faking it. Which is no way to end a general-release movie.

And that's the thing with this movie: there's no-one to like and connect with. Because that would engage our sympathies with them and against the other: with the small town, against Mavis; with Mavis, against the small town. For some reason Cody and Reitman wanted us to do neither. Which makes it more real, but for that reason, less satisfying.

Steve McQueen's Sex-Addict Movie Shame

I saw the much-hyped Steve McQueen movie Shame Sunday afternoon. Here's what one of the characters would say to describe their crazy behaviour...

"I was so out of control, I fucked my brother's boss three hours after meeting him in this nightclub where I had a gig. I shagged my brother's boss in my brother's bed. In his flat, where I was crashing. My brother had to go our for a run while I was shagging his boss in his bed."

That's the kind of story that has people in 12-Step rooms agreeing that you had crossed the line from Normal to Crazy. Catch is, it's what Carey Mulligan's character does. Michael Fassbender's character is a single man. So he can't do stuff like whore away his daughter's college education, or disgust his wife so much she divorces him, or cause his son to be jeered at in school, or lose his job because he was getting some lunchtime nookie when he should have been at a client meeting. That's what out-of-control addicts do. His character is single and keeps his job despite the IT department finding a ton of porn on his work computer (huh? not these days). He's just a fucked-up man who can't mix friendship and sex, and has the money to buy hookers - though in the middling-level job he has, those are pretty fancy-looking hookers he's getting for the money. He's the sex equivalent of a heavy drinker who behaves badly when drunk - that doesn't make you an alcoholic, it just makes you an asshole who needs to cut back. And that's what his character is. It's his sister who goes in for self-harm and attempted suicide - and self-harm is regarded by we conventional alcoholics as almost as incomprehensible as anorexia. It's his sister who's the utter mess.

Which is not the movie I was sold by the hype. It has good photography and sets, excellent performances, but of a script full of cliches and almost zero insight into sex addiction, or indeed any kind of addiction. Fassbender's character gets full of remorse, so he goes to a downscale bar and gets the crap kicked out of him by a rightly pissed-off boyfriend. After which he gets oral sex from a gay man in one of those visions-of-hell that have never actually existed. Ummm, hello? Can you spell "homophobic"? There are the obligatory masturbation-in-the-shower sequences that are shorthands for "desperate and sad", in the same way as the beautifully-photographed run is supposed to be a literal metaphor for the way he runs from problems and confrontation (in this case, that he should have stopped his boss coming into the flat with his sister). I didn't get the feeling that the writers understood anything about sex addiction, but that they did think that single men were pretty awful. Compare and contrast with Michael Keaton's portrayal of a minor-asshole cokehead in Clean and Sober - Shame is not of that calibre of insight at all.

I would have shown a guy running out of money, lying to a likeable girlfriend (the Nicole Beharie character will do just fine), in trouble at work because he was dumb enough to download porn to his work computer on a business trip, missing a visit to the hospital to see his father because he got caught in a four-hour Internet porn session, and then getting beaten up by a returning boyfriend when he was cheating with a random pick-up (called, say, Sarah). He goes for treatment, thereby saving his job, but not his girlfriend, who leaves and in a later scene with a friend explains that she's not so sure she can trust her judgement anymore as he didn't get what was wrong with the guy until it was too late. Sarah gets thrown out by the boyfriend, with a black eye, the scene done in such a way that we think he has a point, even if he shouldn't have hit her. The guy comes out of treatment and returns to work, we can reprise the neat scene on the train with Lucy Walter's character but this time have him look away and see the Lucy Walter's character's disappointment. He runs across Sarah, who's sporting a bruise (brusies take a long time to go away) and gives him a smack we may well feel he deserves. Leave the man standing on a Manhatten street, confused and just starting to talk to his SAA sponsor. You can have all the hot hookers you like in the first act.

I saw two films that day. Before Shame, I saw Tales of a Life. Now that's a good movie.

Movies For The Naive: Outing "Brief Encounter"

For years I heard people talking about Brief Encounter. It was a deeply moving study of unrequited love, middle-class self-control, a Noel Coward script, excellent acting and some wonderful black-and-white photography.

Finally, I was in the room when it was on television. I settled down to watch it, and no more than twenty minutes in turned to the others in the room and said "you know this is about a gay relationship, right?"

