American Psycho

I got hold of this because there's quite a buzz around Mary Harron in the papers since she's appearing at a festival in London at the moment. I've always quite fancied seeing it but was put off since my mum bought it, then promptly took it back after a male colleague told her it was very misogynistic and she'd hate it. Hence whilst part of me was attracted by the lure of something so controversial, I felt like I'd be some kind of sadist pervert by watching it. That was some years ago though and having braved Irreversible and worse in the meantime - and realised that you are allowed to watch edgy stuff and not automatically fear you're a sadist - I was ready to watch it now. I was also interested in how a woman who is seemingly interested in fiesty women (Bettie Page, Valerie Solanas...) could present something so apparently misogynistic.

So predictably, there having been such a furore over it in my head, it left me wondering what all the fuss was about. The two scenes with the prostitutes weren't that extreme, and sure his relationship with his girlfriend is warped, but he's complicit in its absurdity. And that's the whole point. You have to have watched it with your eyes closed and earmuffs on not to realise that it's a biting satire. The first clue comes perhaps 15 minutes in when our 'hero' Patrick tells his girlfriend that he is wearing his tie (or something similar) like that 'because I want to fit in'. And that's just it. Everything about his life is a clone of the same people with the same income in the same field - such as his 3 close work pals (a who's who of former Sex and the City one night stands).

The scene where he and these guys compare business cards is one of the best in the film. They are all trying to outdo each other - I'd never considered that you could do that with a business card before - and frankly they all looked rather similar to my untrained eye. When Patrick is upstaged by someone else he practically implodes - and I think this is a good microcosm of the wider effect on him this lifestyle is having. His homogenity is what drives him towards his murder spree. The catalyst is an incident which should almost confirm that he's achieved his goal - the fact that his colleague, Paul Allen (Jared Leto), believes Patrick is someone else - a colleague who closely resembles him. After a meal one evening, Paul becomes Patrick's unsuspecting victim at the hands of an axe.

Paul's final meal takes place at a fairly undesirable restaurant, despite the fact that he is able to get into the restaurant de jour 'Dorsia', which Patrick has repeatedly failed to do, further inflaming him. But he wants to take girls there - especially Courtney with whom he's having an affair - and it shows his desire to impress them. He is consistently trying to impress others - often an ignorant audience, such as the prostitutes who he reminds are drinking a 'very fine Chardonnay'. This desire to please doesn't seem consistent with my construct of a typical (or at least Hollywood) serial killer, and helps to build Patrick into something more 3-dimensional.

Christian Bale is great. I really hate myself for saying this, but I was plagued by the resemblance, as least of his mouth, to Kermit the Frog. This is no doubt a product of seeing this last year but I was convincing myself that I would have seen the resemblance with having read it. Bale has just the right amount of scary in his eyes to play a murderer, and especially in this ironic way.

I'm not a massive fan of Reece Witherspoon. I still can't believe that she won an Oscar after all the romcoms she's subjected the world to. However she is ideally cast in the role of dumb whiney girlfriend - I feel like I've seen her act that part before (I use the term act loosely).

I haven't read the book, but I might do now. I did start Glamorama a while back, but never got more than halfway. I would definitely like to read more. It's funny that from what I'd heard about American Psycho, I'd always thought of Bret Easton Ellis as one of these alpha male literary types who objectifies women because it's sexy, edgy and appealing to the male audience. And yet he's actually gay. We have a book and a film which have been lambasted for their misogyny, and they are the products of a gay man and a woman respectively. Eaton Ellis has previously said that the figure of Patrick Bateman was based on his late father.

It's 9 years since the film came out and an unbelievable 18 since the book (1991). But what's so funny is that these self-styled yuppies are more abundant then ever, at least in London. I've been preparing a post on what i've seen of 'recreational' drug use in London which I'll put up at some point, but it's key points are that drugs - especially Coke and Ketamine right now - are almost everywhere in London. People especially in the 25-35 age bracket are earning more money than they know what to do with, and have no other interests to pursue in their spare time other than spending the entire weekend on drugs. And if it's not that, it's designer clothes, the latest console, designer handbags or some other meaningless tripe to try and make them happy. I guess I wonder how much longer it will last, especially if the recession has caught up with a lot of them.

