The Hunger Games' Katniss Everdeen is an Excellent Role Model

First published in the Western People on Monday.

Positive role models for girls and young women are thin on the ground in our current culture. As such, for one of the few to get a belt a national paper’s crozier is disappointing in the extreme.

The Irish Independent reported last week that “blockbuster film 'The Hunger Games' was responsible for the most complaints to the Irish Film Classification Office (IFCO) in the last two years.” When you read that, you wonder just what was this awful film about, that so many people rose up against it? What are they doing that’s so appalled the public?

And then you read on and discover that the bar for the “most complaints” isn’t that terribly high. Do you know how many complaints the IFCO got about The Hunger Games movie over two years? Five. That’s one every five months.

If you’re doing something that only registers a complaint once every twenty-one weeks I’d say you’re doing pretty well. If you told James Horan that complaints about him, his selectors, his team, his team’s style of play or even the particular hat he chooses to wear on the sideline would come in at rate of one every five months he’d weep real tears of relief and gratitude. As it is, I doubt he can go down to the shop for a pint of milk without someone bending his ear about something. Five complaints in two years really isn’t a problem.

We read further, and discover the nature of the complaints. One complainant objected to the nature of the film itself, which he or she claimed featured "teenagers killing each other!! Stabbing each other, twisting each other's necks off, beating each other to death, a little black girl got an arrow into the chest … that’s when the children started crying."

On the face of it, that sounds bad. But then again, what would you say about a movie, ostensibly for children, that features a husky, big-boned child who is only subtly mocked because of society’s monstrous and judgmental attitude to body shape? Not only that, but the child ends up cast into a river, stuck in a pipe and ultimately ends with his distraught mother having to rescue him from being poured into a boiler. A boiler! A child! Inside in a boiler!

But Christmas wouldn’t be the same without Wily Wonka, now would it?

The line in the complaint that refers to the moment “when the children started crying” gives something else away about this particular complainant. The Hunger Games was given a 12A rating by the Irish Film Board, which means that the movie is inappropriate for any children younger than twelve, and that twelve-year-olds themselves must be accompanied by an adult.

These ratings aren’t picked out of a hat. A lot of effort goes into setting these ratings. And if parents are too dumb to understand them or too lazy to pay the ratings any heed than there’s going to be a reaction.

Generally speaking, modern twelve-year-old girls only cry over Master Niall Horan, and twelve-year-old boys only cry over Mr Robin Van Persie. The Hunger Games features neither personality, and therefore there is no reason for twelve-year-olds not to take it in their stride. It’s a reasonable guess that the children who cried should not have been brought to that movie in the first place, because they were far too young.

Some years ago there was a Livelive brouhaha over a movie called Bad Santa. Some genius brought her kids to the movie, despite the fact that it was rated for eighteen-year-olds and over only, despite the fact that tag line on the poster said “He doesn’t care if you’re naughty or nice,” despite the fact that the poster featured Billy Bob Thorton leering out at you with his beard hanging off, and despite the fact that this visibly Bad Santa is about to be licked like an ice-cream by a lady who is a little too young to be Mrs Claus and a little too va-va-voom to be one of Santa Little’s Helpers, normally a much more demure group of ladies.

And despite all this evidence, despite the warning signs everywhere that Bad Santa (Bad Santa! Couldn’t she even have twigged it from the name?) is not a kids’ movie, your wan rolls in anyway with the kids, and then turns around to tell Joe Duffy she was conned.

As for The Hunger Games itself, your correspondent is personally far from an expert on what’s appropriate for children / young adults in terms of movies, books, music or video games. No idea. But I saw The Hunger Games on the back of a seat on one of Aer Lingus’s excellent jumbo jets during an eight-hour flight, and I was enchanted by it.

The Hunger Games is about a young woman, Katniss Everdeen, who volunteers to compete in a fight-to-the-death competition so that her kid sister doesn’t have to. Katniss is played by Jennifer Lawrence in the movie, and she’s wonderful. She’s good and kind and brave and smart. Is she hailed from the rooftops for being good and kind and brave and smart in the Irish Independent? No, she is not. People will skim the headline in the Independent, not read the story but stil make a mental note to ban the Hunger Games movie from the family home.

It’s such a pity. Katniss’s competition for female role models seem to be the Kardashian sisters, the wives and girlfriends of English Premier League soccer players, or else singers like Lady Gaga and Rhianna. So the role model alternatives for girls and young women are the heroine of the Hunger Games, who is good and kind and brave and smart, or else someone who goes prancing around the wheatfields of County Down dressed in her underwear. Dodgy at the best of times, but in the Irish climate especially, a real risk of catching your death of cold.

I know which I prefer. You go, Katniss. You go, girl.

Paradise in the Picture Houses

First published in the Western People on Monday.

Bond: Not such an eejit after all

The first film I remember seeing in the cinema was called The Wilderness Family. I loved it. It was the 1970s and the idea of nature and wilderness was iconic at the time, what with the oil crisis and all that.

John Denver was singing about Rocky Mountain Highs on the radio and the big hit show on TV was a thing called The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. James Adams was unjustly accused of murder by John Q Law and went off to live deep inside the forest with no-one for company except a great big bear called Ben and a man called (appropriately enough) Mad Jack who used to name his donkeys numerically. He had got as far as Number Seven by the time of the show.

There were no bears in the county Mayo at the that time – although I grant that there may have been a few Mad Jacks – and it all seemed so exotic, even on an old black-and-white Pye television set. As such, the chance to see that same wilderness on the big screen of the Savoy Cinema on Tone Street, just down from the current location of the Western People offices, was impossible to resist.

While Grizzly Adams had his troubles during the cowboy era of US history, the Wilderness Family was contemporary to 1970s concerns. But it was close enough, and 100 years is small change in the lives of mountains. If I sat down to watch the Wilderness Family now, it might not seem so magical, but it’d be a mistake to try. Wonder is always at its height during childhood, as it should be.