You need some context. It was 1947. Britain had been at war for six years until 1945 and the soldiers were still returning in 1947. For those years, the British did not give up sex. Indeed, they committed adultery, casual affairs, knee-tremblers, and the men shagged foreign women while their girlfriends wrote them Dear John letters. All of which was just fine while the Germans were throwing bombs and bullets around, but not so good when they weren't. And so began one of the larger exercises in society-wide denial. The English were not, in 1947, clueless about sex, illicit affairs and one-night-stands. If today a man as good-looking as Trevor Howard met a woman as handsome as Celia Johnson, he would entertain the thought that they might fool around a little. And so would she. Newsflash: people are much the same now as they ever were.

The giveaway scene is in Stephen's flat, which Alec and Laura have borrowed for an evening alone. Stephen returns unexpectedly and Laura leaves quickly, leaving her scarf behind. Stephen sees the scarf and holds it up accusingly saying to Alec "I'm disappointed in you. I thought you'd stopped this sort of thing."

A remark that makes no sense made between two single professional men in their thirties in 1947. But which makes complete sense if it's a man's scarf. This is Noel Coward, not some hack who might very well have written the line by accident. The Master knew exactly what he was writing and what it might mean. It was his one explicit clue.

My English Literature studying companions would have nothing of it. I didn't understand that the story was about "Laura's...horror at the thought of betraying her husband and her settled moral values, tempted though she is by the force of a love affair. Indeed, it is this very tension which has made the film such an enduring favourite. The values which Laura precariously, but ultimately successfully, clings to were widely shared and respected (if not always observed) at the time of the film's original setting..." (Wikipedia).

Yes. Right. You go on believing Celia Johnson wasn't playing a man in disguise. The movie was a huge hit because it showed told an Official Truth its audience wanted spreading: "There dear, that's how it was for me when you were in Africa / Sicily / Normandy."

As if.

Samantha Morton's The Unloved

Samantha Morton is best known for her performance as the psychic in Minority Report and puts in a remarkable performance in one of my must-see films, Morvern Caller. The Unloved is her first film as a director: it's about a ten-year old girl (Molly) who is put into the care system after her father (Robert Carlyle in a powerful performance) beats her for losing his cigarette money. Molly shares a room with a sixteen year-old (Lauren) who is being sexually used by one of the care workers, tries to persuade her mother to take her in, gets taken in by the Police when Lauren is caught shoplifting, spends nights out of the home and at the end of the movie isn't even back in school yet. The film is cold and accurate without being bleak - a balancing act Morton and her photographer pull off throughout - and for me captures the way isolated moments - cleaning your teeth in the momentary privacy of the bathroom, gazing at a spider's web, looking at the town from a park hill - can provide brief moments of relief from being somewhere you don't want to be. The images contrast cold skies, sun and clouds with the tatty, industrial town that is Nottingham - a town that for many years was the violent / drug crime capital of the country.

The tone of the film walks another fine line, between isn't-it-dreadful sentimentality (which would have required Juliet Stevenson somewhere) and the fake street-life style of Kidulthood. It helps that Molly is not a broken soul - as shoplifting, trick-turning, gas-taking Lauren clearly is. Morton clearly decided to make the film as an aesthetic and dramatic experience rather than a polemical one (as Cathy Come Home was).  A polemic would have been difficult, because the fault with the care system isn't that it's heartless and staffed by abusers, but that it is smothered in denial.

The scene that says it all is the case meeting: Molly surrounded by her social worker, a care worker from the home, and a "senior social worker". The care worker has been seen feeding Molly toast and tea after she came back from running away, taking her shopping for clothes and trainers and generally being a kind young aunt. The meeting reduces her to inarticulate babbling, which is taken as normal speech by the social workers: their professional vocabulary simply doesn't allow them to say the things that we the viewers would say instinctively. Because, of course, Molly's vulnerability has nothing to do with Molly and everything to do with care system run by adults mostly seen doing paperwork.

The film was shown in May 2009 on Channel Four to an audience of two million viewers. I saw this at the ICA at 6:30 on a Friday. There were maybe fifteen people there. I don't know what it looked like on television, but it looked ten times better in the cinema.