Rachel Getting Married

So we're only a couple of weeks after the Oscars. Does anyone remember that Anne Hathaway was nominated for Rachel Getting Married? Thought not. Yet, when I was in London last weekend and I looked for this film t the cinema, it has only one late night screening at an indie cinema in central london (well, the far east of 'central') and 2 screenings in greater london - we're talking around an hour's journey to get there. Frankly, I think that's quite poor. But, Rachel Getting Married probably isn't a film to appeal to everyone.

Actually, I would have loved to see the women's magazines embrace this as a 'chick flick', rather than the carbon-cutout drivel they usually say is a must-see. Because each of us has a varying degree of Anne Hathaway's unlikeable character Kim within us. At least I hope I'm not only speaking for myself...

In short, Kim has just returned from rehab for treatment for addictions to alcohol and drugs. Unfortunately, this return coincides with her sister, Rachel's, wedding. There is a sense of nervousness at her return, a worry that her unpredictability and attitude might spoil things. Because frankly, Kim is self-obsessed, replete with self-pity and can be very spiteful. One of the very first manifestations of this when we see her is greeting her sister as she has her wedding dress fitted. Kim, in front of others, says she looks so thin that anyone would think she was puking again. And so the awkwardness begins. There is a constant tension throughout the film between the fact that Rachel should be allowed to be the centre of attention during the build up to this special day, and during the day itself - and the fact that people need to tiptoe around Kim, who is also fighting for her share of attention because of her dramatic return. Writer Jenny Lumet presents a host of fantastic scenes which represent this, from Kim's 'toast' as the rehearsal dinner which narrates awkwardly and at length her experiences in rehab and her remit to apologise to everyone for everything, through to the scene where Kim picks a fight (literally - they wallop each other) with her mum on the night before the wedding, then leaves and deliberately drives her (Dad's) car at speed into a tree (we're remembering how her Dad said he'd prefer to drive her around as his insurance premiums are so high). On the whole, Rachel is more likable and seemingly more rational, but there is one scene where she really pulls a fast one on Kim and it's great - lambasting her for the dinner speech, Rachel and Kim have a row at home, among the guests. Right in the middle, Rachel changes tone and announces that she's pregnant. Suddenly all attention is lavished on her, everyone (bar Kim) is ecstatic and apparently the row must be over. But Kim is left in the corner complaining to Rachel that she cannot just do that in the middle of a row. It was an illegal move, but you can see Rachel's frustration and why she did it. Worryingly, I felt that I could empathise with many of the motivations behind Kim's bizarre actions - I wonder whether that's just a girl's thing, stems from having a sister, or whether I am more of a bitch than I always thought.

Much has been made of Anne Hathaway's performance, either for its quality in its own right, or the fact that she is playing against type ('Bride Wars' has not long been out - I haven't even been able to bear the trailer). Either way, she is excellent. To me she was always a bit of a square - I'd only seen her playing cardboard in The Devil Wears Prada, read interviews where she portrays herself as a square, and then learned about her ex-boyfriend emerging as a fraudster. But this film suddenly gave her an edge in my eyes that I hadn't seen before. Rosemarie DeWitt's performance is also to be applauded.

Personally, I like Jonathan Demme's directing style. It feels raw, natural - like you're seeing something real rather than contrived. However, if you're not into the handheld thing then I imagine you might find it irritating. There are also parts of the film which are overlong - the dancing scenes at the wedding for example, seem to go on endlessly, without contributing anything to the narrative. This could have been a 90-minute film instead of 2 hours. But on the whole I found this thoroughly enjoyable. When Kim leaves at the end, she's not been converted or redeemed - she does just about patch everything up with her sister although her relationship with her Mum remains fractured - and that's what so great. Nothing's changed, but that's real life.

Blogging

So I'm still pretty new to all this and still trying to work it all out. Well, that's not entirely true since I'm trying hard to refrain from over analysis of what I'm writing and instead to focus on just the act of writing itself. I think that only by being initially prolific can you begin to develop both your writing and editorial voice.