The Savoy is long gone, leaving not a wrack behind, but in the 1970s it was not the only cinema in Ballina. There was also the Astoria, an old-style cinema and even more wondrous than the Savoy.

Two reasons for this – firstly, there were huge iron gates on the front of the premises, trellised gates that opened and closed like an accordion instead of swinging on hinges. Those gates made a certain impression on duffle-coated eight-year-olds whose imaginations would immediately conclude that those gates were all that stood between the county Mayo and all sorts of Scooby-Doo villains. Many times I piously reflected that it was the grace of God that they were locked away inside there and not roaming the countryside and causing RTÉ to extend Garda Patrol in the light of the special emergency.

Secondly, the Astoria had a balcony. Watching Christopher Reeve’s Superman from the balcony made it feel that you were up there in the air with him, flying around Metropolis (although why he wasted his time with that girl, Lois Lane, was an utter mystery).

The Astoria is long gone now. The Savoy stuck it out for a longer time, with two new movies every week. There were only two channels on that Pye TV set and the Savoy represented a doorway to a different, wholly exotic life that seemed a million miles away from the mean streets of an Irish market town. Every day coming home from Scoil Padraig I’d stop to stare at the posters before dropping into Keohane’s to stop and stare at the no-less-exotic comics.

It’s funny what sticks in your mind. I can vividly remember staring at the poster for Smokey and Bandit, a 1970s comedy starring Burt Reynolds, Sally Field and Jackie Gleeson. Everything Reynolds touched turned to cinema gold then.

I remember the poster for the James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only, where Bond is framed by the extremely long and toned legs of a lady. I wasn’t as bothered with Scooby-Doo at that stage, and thought that Bond, English though he may be, might not be such a fool after all.

The cinema comes into its own for teenagers, as it fulfils two vital teenage social necessities. The first is the intense need to get out the house and meet your friends when you have very little money to spend. And the second is that burning need to spend quality time with that special someone that is counterbalanced by the horrible dread that, the more time he or she spends with you, the more likely he or she is to realise what a drip you are and not at all worthy to lace his or her sandals.

Not only do you not have to talk during a movie, it is positively rude to do so. You only have to sit there. The only slight problem is what movie to go and see in the first place.

For the middle-aged people reading this who grew up in the 1980s, there were only two movies. If you were a boy, it was Top Gun, and if you were a girl, it was Dirty Dancing.

Top Gun is a movie about US air force pilots, and which of them is the best at flying a fighter plane. I have no idea to this day what Dirty Dancing is about but I’ve been told that its principle message is that one should never put a baby in a corner. Sensible advice, but hard to see how it took them two hours to get it across.

The new cinema opened and closed on Convent Hill during my own time away from Ballina. I heard it was an excellent place, but not enough people went to see films there for it to survive. And then I read in last week’s paper that the cinema is to return, and gave a little whoop for joy.

Even in this age of Netflix and torrents and You Tube and blue-ray DVDs there’s still something magical about the dark of the cinema, and the light above your heard shining onto the screen and maybe, on the really good days, someone nice next to you. You’re not talking, but at least you’re there, the two of you, together. Sometimes that can feel like paradise too.

The Dark Knight Rises: A Bit of Craic, Despite Itself

Roger Ebert, the Yoda of US film critics, was a guest on the Jay Leno show when Batman Begins was released in 2005. Ebert loved it, and was scathing in his criticism of those who were disappointed Batman didn’t have a PG rating. “I want a Batman for adults,” said Ebert, to general whooping and cheering among the audience.

Nobody stopped to ask what the children were expected to watch if Batman was adults-only. Hard to see them sitting through McCabe and Mrs Miller.

Comic book movies should sing to the child within. Leave the heavy lifting to Ingmar Bergman. The Dark Knight was overly bleak, with Heath Ledger’s Joker being just a little too real, and the dirty politics of the ending too close to home, to provide proper escapism. The Dark Knight Rises returns a bit closer to admitting that these are kids’ films, and there are two actors to thank for this.

The first is Tom Hardy, who plays Bane, the villain. Bane is a hard chaw given to philosophical expression while throwing his (considerable) weight around. If he were to exist in real life, he would be a composite of the actor James Robertson Justice, the actor, and Brian Moore, former hooker for Northampton, England and the British Lions. Pomposity mixed with a tremendous capacity for violent action. Hardy is wonderful in a role that was never going to be The Dane.

But the real star of The Dark Knight Rises is Anne Hathaway, who plays Catwoman. The New Yorker's Anthony Lane is typically witty about her role; your correspondent can only settle for a paraphrasing Mr Sinatra and remarking that if you don’t like Ms Hathaway in The Dark Knight Rises, you don’t like ice cream.

This is almost certainly accident rather than design from Christopher Nolan. He is producing the new Superman, and the trailer suggests it’s being made as an homage to the cinema of Ken Loach. It’s so disappointing.

These things are meant to be fun. That’s the reason that the “new” Star Wars movies were all rotten. They were taken too seriously. They were made for fanboys, rather than people who don’t care which one is green and which one has antlers – they just want to have a good time.

Yoda is emblematic of the problem. In the Star Wars movies, Yoda has a thing that distinguishes him from the rest of the characters. Backwards he speaks. Wise to show he is. A pain in the neck it gets, after a very short while. They keep it up in all three movies. Religiously so.

But here’s the thing. When Yoda first appeared, in The Empire Strikes Back, he didn't always talk like that. “That is why you failed,” he tells Luke when Luke refuses to finish his training. Recognisable Queen’s English there for a vital plot point, because the plot point was more important than loyalty to a fanboy article of faith.

The best comic book movie of recent years was the remark of Star Trek, and there’s a scene at the end that illustrates just how well its writers understand the genre and realise that if the thing is going to work, it has to have broader appeal than people to make dead threats to movie critics online.