The History Boys

I'd been wondering if I should watch The History Boys for some time, any reluctance caused by the trailers which suggested that it was Stand and Deliver in an idyllic Yorkshire setting. A friend told me I really should see it, so I did. Stand and Deliver it sure ain't. It's probably the most cynical exercise in... I have no idea in what. Pandering to everything bad about the English. Where the hell do I start?

It's set in 1983. It has to be. In 1985 British teachers started a campaign of strikes that ended in 1987 with the Teachers' Pay and Conditions Act. In 1986 the two-tier syllabuses and examinations at sixteen – GCE's for brighter pupil's and CSE's for the rest – were replaced with a two-tier examination called the GCSE based on a common syllabus. In 1985, Britain was the only country in the world that taught elementary calculus to under-sixteens: after the GCSE, it became possible to get an A-level without knowing the derivative of sin(x). 1983 is British education Before The Fall. It's Britain before the Fall of the 1984/5 Miner's Strike, after which the Left had no moral centre.

The History Boys themselves have astounding confidence, memories like fly-paper, the concentration of astronauts and a security about their sexual identity that means they no hang-ups whatsoever about the well-meaning but gently gay Fat Teacher feeling them up as he gives them rides home on his motorbike, despite the fact that only one of them has a girlfriend (the school secretary, this being the only school in the world where the secretary isn't about a hundred years old.) They are what big, well-financed sixth-formers look like from the outside – but not on the inside. They are introduced to us as the best the school has ever had.

The History Boys says it's about education, the idealism of the Richard Griffiths character versus the cynical tricks of the Stephen Campbell Moore character. Griffiths will educate them – as well as make them learn poetry by heart (they quote Stevie Smith – Stevie Smith!) and the endings of camp films and plays by heart – but Moore and his tricks will get them into Oxbridge. It says it's a feel-good movie, but a feel-good movie has to have something at stake for our heroes, and there is no chance in hell these History Boys are going to fail. Not one. They have no weaknesses, their families don't exist and the whole thing takes place in an idyllic valley somewhere near Sheffield. Sheffield was one of the most prosperous town in the country, but by 1983 it was closed for business. The Full Monty was set in Sheffield in 1972 and it didn't get any better afterwards.

My friend gets very cross with me when I criticise a film for being “unrealistic”. He thinks I mean that the clothes were wrong or that the bus was the wrong type. I can live with that. Except when the story depends on it. Teenage boys are not relaxed about sixty-year old teachers groping them and they would not have the relationship they have with the character if he did – but then, if they did, and he didn't, the whole ending would disappear in smoke. And that's what the whole thing is – a smoke-and-mirrors magic trick written for people who want to be deceived. The lie is that it's all painless: that excellent A-level results (especially in 1983) could be gained while learning the ending of Brief Encounter, whereas that much work leaves people changed for life. It was A-levels and the university interviews that was the rite-of-passage. University and a degree was the reward for A-levels well done. The myth of pain-free life. Any time you can put that in a movie, you will find a willing audience in Britain.

If I'd been given the script? Well, the Sexually Confident One would have had three girlfriends in the course of the film. His mate would have been pining for some unattainable beauty and caught having a shag with an all-too-attainable one. No homosexuality and the Campbell Moore character would have gone to Jesus College, Oxford. We would have seen how good Rudge was at Rugby – that would have been my opening scene. We would have seen a Saturday afternoon in Sheffield so we understood why they wanted to leave. If they really cared about history, they would know where the best courses for their periods were – that discussion would have been in there and I would have sub-contracted it to a History teacher at a top public school. We would understand why they want to go to Oxford or Cambridge – contacts, CV, Footlights (one of them is a demon pianist and the other sings), whatever. Why were they interested in History? A few hi-jinks involving drink, soft drugs and someone else's girlfriend. Edited highlights of a real Oxbridge interview. But mostly we have to care that they get in – and not just because, well, they would, wouldn't they, because how could you not want to go there? Each one of them has to have a failing they need to overcome if they are to get in, and since there's eight of them that's enough story for anyone. And that's why you're going to care – because you want them to overcome their faults. Oh, and one little thing: at some point we the viewer get to see how much a conscientious A-level and Oxbridge History student has to read. The sheer pile of books, lingered over for one minute of it and we're sold on these guys being serious.