This blog does not intend to compete or be compared with any other film blogs or other blogs of any kind. I want it to remain unique and entirely uninfluenced editorially by the world outside it (note that I am already breaching this by writing this post which stema directly from a few small attempts to publicise this blog online). This is another reason why I keep my name off it - to be truly honest in it, I don't want people I know to know it's me. This is particularly relevant since I work in the film industry.

I don't consider myself a voracious consumer of film criticism, although The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw is my hero in this medium. We rarely disagree on a film but I find that his reviews are so well crafted in form and content that they leave me in awe. But I have no aspirations to replicate his style. Instead my objective is to focus on my very personal reactions to films
- I think that any organic reaction to a film results from how it interacts with your personal life. I much prefer to say that, for example, Revolutionary Road had a huge impact on me because I'm at a point in my life where I'm looking for something else, abroad. I know I couldn't write an more objective (although all review is subjective...) criticism of the film when I was so blinded by the reaction that resulted directly from my personal life. I would rahter be hoenst and say that 'Control' knocked me for six to an extra level because the look and nature of Sam Riley's portrayal meant that I could not stop thinking about an ex-boyfriend who burned a hole in my heart.

So I guess that all I'm saying is that my reviews are very personal and I like them that way.

Home cinema

Last week I finally bought a projector. I'd been after one for some time, but didn't have the budget. I finally found a great quality £250 one and snapped it up straight away.

Without wanting to sound like a total geek, it really feels like finally one of the voids in my life has been filled. Watching films is one of the things I care most about in my life, and so the ability to watch them projected large onto a wall is phenomenal. It's like now I don't have to think that I should go and watched something at the cinema just to get that cinematic experience that you miss by watching films on the TV. I'm really recommending this to anyone who'll listen. Previously, I'd always said that the all I needed in my own flat (the art nouveau one in Paris which I'll one day own) were a grand piano, a chandelier and a wine rack (including wine). Now all I care about is my projector and the paraphenalia needed to get it going. I'm currently plotting a mvoe abroad and while I know that to include a small projector in a small case I'll be taking to start my life abroad might seem strange or indulgent, to me, it's like as long as I can go home at night and watch things that inspire me, then I'm happy and I don't care if I've only got one pair of trousers and a toothbrush.

Hunger

Just sat down on the train back home, accompanied by my freshly bought sandwich and juice which feel somewhat inappropriate, having just left a belated screening of ‘Hunger’.

It feels strange having seen this so long after the hype has died down. But nice. Unobstructed by any critics’ viewpoints at the front of my mind, or the need to come out and articulate an opinion for discussion with friends.

Whilst I’m little familiar with Steve McQueen’s art (will look into ASAP), I was surprised that this didn’t feel like an ‘artist’s’ film (or at least a Young British Artist’s film), by which I mean that there was very little concept or abstraction as we’ve become used to seeing in the art of the YBAs. It’s actually an incredibly tidy film. Neat and logical. I found many of the shots comfortingly predictable, even if the recurrent close-ups might be considered unorthodox for some. In some ways, it had all the meticulousness of a showcase short film, which is perhaps why it felt so familiar to me. I actually felt like with its symmetry, measured framing and careful tracking shots, among other things, I was watching the film of someone with OCD. The meticulousness does work nicely as a visual mirror for the routine and supposed order of the prison.

The only shot where I felt a flutter of excitement was in the layering of a shot of a weakening, delusional Bobby in bed crossed with a shot of a flock of dispersing birds in the sky. The birds then become a recurrent conceit as his body weakens.

I’ve always been ashamed at my lack of understanding of the Irish question (although I was reassured when I probed my parents about it, who lived through it and even remembered the hunger strike, but who also said they didn’t fully comprehend it). We were not taught it at school, which in retrospect I think is really poor (I lost count of how many times we did Nazi Germany). I think that a mix of authoritative and personal arrogance (it’s an Irish problem, not English) has stopped me researching it independently since. It’s awful that I couldn’t tell you why right now we are not fearing an IRA attack, yet I remember a few years ago the Arndale Bombing in Manchester.

The film’s story is based around the Irish prisoners who had been jailed for involvement in the ‘Troubles’ (which had so far claimed over 2000 lives). The prisoners are aggressively pursuing the status of political prisoners and the associated rights that this status brings (namely, better treatment than other convicted criminals). At the beginning of the film they are on the ‘no wash’ and ‘blanket’ (going naked rather than wear prisoner clothes) protests. Bobby Gillan (who initially seems like our main protagonist) enters a cell where his cellmate has smeared his faeces all over the walls.