In the final minutes of Star Trek, Nero is about to meet his Waterloo when Kirk surprisingly offers to save him. This is the dialog that ensues between Kirk and Spock:

Kirk: This is Captain James T Kirk of the USS Enterprise. Your ship is compromised. You're too close to the singularity to survive without assistance which we are willing to provide.
Spock: Captain, what are you doing?
Kirk: You show them compassion, it may be the only way to earn peace with Romulus. It's logic Spock – I thought you'd like that?
Spock: No, not really. Not this time.

Spock cracks a funny. The fanboys should have been up in arms, because as a Vulcan Spock a, shouldn’t be able to see the funny side and b, should agree with Kirk’s reasonable point that peace with Romulus is more important than revenge on Nero. But guess what? There is no Vulcan, or Romulus! This is just a game – launch photon torpedoes! Blow them out of the sky!

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier - Why?

A book isn’t a film and a film isn’t a book. This eternal verité is proved once more by the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy movie currently on general release. It’s beautiful to look it, superbly acted and scrupulously loyal to the original book. It’s just that as a movie, it’s not very good.

If you haven’t read the original John Le Carré book or are unfamiliar with the plot the odds are against you either figuring out what’s going on or why what’s going on matters. In their determination to be loyal to the book the producers of the movie have left out its heart. Gary Oldman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Colin Firth – all of them are wonderful in the movie but they are dancers without a tune, moving to no purpose.

The only art form less subtle than film is opera. You can have subtle moments certainly but movies and opera are both written in great broad strokes. The media demand them.

To adapt a novel, the screenwriter has to boil the boil down to its very bones, and then rebuild a film structure, rather than a novel structure on those bones. You're chasing fools' gold if you try to recreate the novel in the screenplay - they're too different a beast. You have respect the conventions of each genre, and accept that what works in one won't work in the other.

What is Tinker, Tailor about? It’s not about the mole in British intelligence. The mole is incidental. Tinker, Tailor is about a man, George Smiley, who is an abject failure at everything he does bar one thing. He is absolutely gifted at his job.

Smiley has lost his job at the beginning of Tinker, Tailor and the whole narrative is about him getting his old job back. He has to do the only thing he’s good at. Smiley knows nothing else. He has no other fulfillment.

That’s what Tinker, Tailor is about, at its most fundamental. And every time you’re looking at something other than that journey of George Smiley to get his old job back the audience is being lost. The school scenes are some of the (many) joys of the book, but in the film they slow up the action. They have to go. Ricki Tarr has to go.

There are marvellous scenes there. Smiley’s reminiscence about meeting Karla, his Soviet opposite number, is moved to his hotel rather than the motorway café in the book, but it still works very well. The Christmas party motif in the film to reflect the more innocent days of the circus is inspired.

But in their effort to get everything into the film, the essence of the book is lost, and that’s a pity. It’s a noble failure of course, and the movie is certainly worth seeing in a way that so very many movies aren’t. But if you really want to treat yourself the price of two pints will get you the book. That really is a treat.

The Real Reason Hollywood Stars Make the Big Bucks

Your faithful correspondent has a pet theory about Hollywood actors and their extra-ordinary levels of remuneration. An Spailpín doesn’t think that they pull down the big dollars because of the acting they do for the films’ two hour duration.

They pull down the big money for the acting they do afterwards, in keeping a straight face when promoting a film that they know, as surely as anyone can have knowledge of anything in this crazy, mixed-up world, that the film they’ve just made is a complete and utter pig.

There are two films in An Spailpín’s mind particularly at the moment; One Day, a romantic comedy starring Anne Hathaway and someone else, and Cowboys and Aliens, a science fiction actioner starring Harrison Ford, Daniel Craig and Olivia Wilde.

There are some people who will like these movies, to whom the pictures will speak as works of art. An Spailpín’s brother Mayoman, Willie Joe, got rather a blast out of Cowboys and Aliens. But generally speaking, the movie industry will remember these two films as turkeys.

Everybody knows it. In modern cinema, there are no word of mouth hits anymore. A movie sinks or swims immediately it comes out. It may become a beloved DVD hit a year later, but as far as Hollywood is concerned, if a picture doesn’t open everyone concerned with it has a smell rising from them because of that, a smell that can only be cleared by a bone-fide box office smash.

Anne Hathaway knows that the picture is a bomb by the time the movie is released. Chances are she's known for months. But she’s still got to do her media, as she is the only star connected with One Day. She is the only person with whom interviewers wish to speak. What would Ryan Tubridy do for twenty minutes’ of Hollywood glamour on the Late Late Show this Friday night, instead of the scrapings of the RTÉ canteen, followed by a panel discussion featuring Terry Prone, Eddie Hobbs and Jason Byrne?

So Anne Hathaway does her interviews and smiles her million dollar smile and talks about Yorkshire and how much the book moved her and how hard it is to find good females roles in Hollywood and yes, she loves Kate Middleton and the wedding did remind her of the Princess Diaries and all the while she’s thinking: my God, will I ever have a hit movie to myself? Or will I be on the Hallmark channel for the rest of my days, playing alcoholic mothers who sell their daughters for crates of gin?

Harrison Ford hasn’t had a hit since Air Force One. The last Indiana Jones movie doesn’t count, because nobody can think of it without becoming incredibly sad. Jon Farveau, the director of Cowboys and Aliens, has the consolation of the guaranteed money of the Iron Man franchise (provided nobody has a hundredth-monkey-moment about these interminable Marvel comic movies), while Daniel Craig has the matchless consolation of knowing that, whatever happens to him in his future career he cannot possibly make as bad a call as Clive Owen already has.

While Olivia Wilde thinks: Tron bombed and this bombed. I have three, maybe four more movies left until I’m on the Hallmark channel for the rest of my days, playing drug-addicted mothers who sell their sons for crates of Acapulco Gold, the notorious bad-ass weed. Oh God, oh God, oh God.

But they can never voice that. Instead it’s all about how great it was to work with Harrison Ford, how much she learned from Hugh Laurie on House, and how she really got to explore what her character went through and developed as a person when Zolbat the alien wrapped his scaly tentacle around her milky-white neck, before Daniel Craig chopped it off (the tentacle now, not the neck).