Some of the most shocking scenes occur when the guards attempt to wash or cut the hair of the prisoners. The brutality is frightening. The prisoners scrabble and fight like animals. This debasement of man seems to be coming at me from all angles right now. Before my recent trip to Berlin, I started reading ‘Papillon’, Henri-Georges Charriere’s narrative of his escape from the notorious prison in French Guiana with an 80% mortality rate (this book came recommended to me some time ago by a taxi driver). Berlin also saw me take a trip to Sachsenhausen – Germany’s first, and supposed ‘model’ concentration camp. Meanwhile, just 2 days ago on Friday I read a Guardian feature on the new Charles Bronson film, written (the article, not the film) by an ex-lifer with plenty of anecdotes. I’m certainly not drawn to reading these stories, in fact I generally try to shirk them (despite the evidence, although I’ve since put Papillon down). However what I am drawn to is the question of what exactly brings about this barbarity between men? If you give any man the power to do as he wishes with another, and a certain set of conditions, does every man have it within him to debase his subordinate to the extreme? One of Hunger’s most touching scenes sees a riot policeman shirking his duty of beating the prisoners – while seeing him cry of the right of the shot, behind a wall, the beatings from his colleagues are still visible on the right.

The film is largely quite a mute one, tracking movements, actions and expressions much more than dialogue. This makes a long dialogue scene between Bobby Sands and the prison priest at around the halfway point very intense. In a remarkably long dialogue-heavy take, Sands explains his plans to launch a new hunger strike where man will begin at 2 weeks intervals, with new men replacing the dead. While the father supports the cause, he cannot condone the suicide mission. In another neat symmetry, we return to the cold, harsh quietness of the film’s first half as we watch Sands slip towards death. Fassbender’s commitment to his emaciation must be commended since there is little room to question the authenticity of any of his degeneration. Even the sores on his body look real.

By the time of his death I was emotionally ambivalent, It didn’t raise any tears, but I’m glad that it didn’t feel as if it has been contrived to.

Some parts of the film raised interest but then seemed to hit a dead end. The prison guard whose minutiae is followed for the first 15 or so minutes only appears sporadically after, before getting shot in the back of the head at a nursing home where he is visiting his entirely uncommunicative mother. The shot of her blood spattered face with his head in her lap – like many of the film’s frames – would stand alone as a beautifully crafted photograph. But we’re not given any clues about how the incident comes about or who exactly the assassin is.

We don’t actually begin to focus on Sands until some way in. Rather, two other prisoners are our initial focus. But we never learn their fate or see their reactions to Sands’ plan. We never see any of the other prisoners at all after Sands tells the Father that he will start the hunger strike. Elsewhere, the trio are regularly seen exchanging items with their visitors (drugs, a radio etc) but the consequences are never developed – one guy listens to his radio briefly, and the drug-taking is brief and non-descript.

Perhaps I am too harsh since such developments are what I should expect of a conventional fictional narrative, while McQueen’s is not that, and has a convincing fiction-documentary hybrid feel. The stunted developments could just as well be seen as delivering a more truthful view of the routine of their daily life.

But there is also the sense that McQueen enjoys challenging his viewer. In one scene where the prisoners have once again poured their urine into the corridors from under the doors, a cleaner starts to mop it up. We watch him approach us form a fixed viewpoint at the exact opposite end of the corridor. My exact thought after about 20 seconds was ‘please don’t make us watch him mop the whole corridor’ – and that’s exactly what he did for the next few minutes. But this mild frustration and sense of imprisonment in someone else’s gaze does really mirror the content and I think its bravery should be applauded.

Overall, that is exactly the right word to describe this debut feature from Steve McQueen – brave – both in content and form. I would have been keen to see what subject next caught his attention but I did read that he thinks this may be his only feature – much related to the huge time investment it demanded.

Will be looking at another YBA’s take on cinema in Sam Taylor-Wood’s ‘Love You More’ which should arrive this week…

Addendum:
Really interesting interview with Fassbender and Cunningham about the long dialogue scene here