And people say Hollywood actors and actresses are over-paid? Reader, they don’t get paid half enough for keeping a straight face through all this.

So. Farewell Then, Elizabeth Taylor

The late Elizabeth Taylor was the inspiration for what is, to An Spailpín’s mind, one of the great gallant comments about any woman. Richard Burton, the man with whom she would be associated more than any other, wrote in his diary that the first time he saw Taylor he wanted to laugh out loud. It seemed the only correct reaction to her staggering beauty. Wasn’t it a lovely thing to say?

Millions and millions of women wanted to be Liz Taylor. Maybe you should be careful what you wish for. Eight marriages, seven husbands, countless addictions, and all for what? Was Liz Taylor ever happy?

Liz Taylor was a child star. How many child stars have led happy and adjusted adult lives, if such things exist? Shirley Temple, maybe. Deanna Durbin. But both of those shunned the limelight once they grew up. For others, like Taylor, who lived their entire lives in its glare, it’s hard to know if it was every worth their while. Or if they even knew who they were when the light went out. Maybe the limelight itself was Taylor’s worst addiction.

Liz Taylor’s first marriage was to Nicky Hilton, when she was eighteen years old. The marriage lasted a year. Hilton was a drunk who used to beat his child bride. A woman so beautiful that Burton wanted to laugh out loud at the joy of her.

After Hilton, Taylor married a British actor called Michael Wilding, and then Mike Todd, who died in a plane clash. Eddie Fisher left his wife, Debbie Reynolds, to catch the grieving Taylor on the rebound only to get the elbow himself when Taylor hooked up with Richard Burton while they filmed Cleopatra.

Burton and Taylor were second only to John and Yoko as the iconic sixties couple. Mervyn Davies, the former Number 8 for London Welsh, Swansea, Wales and the British Lions remarked in his autobiography how odd it was to return to the London Welsh dressing room and see the most beautiful woman in the world going whiskey for whiskey at the bar with her husband.

Burton loved rugby, and Taylor too, in his way. They divorced, and remarried, and divorced again. Taylor didn’t attend Burton’s funeral in 1984. It would have been unfair on Sally Hay, Burton’s wife. Whom would the world identify as the widow?

Taylor married twice again, for reasons that are difficult to fathom. Or else painfully easy – the most beautiful woman in the world was lonely. Who wants to be Liz Taylor, really?

Her celebrity was greater than her career, although as an actress she had a considerably greater range than her only rival for the most beautiful woman in the world, Marilyn. She wasn’t funny, as Marilyn was, but Taylor could burn up the screen in an instant. Whatever it is, she had it.

Most of her pictures are dated now. She and Burton were directed by Franco Zefferilli in The Taming of the Shrew; twenty years later, the trailer to the film was used in English courses as an example as the crippling weight of the patriarchy. Neither director nor stars nor Shakespeare himself could get past the politburo in those days.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf won Taylor her second Oscar but, while it’s by no means fashionable to say so, it’s a two hour episode of Eastenders, really.

An Spailpín’s dollar for Liz Taylor’s greatest performance must be as Maggie the Cat, the role she was born to play, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She was opposite Paul Newman, in one of his great roles. After all, it took an actor of stunning ability not to laugh out loud when Liz Taylor came into a room.

Is TV Really Better Than the Movies?

Is TV really better than the movies? The debate is in the ether. An Spailpín was discussing the issue only a fortnight ago with a man acclaimed by many as the Pride of the Ross, and now I see the matter mentioned in passing in the Telegraph and in Edward Jay Epstein’s Hollywood Economist blog.

The Telegraph and the Hollywood Economist concentrate on the parlous state of the movie industry, and do a fine job of it. An Spailpín recommend’s Tom Shone’s Blockbuster of some years ago for further study. But this notion that TV is better than the movies is one that concerns us more so than the future of Hollywood.

That the movies are particularly bad at the moment is more or less beyond dispute. With the exception of shooting stars like The Hangover the output of the industry is generally dreck. But is TV really that good either?

The rise of cable TV in the States is the reason behind the rise in the status of TV drama. Shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men and Sex in the City on cable in the past ten years have elevated TV drama to a more adult and serious plane, while the rise of the cheap DVD boxset and Sky plus means that TV watching isn’t as time-constrained as it once was. You can consume TV on your own terms, in your own time.

However, An Spailpín can’t help but think that TV as an art-form is denied the most important thing that an art-form needs: permanence. Because TV shows are so very long through their runs, who is going to be able to sit through all of a particular series that didn’t catch it first time out?

Most people of this generation love The Sopranos. In ten years’ time, who is going to want to sit down and watch a six-series, 28 disc box set in the hope that it will be worth his or her considerable time?

You can call a friend, tell him or her you’ve just seen this great movie from the 1970s called The Godfather and recommend it highly. Within a week your friend can have called around, borrowed the DVD or downloaded it him or herself, and report back. Your discussion of your shared aesthetic experience can enrich both your lives.

But if he or she has never seen any of The Sopranos and you make your recommendation this week, he or she won’t be able to report back until the Six Nations rugby starts, unless he or she has a most remarkably dull Christmas and might then make the finishing line before the end of the FBD League.

And even then, the experience of an intense exposure to those 28 discs isn’t the same as the slow exposure that our generation has had to the Sopranos, when it wove itself into our consciousness over ten years. It’s the difference between letting the pint settle or draining it white.

And as every year since the Sopranos was in its heyday goes by, the references to Tony Soprano will become more and more obscure and will become meaningless, like those to Poldark or The Onedin Line.

Poldark or the Onedin Line? They were big deals in the 1970s, along with I, Claudius, Rich Man, Poor Man and Washington: Behind Closed Doors. All of them thought revolutionary, must-see, appointment TV in their day. But who bothers sitting through 20 discs of the Onedin Line now? What would be the point? That was then, this is now.

Fathers can watch Shane with their sons and share an artistic experience. Mothers can watch Gone with the Wind with their daughters, and everybody can watch It’s a Wonderful Life. You can’t do that with TV series. It takes too long.

The Sex and the City TV show was the most revolutionary cultural experience for fifty per cent of the population of the west. But will the woman to whom that show spoke be able to share that with their daughters when they’re old enough to understand?

It’s difficult to see how. The DVDs will be kept at the back of a press somewhere, only taken out in punishment towards delinquent gentlemen of the house who do not leave out bins, do not put down toilet seats or talk during the X-Factor. Time’s fell hand will have obliterated the rest.

Haven't These People Anything Better to Do?

There was a bizarre TV show on BBC Three last night that tells us much about who we are as a culture in this twenty-first century.

It was called Great Movie Mistakes, it was presented by the sometime comedian Robert Webb, and it was compendium of movie clips where there’s been a mistake. You could see someone’s digital watch in a pirate movie, the cable holding a stuntman to a wall, or some other mistake in continuity.

This thing is that the thing was on for three hours. Three hours is a long time. Bearing in mind that each clip lasts about ten seconds and is shown twice – in the format here’s the clip, wisecrack, identify the mistake, show the clip again, wisecrack, next – there was a whole lotta movie mistakes exposed to the Great British public – and Paddy leaning over the ditch, of course – before midnight last night.

But to what end? Isn’t it all the one mistake? Doesn’t this show ended up like those 1,001 Best Liverpool Goals that nobody watches after twenty-odd because they all get a bit ... samey? This is the BBC, for God's sake. They're supposed to be better than this.

There is a whole culture that exists to tell us the world of make believe may in fact be a make believe world. There are websites that monitor these things, looking out for mistakes, evidence for a case that, far from Discovery Channel documentaries or live CNN-style reportage from the scene, something like Iron Man II or Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen may just be a movie. Nothing more, nothing less.

People get tremendously upset over some tiny mistake in continuity. They refuse to suspend belief in the slightest. In one website, a sage has spotted this in Buffy: “While it is established that Angel doesn't age, it's obvious across both Buffy and Angel that David Boreanaz gets older. More unavoidable than deliberate, but still worth noting.”

Still worth noting. There’s clearly no fooling this man. He’s got an eye for detail. He can’t prove anything – yet – but he is beginning to wonder if Angel is a vampire at all, and not, like, some actor, or whatever.

What are they trying to prove? Sophistication? How sophisticated are you if your greatest insight into Being is to carefully note that in the movie The Bounty Hunter, currently on general release, “Milo gets out of the car to pump gas, but they are in New Jersey where pumping your own gas is illegal.”

In his book, Which Lie Did I Tell, the great screenwriter William Goldman address the question of how it is that characters in the movies can always find a place to park. Goldman asks the obvious question: how many people want pay ten bucks to spend twenty minutes in the theatre watching some guying driving around looking for a place to park?





Technorati Tags: culture, movies, BBC, Buffy, William Goldman, The Matrix

So. Farewell Then, Jean Simmons

Jean Simmons, who died last Friday at the grand old age of eighty, was an actress from the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood (which we may date as from Gone With the Wind until Bonnie and Clyde – it’s as handy a metric as any).

Simmons wasn’t Grace Kelly or either Hepburn but she was in three of An Spailpín’s favourite movies – two cast iron classics, in one of which she has little to do inand one of which in which she was quite central, and the third one of the great guilty pleasures from the Hollywood biblical epics of the 1950s.

After making a name in English cinema, Jean Simmons crossed the Atlantic to play Richard Burton’s secondary love interest – after the LORD, of course – in The Robe, the first movie made in Cinemascope. If that means little now, image how little people will give a rooty-toot-toot about Avatar in fifty years’ time.

Burton was Oscar nominated for The Robe and is the best thing in it. Simmons just has to look around and match the young Burton for prettiness, but it’s chiefly the Burton’s incendiary performance that makes the movie worth watching. The role of Miriam the crippled girl is theologically fascinating for those who enjoy that sort of thing, but theology is pretty much a minority interest these days.

It’s possible that Simmons and Burton had an affair during the filming of The Robe. There are different stories about the details, the best of which is not suitable for the sort of family reading that is normally available in this space. But if you meet An Spailpín on the high stool some evening remind me and I’ll be more than happy to go raconteur about old Hollywood.

The biggest hit that featured Simmons was Spartacus, in which she played Mrs Spartacus. It’s a nothing part, and Simmons gets lost in the picture among such notorious scenery munchers as Kirk Douglas, Peter Ustinov, Charles Laughton and Laurence Oliver.

Jean Simmons’ greatest role is as schoolteacher Julie Maragon in The Big Country, one of the great Westerns of all time. The movie stars Gregory Peck as James McKay, a sea captain engaged to marry the heiress to a huge ranch in the west. But McKay discovers when he visits the ranch that his fiancée, Patricia Terrill, is something of a spoiled brat, her father is two bit dictator feuding with a neighbour the same way that Jock Ewing feuded with Digger Barnes in Dallas, and married life is not going to be simple.

Simmons’ character owns the farm that separates the feuding ranchers, and she has done her best to keep the peace over the years. McKay’s arrival is the spark that finally leads to the dispute’s final resolution.

The Big Country is a magnificent film, from its superb opening theme music on. Peck was the epitome of nobility, and the film is remarkable for Charlton Heston as Steve Leech, the only “baddie” Heston ever played. The real villain of the movie is played by Chuck Connors in a tour de force performance as a low down dirty rat of a man. Connors and Heston would share screen time again the Sci-Fi classic Soylent Green.

Great scenes abound in The Big Country. There’s a wonderfully filmed fight between Heston and Peck, where the camera pans back to put the fight in perspective against the huge sweeping plain of the surrounding land. Peck’s potential father-in-law, swine though he is in many ways, get one wonderful scene that shows how maybe he got to be in the position he is, and Peck and Simmons share a lovely scene where the perils of the sea and the perils of the big country are compared and contrasted.

Jean Simmons was also in such big movies of their day as Elmer Gantry and Guys and Dolls (opposite an hilariously miscast Marlon Brando) but it’s for The Robe, Spartacus and especially The Big Country that An Spailpín will remember her best. God have mercy on her.





Technorati Tags: culture,movies, Jean Simmons, The Robe, Spartacus, The Big Country, obituary

Sherlock Holmes

Guy Richie has created a Sherlock Holmes for the UFC generation. He even has Holmes doing a spot of mixed martial arts himself, in what looks like a Victorian version of the UFC’s infamous octagon. This is Holmes for a generation that was raised on wrestling, comics and MTV.

It’s not that bad, really. It looks very stylish, the soundtrack is rather thrilling, and the direction is so kinetic that you don’t really have time to pause for breath as you’re rushed through the Gothic Victoriana.

There is precious little relation to the Arthur Conan Doyle stories, of course, but too much can be made of that. Watchmen clung religiously to the original text, and what a stinker that was. There’s nothing wrong with taking an original text and adding to it. The problem is that Richie’s Holmes takes away, and leaves a big hollow where the humanity used to be.

Take the Hound of the Baskervilles off your shelf – and if it’s not on your shelf, do yourself a favour and go out and buy it. An Spailpín will still be here when you get back – and read it again. You can hear the hound calling across those lonesome Yorkshire moors. It all feels so very real.

Nothing in Guy Richie’s Holmes feels real. The plot owes more to Dennis Wheatley than Conan Doyle, and the look of the film is too comic book. You never feel you’re in Victorian London. You never feel like you’re anywhere human at all.

Part of the problem, funnily enough, is Holmes himself. He has no real human qualities. He’s a caricature, much more so than he was in books or in previous celluloid characterisations. At one stage, watching Downey eat, I was reminded of him in Chaplin in 1992, when he does the fork dance. Perhaps Downey was channelling that in the absence of something else to get his teeth into.

The strongest performance of the movie – and nobody is more surprised than your correspondent – is Jude Law’s Doctor Watson. Law’s shallowness is such that he fails to shine as a star, but the man was born to play second banana. There is some good business between him and Downey, but it’s not nearly as good as the movie believes it is. Rachel McAdams is wasted in the picture. Shame.

Sherlock Holmes ends with exactly the same setup for a sequel as Batman Begins. Shamelessly so, in fact. And there may be a sequel, certainly. But in ten years’ time, the movie(s) will be seen for they are – grand for a trip to the movies, but ultimately disposable. While Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett still continue to shine as the definitive Holmes of big and small screen, respectively.

FOCAL SCOIR: Luke Kelly’s definitive version of the Rocky Road to Dublin is used twice in the movie, firstly during the UFC scene and secondly over the end credits. Nobody cheered or clapped while An Spailpín was in Cineworld on Parnell Street when it was played, either time. And that's sad.





Technorati Tags: culture, movies, Sherlock Holmes, Robert Downey, Jude Law

Inglourious Basterds

There are moments in Inglourious Basterds when you can’t believe what a great movie this is. There are other times when you despair of Quentin Tarantino, and think it’s more than spelling that’s giving him trouble lately. It’s that sort of movie.

The Director’s Cut is one of the ruinations of modern cinema. The very idea is wrong – what makes a movie good isn’t what you put back in, but what you leave out. It’s precious in the extreme to think otherwise. Movies’ natural lengths are ninety minutes to two hours. Once you go beyond that, you’re stretching the form.

Tarantino clearly had lots of ideas for Inglourious Basterds and, instead of picking and choosing and treating the audience to 90 to 100 minutes of schlock cinematic bliss, Tarantino shoved them all in to a 153 minute magnum opus. Think the Beatles’ White Album on celluloid and you’re there.

The movie’s original premise was about a US guerrilla force in Nazi-Occupied France during World War II. But the really interesting thing in the movie is the subplot, about a Jewish girl whose family has been wiped out by the Nazis and finds that Heaven has sent her a golden opportunity for vengeance.

Tarantino could have made a super, super movie if he’d realised that he’d fallen for Shosanna Dreyfuss and dumped Aldo Raine. Brad Pitt has very little to do in the movie, really, and seems to amuse himself by impersonating George Clooney in O Brother, Where Art Thou? A little judicial editing and working on the script could have changed the focus to Shosanna, where it belongs, and then run the Basterds idea through that.

Tarantino could have sold the change of emphasis to Pitt by pointing out that you don’t need time on screen to be the star, and proved it by showing him Silence of the Lambs. Instead, everything goes into the pot and we take the rough with the smooth.

Some of the set pieces in the movie are fantastic. Two especially; the opening, where we meet the villain, Colonel Landa, and another about half-win in, set in a bar, that helps establish the dénouement. Tarantino has found a German actor, August Diehl, who is the spitting image of Christopher Walken thirty years ago. How perfect is that?

There’s so much to enjoy, in many ways. There are some lovely, really clever scenes between Shosanna and a German soldier who later turns out to be vital to the plot. Christoph Waltz's Colonel Landa is a super, super villain. The scene where Mike Myers’ General briefs Michael Fassbender’s Archie Hicox is up there with Christopher Walken’s watch scene in Pulp Fiction. One of Tarantino’s great gifts is his use of music, and he doesn’t disappoint here, not sparing the Ennio Moricone for a moment.

But the overall effect is watered down by a plot that isn’t tight and by a liberty taken with history that isn’t worth it. The film doesn’t end so much as peter out. Therefore, the overall effect of the movie is disappointing, even though there have been great moments. Not the artistic washout that we feared, but not as good as we hoped either.





Technorati Tags: culture, movies, Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino

Star Trek

The new Star Trek movie is a triumph. Not just because of what it is, but also because of what it isn’t.

The makers of the new Star Trek get it. They know the single greatest element of a movie like Star Trek is that it’s got to be fun, and Star Trek delivers fun by the bucketload. For the first time in quite some time your correspondent wished that he were ten or twelve years old again, because if you see this picture when you are that certain age, it stands a strong chance of being your favorite movie until you die.

The movie is over-plotted slightly, but it is a small complaint. It’s no easy task to reinvent something that’s as established in the culture as Star Trek but the makers of the new Star Trek have been as successful in this as the makers of the Daniel Craig Bonds, and for that you can only take off your hat to them.

They are blessed in their casting also. Zachary Quinto is a marvellous Spock, taking advantage of the fact that this is a re-imagining to look at the character in a different way. When Leonard Nimoy invented the character his super-rationality was the novelty. But now, because the Spock character is so large in the culture, forty years after the TV show first aired, Quinto is able to focus on Spock’s repressed emotions rather the no-longer-novel idea of Vulcan logic, and Spock is very much the centre of the show in consequence.

The writers have to take credit also for a very witty and well-judged script. There is one scene early in the movie, when the child Spock is being bullied by the other Vulcan kids for being half-human. “Spock,” they say, as they gather behind them. Spock knows their game. “I presume you have prepared fresh insults yet again for today?” he asks, wearily. “Affirmative,” says one of the bullies.

That slew me.

The movie is gloriously and unapologetically shallow. Chris Pine’s James T Kirk is an uncomplicated alpha male who wants to get his way and isn’t too bothered about anything outside of that. Anybody looking for messages will have to pop down to Spar or Centra instead.

In one way this is slightly off-brand, because Star Trek was always seen as the thinking man’s sci-fi. But the producers have two reasons for going with the uncomplicated approach.

The first is that The Dark Knight was weighed down with strum und drang more than its ability to carry all that philosophising. It’s a comic book, not Schopenhauer. As for Watchmen, that was just rubbish. Far better that Star Trek takes the delivery of an uncomplicated good time at the movies as its remit, and piles on the thrills.

The second reason – and this is just a guess – is that the first Star Trek movie in 1979 had one of the most thought-provoking plots of all the Star Trek movies, but nobody noticed and the movie is generally considered a disappointment. Unfairly so. They boiled it down to brass tacks for Star Trek II, which is about some crazy bastard out in space and the Enterprise is sent out to blow him out of the sky. Exactly the same as the plot of this year’s movie. No daws in Paramount pictures, you know.

There will be sequels – the box office and the almost universally ecstatic reviews dictate it will be so. It will be interesting to see if they can keep the magic, or if, like the Spider-Man and X-Men franchises, they disappear under the weight of expectation. Here’s hoping the new Star Trek lives long, and prospers.







Technorati Tags: culture, movies, Star Trek, The Dark Knight, Watchmen

Jamie Foxx - Oscar Fishing?

Do Hollywood stars attend each others’ movies? And if they do, do they play close attention? An immanent new release, The Soloist, suggests that this is exactly what they do.

The Soloist looks quite awful, judging by the trailer currently in the cinemas. Based on true story, the movie stars Jamie Foxx as a gifted musician who doesn’t play and lives rough in Los Angeles because he’s crazy as a bag of hammers. He’s discovered by Robert Downey, Jr’s cynical journalist, they two men go on a journey together to discover the beauty within.

Wretched, I know. But watching Downey talking to Foxx in the trailer, Foxx all shrugs and twitches and rolling of limbs, your correspondent’s mind flashed back to the last movie Robert Downey, Jr was in, and An Spailpín Fánach couldn’t help but wonder if Foxx had been to see it. And brought a notebook.

The last movie Robert Downey, Jr, was in was Tropic Thunder. Downey played an Australian actor, Kirk Lazarus, who is so into the method school of acting that he becomes black to play a black man in a war movie. Downey is utterly politically correct, truly inspired and would have been a worthy winner of this year’s Best Supporting Actor Award – even the fact he was nominated was a victory of sorts.

But what makes Tropic Thunder germane to the current discussion is a scene between Kirk Lazarus and Tugg Speedman, an action hero movie star played by Ben Stiller. Speedman had been in a movie called Simple Jack, which was his shot at making his bones as a legit actor, rather than an action hero. It bombed, and Downey's character explains to Speedman why he was never going to win an Oscar for it.

"Check it out. Dustin Hoffman, Rain Man. Looks retarded, acts retarded, not retarded. Counted toothpicks, cheated cards. Autistic, sho'. Not retarded. You know Tom Hanks, Forrest Gump. Slow, yes. Retarded, maybe. Braces on his legs. But he charmed the pants off Nixon and won a ping-pong competition. That ain't retarded. Peter Sellers, Being There. Infantile, yes. Retarded, no. You went full retard, man. Never go full retard. You don't buy that? Ask Sean Penn, 2001, I Am Sam. Remember? Went full retard, went home empty handed."

And now, one year on, here’s Jamie Foxx sawing away on his cello under the Los Angeles flyovers, doing his best for another Oscar. Looks retarded, acts retarded, not retarded. Still. Suits him better than picking on schoolgirls I suppose.





Technorati Tags: culture, movies, The Soloist, Jamie Foxx, Robert Downey, Jr, Tropic Thunder, Oscars

Fangs for the Memories

It’s ironic that vampires are so big in the culture now as Ireland is being sucked dry by her people's own excesses. Count Dracula stares balefully down from posters on lamp-posts in Dublin as part of the municipality’s One City, One Book promotion (reading more than one buke per calendar year would cause anybody’s head to explode of course – best not to take the chance), while the critics rave about Let the Right One In, the remarkable Swedish vampire movie that’s currently on general release.

Let the Right One In is not like other vampire movies that you’ve seen. It’s about a little boy called Oskar, living in a soulless suburb of Stockholm and getting bullied at school, who becomes friends with a strange little girl next door called Eli. Eli walks barefoot through the snow, can’t eat sweets, and knows exactly how Oskar should respond to the bullies. No Swedish pacifism for her.

The children playing Oskar and Eli look the part, but the real horror in the movie is the utterly hideous suburb in which Oskar and Eli live. They live in a block of flats that are like Finglas in the 1970s without the anti-social activity. There is no social activity at all – just a tremendous, soul-destroying ennui that leeches the life out of you just as much as little Eli drains your blood when she’s feeling peckish.

As horror films go the movie is quite tame, really, except for the occasional gory bit, and the lasting terror is of that awful housing complex. Horror films shouldn’t be quite so – dull, I’m afraid. But it is so terribly Swedish - close-ups are the vogue in Swedish cinema always, and the claustrophobic effect of this in Let the Right One In is that when we see Eli, that unearthly child, scurrying up the side of a building, our only reaction is to say “you go, girl! Anywhere but here!”

How far from our elegant host at Castle Dracula, who so enjoys the children of the night and the music they made. Dracula is a strange choice indeed for promotion – Stoker’s connection with Dublin is tenuous at best, and the book really isn’t that good. It really isn't.

It would be interesting to discover why the Corpo chose Dracula above any others. An Spailpín is willing to bet that while many of them will have seen the movie, very few will have read the book. A promotion that claps itself on the back over one book a year would suggest that the promoters are a little off the pace when it comes to reading. A current promotion in Eason’s, where the book will be signed by The Count himself this Saturday lunchtime - how selfless of him to put his notorious aversion to sunlight aside so they can shut up the shop at half-five as usual - would indicate the audience that Dublin City are going for, and the literary set they ain’t. How very depressing.

Better, then, to ignore it completely and sate your thirsts with Joan Acocella’s marvellous appreciation of the book Dracula, warts and all, in the New Yorker some weeks ago. They have super writers in the New Yorker, and Ms Acocella is one of the very best. Bon appetit.





Technorati Tags: culture, movies, books, Let the Right One In, Dracula, Dublin

The Strange Death of the British Male

An Spailpín Fánach is fascinated by The Damned United, currently on general release, just as I was fascinated by the novel from whence the film sprang. Not because of what it says about Brian Clough or soccer or any of that, but because of what it says about the state of current British culture.

The Damned United is about the 44 days that Brian Clough spent as manager of Leeds United football club in 1974. It was a match made in Hell – Clough was the loudmouth manager of upstart Derby County, and a man who took a certain relish in goading his enemies. Enemy No 1 was Don Revie, manager of Leeds United in the 1960s and 70s and a man who was seen by some – but not all – observers as someone who mined a deep well of cynicism to get results.

Because Clough had made no secret of his distain for Leeds and their methods, his appointment as Revie’s successor was like making Joe Higgins head of the Central Bank. It didn’t last, and Clough was gone in 44 days. Clough then took over at Nottingham Forest and went on to make his name as one of English soccer’s greatest managers, and the Greatest Manager the English National Team Never Had.

Clough died some years ago from complications brought on by hard living, and in the book David Peace took that legend of the iconoclastic Clough as he’s understood and fondly remembered now and spun it back to what it might have been like when Clough was in charge at Leeds. The novel is described as faction, that terrible word that means it would be so lovely if things really were like this, so let’s just pretend that they were and not get bogged down in nasty old facts.

Johnny Giles, who successfully sued the publishers of the novel, and is allegedly considering going in with studs up before our learned friends concerning the movie as well, made the point on Newstalk’s Off the Ball recently that while the book is being sold as fiction it is being consumed as fact, and that’s what’s really bugging him. Giles has no objection to books being written and Revie being criticised by “football people,” but some guy just making stuff up strikes Giles as being deeply infra dig.

What’s really interesting, then, isn’t what the book or the movie tells us about the real Brian Clough but what the huge popularity of the book and movie tell us about the current state of British culture, its current fascination with the 1970s and its great, crying need for a hero as Brian Clough is portrayed in the book – telling one of the best teams in England on his first day in their dressing room that they should throw all their medals away because they were won by cheating, not bothering with reports on opposition teams and telling the boys to just go out and enjoy themselves.

Just going out and enjoying yourself is grand when you’re training the Sunday XI of the Dog and Duck, but it’s guaranteed disaster if you’re playing for keeps with the big boys. That the notion has appeal to the current British male says something about the appeal of the juvenile that is currently so high in the culture.

Brian Clough’s mother died while he was manager at Leeds. Peace makes a big deal of it in the book: “The end of anything good. The beginning of everything bad... No afterlife. No heaven. No hell. No God. Nothing - The end of anything good. The beginning of everything bad.”

Is that not a description of the current lost state of the British male? Lost in the world, not recognising it anymore or his place in it? Always seeking a return to childhood when heroes like Brian Clough were easily identified?

The iconic status of Detective Gene Hunt in the BBC’s Life on Mars TV show is another riff on the tendency current in the culture to glamorize the 1970s in England. This is very much a post hoc glamorisation of course – there was nothing too glamorous about recessions, deaths in the North, bombings in Birmingham and winters of discontent. But the 1970s are being presented as Shangri-la compared to now, when England has become one of the most politically correct places on the face of the Earth.

In Life on Mars, Sam Tyler represents the modern British male – caring, sensitive, aware of minority rights. Gene Hunt is the old style copper, who likes beer, mushy chips, football on the terraces and beating the Jesus out of suspects back in the police station. Current cultural conditioning has made Sam Tylers out of the British, but it was the Gene Hunts that took Quebec and held the Khyber Pass.

The Damned United and Life on Mars are evidence of the tremendous power of nostalgia. The 1970s were grim times in England any way you slice them, but the children of the seventies currently working in media and culture are hanging on to their childhoods as hard as ever they can. Because the alternative is the void - the end of anything good. The beginning of everything bad.

The US Secretary of State Dean Acheson said in 1962 that Britain “had lost an empire and has not yet found a role.” The Damned United and Life on Mars would suggest that not only has she not found a role, but she’s given up the search entirely. The end of anything good. The beginning of everything bad.







Technorati Tags: culture, books, tv, movies, The Damned United, Life on Mars